At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot
‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has stuck, even though knives have replaced guns as the young criminal’s murder weapon of choice. Sheffield has its steel, Liverpool its music and its football — and Nottingham its guns.
How had it come to this? The defining image of Nottingham in the early 1960s was that of an angry young man, Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton, working on a capstan lathe at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But Seaton wasn’t that angry. He might use his fists, but he would never use a gun. Sillitoe was born and brought up in Radford, then a proud working-class community, now a chilling example of the urban decay which is withering the soul of many a northern town. Radford is not quite a no-go area, but no one wants to go there. Neither do they want to go to St Ann’s, the Meadows, Bilborough, Basford and Broxtowe, all pockets of deprivation, crime, drug addiction and third-generation welfare dependency, where you can smell the stench of hopelessness. The despair is fuelled with anger because many of Nottingham’s more salubrious suburbs, such as Wollaton, Mapperley and Rushcliffe, are bang next door. It is a toxic mix, which has inevitably erupted into violence.
But this does not wholly explain the melancholy which hangs over the city. Neither do the closures of the huge Raleigh and John Player factories in the city centre, which provided employment and identity for many thousands of Arthur Seatons; nor the decline of the centuries-old lace and hosiery industries, which hit the city’s womenfolk hard.
No, it is the bitter legacy of the miners’ strike of 1984, when the proud Nottinghamshire miners found themselves corralled by Arthur Scargill and then betrayed by Margaret Thatcher. That tight-knit community never recovered from the closure of its pits; the replacement of traditional industrial jobs by precarious employment in the service sector has killed its spirit.
The city’s plight is exacerbated by the lack of imaginative regeneration in the city centre. Gideon Haigh, a fine contemporary Australian cricket writer, was so horrified on his first visit to a Test Match at Trent Bridge that he wrote: ‘Nottingham was recently voted the second worst place to live in England, which makes me wonder whether the first, Hull, could really be so bad. It is the ugliest provincial city that I have ever seen, designed without care or feeling, or even eyesight, such is its encrustation of visual pollution. It does not deserve a cricket ground as pretty as Trent Bridge. Gaddafi Stadium would better suit the environs.’ Ouch!
All this would have appalled Jesse Boot, the city’s most famous son (apart, possibly, from Robin Hood). A hard-working visionary, Boot opened his first chemists shop in the run-down Goose Gate area of the city in 1884, a shop which dazzled customers with its sheer size and spectacular window displays. Today Boots is a massive worldwide brand, but Goose Gate remains run down: the only sign of activity when I visited, on a dark, windy Thursday night, was a dog in charge of a very drunken man amidst the swirling litter. The original Boots is now a charity shop and there isn’t even a plaque on the wall, although there are memorials just up the road to Lord Byron and J.M. Barrie, whose connections with the city are oblique, to say the least. The council should hang its heads in shame – at least Nottingham University, which Jesse founded and which is one of Britain’s most respected provincial universities, displays his bronze bust at its entrance. Its panoramic campus on the edge of the city is a near neighbour to Boots’ own campus, which boasts some magnificent modern industrial architecture. Both seem curiously detached from Nottingham itself.
And yet it would be wrong (and might drag The Spectator into another Liverpooltype embarrassment) to write Nottingham off completely, as long as its city-centre retail heart — ugly as it may be — continues to beat strongly in these difficult times. The retail core is anchored by two massive shopping centres, the Victoria Centre to the north and the Broadmarsh Centre to the south. Clumber Street, which connects the two, boasts the fourth largest pedestrian footfall in Europe. No wonder Yorkshire property developers Oakgate swooped when they saw 16,000 sq ft of semi-derelict property available two years ago. The site has been transformed and now includes a flagship branch of HSBC.
And then, of course, there’s Brian Clough OBE, the greatest manager the England football team never had and a legend in his own, very liquid, lunchtime. When Clough arrived in 1975 to manage Nottingham Forest, he inherited a desperate team (I know, I saw them play Oxford United a couple of months before Clough arrived and they were appalling). Within four years Forest had won the European Cup, an extraordinary achievement. What was Clough’s secret? ‘I prided myself on getting a bit more out of the players than they thought they had. If there was a method or a secret, that was it. Frightened of me? What a load of rubbish! The only time they needed to be frightened of me was if they went to bed too early on a Thursday or Friday and I had to get them out to have a glass of champagne... and we did that a few times!’ The champagne and the whisky finally destroyed Clough as he succumbed to chronic alcoholism, but gosh how he restored Nottingham’s pride, albeit temporarily. No wonder 4,000 adoring Forest fans turned out in early November for the unveiling of Les Johnson’s uncannily lifelike statue of Cloughie, hands raised and clasped in triumph, at the junction of King and Queen Streets. A couple of years ago the city, fearful about its gangsterland image, appointed a ‘reputation manager’. Drunk or sober, Clough would have done a brilliant job. Sadly, there’s no one like him in Nottingham today.
Previous page
