THE GROWTH OF MODERN NOTTINGHAM 5 



Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, started his palatial residence on the site 

 of the old Castle; Nottingham now possessed a ducal seat and became 

 a centre of attraction to the people of quahty in the district. They not 

 merely visited the town; they lived in it; and the houses which they 

 built express the ideas of comfort and elegance belonging to their class 

 and period. Consider such examples of aristocratic house-building as 

 Newdigate House (1675) in Castle Gate, Willoughby House (1730-40), 

 and Vault Hall (1743) on Low Pavement and the house of Lord Howe 

 at the corner of Stanford Street, and perhaps especially Bromley House, 

 built by George Smith the banker in 1732. We have only to step into 

 the vestibule of Bromley House, look through the vista of the hall and 

 garden, mount the ample sweep of its staircase through the leisurely 

 gradations of its shallow stairs, to realise at once that we are in the 

 mental climate of another age, an age of assured serenity, of patrician 

 culture firmly based. Nottingham was basking in the full Augustan sun. 



The reputation of Nottingham at this time stood high. ' Were a 

 Naturalist in Quest of an exquisite Spot to build a Town or City upon, 

 could he meet with one that would better Answer his Wishes?' So wrote 

 Dr. Charles Deering of his adopted town of Nottingham in 1739, after 

 setthng there at the conclusion of a pilgrimage that had been long and 

 arduous. He was a naturalist of some repute and had settled in Notting- 

 ham after a varied and not'Too fortunate career as a doctor in Germany, 

 London and elsewhere. He was a solitary and he died destitute. But 

 he loved Nottingham so well that he spent his slender resources 

 in collecting material for its history and his last years in writing 

 it up. When we look at the plan which he included in his History of 

 Nottingham, pubhshed in 1751, we can see the reason; we may even 

 envy him the opportunity of making such a choice. (See Plan of Notting- 

 ham in 1744 inset opposite page 8.) 



The town consisted of less than 2,000 houses, containing about ten 

 thousand people; most houses had stretches of gardens and many had 

 orchards. This ' garden city ' community of ten thousand souls was 

 arrayed along the southern face of a sandstone outcrop, stretching from 

 Hollowstone along High Pavement, Back Lane (Parliament Street), Butt 

 Dyke (Park Row) to the Castle Rock; to the north and south of this 

 sandstone crescent lay the open fields and meadows, the famous crocus 

 meadows which in early spring spread a purple hem to the skirts of the 

 old town. No town in England, it is said, had so fine an approach as 

 ' the most beautiful mile ' which lay through these crocus meadows be- 

 tween Trent Bridge and Hollowstone; and from Celia Fiennes who, in 

 1689 said it was the neatest built town she had ever seen, to a German 

 traveller in 1784, who described it as one of the best, and certainly the 

 cleanest outside London, there is a chorus of praise. 



At the very time that these words were written changes were taking 

 place that were destined to give Nottingham a reputation of a very differ- 

 ent kind. They sprang from that potent seed, sown almost casually by 

 William Lee, an obscure Calverton clergyman, in EHzabeth's reign. The 

 stocking-frame, which he invented in 1589, and on which he had made a 

 pair of silk stockings for Elizabeth herself, had grown into an industry 



