What do you think?
Rate this book
Nottingham Transformed: Architecture And Regeneration for the New Millennium
"Scenically and architecturally, Nottingham is one of the most remarkable of English cities. A major commercial centre in the Middle Ages, it subsequently became an important industrial city until well into the twentieth century, when the traditional industries collapsed. Now a city in transition, Nottingham is making its name in the twenty-first century as a centre for business, with service industries, apartments, shops, bars and restaurants colonizing the former palaces of industry and generating a wave of exciting new design." This book records more than two decades of regeneration and change, and looks forward to the future redevelopment of key parts of the city. With a foreword by fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, who started his business in Nottingham, and illustrated throughout with photographs by Nottingham-based architectural photographer Martine Hamilton Knight, this study provides insights for architects, planners, students and anyone interested in the recent transformation of Britain's cities.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 16, 2023
Kenneth Powell’s essays in this book give us a comprehensive account of Nottingham’s urban and architectural history. Beginning with early maps, he goes on to describe the lace-making tradition, the industrial revolution, and then how in the 1960s Nottingham’s then-vibrant working class, so sympathetically portrayed in Karel Reisz’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1958) was eradicated by planning policies of authoritarian, bureaucratic cruelty, in which “a hard-line approach was taken to slum clearance, though the outcome was not always what was hoped.”
A masterly piece of powellian understatement; the outcome was a socio-economic disaster that left what was once working-class Nottingham the UK’s most socially dysfunctional, crime-ridden city. By 1980 the whole of St. Anne’s - a vast hillside and valley of Victorian terraces “often of above-average quality” - had been senselessly demolished; by the year 2000 “the problem areas, in terms of crime and antisocial behaviour, were often the housing schemes of the inter-war and postwar period.”
Despite his very good accounts of Nottingham’s earlier Georgian and Victorian heritage, Powell’s main emphasis necessarily falls on those destructive planning policies. The period photographs of lost Nottingham - Victoria Station or the steep narrow streets around Drury Hill - record the death of a once-beautiful and socially coherent city. So when the book moves on to present a selection of current or recent projects, we wonder what today’s planners have been doing to make good the damage perpetrated by their predecessors. Alas, all we see is piecemeal, privately-financed retail, office, and hotel developments, seemingly with no plan or urban vision linking them together.
The masterplans he includes, some of them quite shockingly superficial, are limited to the city centre, the railway station area, and parts of the run-down Eastside. Some new construction projects, like the Broad Marsh retail area, are so large that they are in effect masterplans in themselves; yet there is no indication that this collection of ad-hoc local interventions are intended in any way to mesh together as a coherent urban strategy.
So far as individual buildings are concerned, Powell’s most interesting examples are cultural buildings by good local practices like Marsh Grochowski, or Caruso St. John’s contemporary art centre. Some of the recent Nottingham University buildings are interesting (though quirky) whilst of the city's past masterpieces, Owen Williams’ 1930s Boots D10 Building (refurbished by AMEC, 1994) remains a tremendous essay in structural and spatial innovation.
As a contrast to the mindless pastiche that has wrecked what remained of Nottingham’s historic core, Benson and Forsyth’s mixed-use development in Bottle Lane shows how designing in context can be innovative and dramatic.
When it comes to the outlying areas and the disenfranchised people who inhabit them, nothing is said about what is being done to address their needs. We are left wondering whether Nottingham’s planners know where the city is going, or whether the whole thing is just being left to market forces.
A masterly piece of powellian understatement; the outcome was a socio-economic disaster that left what was once working-class Nottingham the UK’s most socially dysfunctional, crime-ridden city. By 1980 the whole of St. Anne’s - a vast hillside and valley of Victorian terraces “often of above-average quality” - had been senselessly demolished; by the year 2000 “the problem areas, in terms of crime and antisocial behaviour, were often the housing schemes of the inter-war and postwar period.”
Despite his very good accounts of Nottingham’s earlier Georgian and Victorian heritage, Powell’s main emphasis necessarily falls on those destructive planning policies. The period photographs of lost Nottingham - Victoria Station or the steep narrow streets around Drury Hill - record the death of a once-beautiful and socially coherent city. So when the book moves on to present a selection of current or recent projects, we wonder what today’s planners have been doing to make good the damage perpetrated by their predecessors. Alas, all we see is piecemeal, privately-financed retail, office, and hotel developments, seemingly with no plan or urban vision linking them together.
The masterplans he includes, some of them quite shockingly superficial, are limited to the city centre, the railway station area, and parts of the run-down Eastside. Some new construction projects, like the Broad Marsh retail area, are so large that they are in effect masterplans in themselves; yet there is no indication that this collection of ad-hoc local interventions are intended in any way to mesh together as a coherent urban strategy.
So far as individual buildings are concerned, Powell’s most interesting examples are cultural buildings by good local practices like Marsh Grochowski, or Caruso St. John’s contemporary art centre. Some of the recent Nottingham University buildings are interesting (though quirky) whilst of the city's past masterpieces, Owen Williams’ 1930s Boots D10 Building (refurbished by AMEC, 1994) remains a tremendous essay in structural and spatial innovation.
As a contrast to the mindless pastiche that has wrecked what remained of Nottingham’s historic core, Benson and Forsyth’s mixed-use development in Bottle Lane shows how designing in context can be innovative and dramatic.
When it comes to the outlying areas and the disenfranchised people who inhabit them, nothing is said about what is being done to address their needs. We are left wondering whether Nottingham’s planners know where the city is going, or whether the whole thing is just being left to market forces.
Displaying 1 of 1 review