Nottingham audiotours

Beneath Nottingham there are more than eight hundred sandstone caves, hand-cut over centuries into the rock on which the city sits. Some are medieval tanneries, some Victorian slum dwellings, some wartime shelters, and one of them, in a pub called Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, may have been serving ale since 1189 when Richard I's crusaders supposedly stopped off on their way to the Holy Land. The pub is partly carved into the castle rock. This is what Nottingham is like: things that should not still exist have somehow kept going.

Notts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional football league club in the world.

Across the city, Nottingham Forest won the European Cup back to back in 1979 and 1980 under Brian Clough, which remains one of the most improbable achievements in football history. The Lace Market is the other kind of pride: a district of four and five-storey Victorian brick warehouses where the nineteenth-century lace industry ran, now converted to apartments, galleries, and bars. The lace trade made Nottingham synonymous with its craft across Europe the way Sheffield meant cutlery or Wedgwood meant ceramics.