Nottingham Audio Tour: Historic Bulwell

Stops on this tour

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1. location_on

   1

   Old Townhall

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   Look for the red-brick Victorian façade with its neat five-part front, a recessed arched loggia, and a curving Dutch gable topped with a round oculus window. This place has the…Read moreShow less

   Look for the red-brick Victorian frontage with five balanced sections, an arched porch on short columns, and a curving Dutch gable with a round window set high in the middle.

   This building tells a very Bulwell kind of story: ambition, hard work, and timing that went a bit sideways. In the early eighteen seventies, Bulwell grew quickly, largely because brickmaking brought jobs and people. That growth pushed local leaders to form a board of health, and they decided Bulwell needed a proper town hall. They chose this site on the south side of Highbury Road, right beside the River Leen.

   And then came the bureaucratic punchline. The board seems to have made enough progress to hold at least one meeting here, but Nottingham Corporation annexed Bulwell on the first of November, eighteen seventy-seven. The building was not fully completed until eighteen ninety-four. So yes... this town hall more or less lost its original purpose before it had properly settled into the job. Tough start.

   From where you are, the front is still full of civic swagger. The middle three sections form a loggia, which just means an open porch, carried by short Corinthian columns with leafy capitals. Above them sit more columns, a heavy horizontal band called an entablature, and a neat row of tooth-like blocks known as a dentiled cornice. Higher up, those rounded openings hold quatrefoils, four-lobed shapes a bit like stone clovers. And at the top, that Dutch gable curves upward with more flair than strict necessity... which is often how Victorian confidence worked.

   Inside, this was never just a meeting room. It had a real performance hall with a flat floor for the audience, a small balcony, and a proscenium arch, the framed opening around the stage. If you want a peek, have a glance at the image on your screen now. The hall opened to the public as Bulwell Public Hall, hosting concerts and variety acts before drifting into cinema use in the early twentieth century. That change seems to have happened gradually, and the records are a little fuzzy.

   After the Second World War, the place became the Embassy Ballroom. One surviving notice records a Dancers' Night here with Ken Humphreys and his Orchestra on the twenty-fifth of January, nineteen fifty. Later came offices, a furniture and fireplace showroom, a dance school, and then another fine reinvention: boxer Kegg Capeness brought in Bulwell Fight Factory in two thousand and twelve, turning the old ballroom into a gym and community hub for hundreds of local people.

   For a building that lost its civic role early, it has proved remarkably stubborn about staying useful.

   When you're ready, continue on to the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin and All Souls.

   Open dedicated page →
2. location_on

   2

   Old Townhall

   play_arrowPreview
   Look for the red-brick Victorian façade with its neat five-part front, a recessed arched loggia, and a curving Dutch gable topped with a round oculus window. This place has the…Read moreShow less

   Look for the red-brick Victorian frontage with five balanced sections, an arched porch on short columns, and a curving Dutch gable with a round window set high in the middle.

   This building tells a very Bulwell kind of story: ambition, hard work, and timing that went a bit sideways. In the early eighteen seventies, Bulwell grew quickly, largely because brickmaking brought jobs and people. That growth pushed local leaders to form a board of health, and they decided Bulwell needed a proper town hall. They chose this site on the south side of Highbury Road, right beside the River Leen.

   And then came the bureaucratic punchline. The board seems to have made enough progress to hold at least one meeting here, but Nottingham Corporation annexed Bulwell on the first of November, eighteen seventy-seven. The building was not fully completed until eighteen ninety-four. So yes... this town hall more or less lost its original purpose before it had properly settled into the job. Tough start.

   From where you are, the front is still full of civic swagger. The middle three sections form a loggia, which just means an open porch, carried by short Corinthian columns with leafy capitals. Above them sit more columns, a heavy horizontal band called an entablature, and a neat row of tooth-like blocks known as a dentiled cornice. Higher up, those rounded openings hold quatrefoils, four-lobed shapes a bit like stone clovers. And at the top, that Dutch gable curves upward with more flair than strict necessity... which is often how Victorian confidence worked.

   Inside, this was never just a meeting room. It had a real performance hall with a flat floor for the audience, a small balcony, and a proscenium arch, the framed opening around the stage. If you want a peek, have a glance at the image on your screen now. The hall opened to the public as Bulwell Public Hall, hosting concerts and variety acts before drifting into cinema use in the early twentieth century. That change seems to have happened gradually, and the records are a little fuzzy.

   After the Second World War, the place became the Embassy Ballroom. One surviving notice records a Dancers' Night here with Ken Humphreys and his Orchestra on the twenty-fifth of January, nineteen fifty. Later came offices, a furniture and fireplace showroom, a dance school, and then another fine reinvention: boxer Kegg Capeness brought in Bulwell Fight Factory in two thousand and twelve, turning the old ballroom into a gym and community hub for hundreds of local people.

   For a building that lost its civic role early, it has proved remarkably stubborn about staying useful.

   When you're ready, continue on to the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin and All Souls.

   Open dedicated page →
3. location_on

   3

   Leen Valley

   play_arrowPreview
   On your left, Leen Valley opens as a broad green corridor, with the dark ribbon of the River Leen curving through open grassland and a line of mature trees marking its…Read moreShow less

   On your left, Leen Valley opens as a broad green corridor, with the dark ribbon of the River Leen curving through open grassland and a line of mature trees marking its course.

   This landscape looks calm enough now, but it has spent centuries working for a living. Before coal took over, the Leen’s gentle fall powered around twenty mills along its banks. One of the valley’s great bragging rights came in seventeen eighty-five, when James Watt installed the first engine he built for a cotton mill at Castle Mill in Linby. That is a rather large historical footprint for one modest river.

   Then three brothers - George, James, and John Robinson - thought even bigger. In the late eighteenth century, they turned the Leen into a planned industrial system, building or converting mills at Castle Mill, Grange Farm, Lower Mill, Forge Mill, and Forest Mill. They dug ponds and channels to feed the wheels, spent more than forty thousand pounds on the works - well over four million pounds in today’s money - and employed around eight hundred people across the valley. Then, after spreading across six sites, the family backed out of cotton spinning in the eighteen twenties and moved into banking... because apparently rebuilding a whole river corridor was not quite enough paperwork.

   The Leen also helped quench Nottingham itself. At Finkhill Street, the city’s first recorded public waterworks used an engine-house, a water-wheel, and pumps to lift river water to a reservoir near Park Row. Even after pipes arrived, water sellers called higglers still went door to door with buckets.

   Here in Bulwell, the river mattered even earlier. The settlement grew around a medieval bridge, and the name Bull Well may come from an Anglo-Saxon man called Bulla... or from a local legend in which a bull struck sandstone and made water seep out. As origin stories go, that one has a certain stubborn charm.

   From the eighteen forties to the eighteen seventies, coal mining remade the whole valley. Collieries opened at Cinderhill, Hucknall, Annesley, Bestwood, Linby, and Newstead, and the Leen Valley Railway arrived in eighteen eighty to haul coal and passengers. At Annesley, miners started sinking twin shafts, each thirteen feet wide, on the first of January, eighteen sixty-five. By eighteen sixty-seven they had reached the Top Hard seam - a deep layer of coal - at four hundred and twenty yards, and a whole village grew around the pit.

   If you check the image on your screen, you can see the valley’s gentler afterlife now. Some former industrial ground has turned into unusual grassland with real conservation value, even as the river still poses flood risks. And the valley keeps making new history: in May twenty twenty-two, Councillor Audrey Dinnall, who represents Leen Valley ward, became the first Black person elected Chair of Nottingham City Council’s Licensing Committee.

   So this is Leen Valley’s trick... it never stayed one thing for long: mill stream, water source, coal corridor, factory belt, green space. Not bad for a river once asked to do absolutely everything.

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