On your left, look for a broad grassy valley with gently sloping earth banks and the slim dark ribbon of the River Leen running through its middle.
This is the Leen Valley, the wide corridor the River Leen carved through Nottinghamshire, linking Bulwell to places like Linby, Hucknall, Basford and Nottingham itself. The shape of the land mattered here more than people sometimes admit: the river’s gentle fall decided what could be powered, where work gathered, and how a town could grow.
Long before coal took over local memory, the Leen drove a chain of mills. Local histories reckon there were around a score of them along these banks, and in seventeen eighty-five James Watt installed an early engine for a cotton mill at Castle Mill in Linby. So before pit wheels, before spoil heaps, before mining railways... this valley was already busy turning water into industry.
George, James and John Robinson understood that better than most. They treated the river like a working machine, 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, invested heavily in the works, and employed hundreds of people along the valley. Then came the wonderfully sharp twist: after spreading across six sites, the family pulled out of cotton spinning in the eighteen twenties and moved into banking. Same instinct for opportunity, cleaner cuffs.
The Leen also helped keep Nottingham supplied. 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 piped water arrived, higglers - door-to-door water sellers - still carried fresh buckets through the streets.
Then coal remade everything. From the eighteen forties to the eighteen seventies, collieries opened across the valley, and the Leen Valley Railway arrived in eighteen eighty to move coal and passengers. Bestwood became the headline giant, setting production records that drew wide attention. At Annesley, Harold Larwood worked at the pit from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty-seven, alongside his father Bob and his brother, before he became one of England’s fiercest fast bowlers. Not every mining district can claim it helped produce both fuel and fast bowling.
If you glance at the image on your screen, you’ll see how that industrial corridor now reads as green open country. Some former works have turned into valuable grassland, while the river still poses flood risks that no simple barrier can neatly solve.
So here’s the thought to carry away: when a town tries to define itself, what matters more - the proud civic building, or the quiet valley that keeps finding new jobs? Around Bulwell, both kept going by changing. That, in the end, is what endurance looked like here.
