News: Story in The Times, Bricks & Mortar Supplement

Saturday, February 26, 2005 - 12:41 PM

There was a feature about The Park in the Times, Bricks & Mortar supplement. The author was Tom Cox who is also the author of two books, Nice Jumper and Educating Peter (details at the website link above). The story is reproduced here with Tom's permission.

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It’s been a dramatic few years for my birthplace, Nottingham. Not content with being named Second Most Violent City In Britain, British City Where You’re Most Likely To Be Assaulted By A Stranger and finding itself the focus of a Panorama special on binge drinking, it’s also seen one of the most horrific waves of gun crime in recent memory. Then there’s the way it looks. For someone like me, who moved away from the city before its property market exploded and a tram system gutted its centre, it’s barely recognisable – a seemingly endless selection of theme pubs, cinemas and VIP nightclubs having replaced the dusty pubs and second-hand shops of my youth. Busier than ever, but somehow starker, too, it is either a city seriously on the up or much more seriously on the way down, depending on who you talk to: the Stag and Hen Night revellers who take advantage of Three Drinks For The Price Of Two offers every Friday night, or the member of my extended family who drove his trailer home one night a year or so ago, unhooked it from his car, and was slightly surprised to find a freshly gunned-down corpse nestling within it.

The Park, which lies half a mile east of Nottingham’s Market Square, has always been a powerful contrast to the city centre, but never more so than in the turbulent Nottingham of today. A (gently) gated community not quite like any other, it’s a place of dumbfounding serenity, and walking below the walls of Nottingham Castle onto its privileged avenues, it’s possible to convince yourself you might suddenly have gone deaf. This effect is all the more extreme if, like me, you have a few moments previously attempted to pay for a car park ticket while a sunny young couple with only four remaining teeth between them stood an inch from your left ear, arguing about who between them and their eleven month-old baby most deserved their final can of Special Brew.

For as long as I can remember, The Park has had an End Of The Rainbow quality for aspirational Nottingham residents. This is perhaps because its status as Nottingham’s Most Beautiful Community is so indisputable, but also because there’s nowhere else quite like it in Britain: nowhere that combines such a feeling of privacy and space with such a proximity to everything central and such a diversity of architecture. Here, on a grid half as big as the city centre itself, are portentous, gas-lit Victorian gothic mansions, smart, asymmetric new builds, Playboy-style pads on stilts and quirky little mewshouses, all generously making room for one another. Over the years, these have provided homes for the likes of Hugh Grant, who lived here for a year whilst working at Nottingham Playhouse, footballers Justin Fashanu and David Platt, playwright Jonathan Miller and clothes designer Paul Smith. A few years before this lot, legend has it that Richard The Lionheart liked to kick back in a minimalist loft apartment here too, between crusades.

When I was growing up, there was always an older brother of a friend who’d made good and ended up getting a house in The Park, possibly equipped with remote-controlled curtains. This wasn’t necessarily because he had to commute to London and found the three minute walk to Nottingham train station convenient, or because he appreciated the aura of bohemian exclusivity, or made use of the private tennis club; it was quite simply because, if you’d made some money for yourself and wanted to stay in Nottingham, that was what you did. My memories of the place come in the form of long afternoons spent in the enchanting Gothic attics of primary school friends with arty parents, or (what now seem bafflingly reluctant) walks around the exquisite residents’ gardens (opened to the public every May) with my mum. These memories are never completely bright or idyllic, though: there’s always a layer of goose-pimples over them, something chilly.

“It’s a place that always seemed to be partly obscured by snow and fog,” says author and illustrator Sally Kindberg, who lived in The Park from the early Fifties until 1969, in a “massive, gloomy, bulbous place, teeming with ghosts” owned by her grandma. Kindberg has since used the Park as inspiration for Creepy Kokey, a children’s book about scary creatures that pop out of cupboards. I tell her that on my last visit there but one, a friend was accosted in the street by a tweedy man muttering furiously about “the vibrations in the earth”. “Oh, I remember him from when I was a kid,” she replies. It seems entirely fitting that The Park’s resident wandering eccentric should be a long-term fixture.

Once a property addict has visited The Park, it’s always going to be fairly close to the top of their Most Desirable Neighbourhoods list. As ever, there’s an eclectic selection of luxury apartments within (and just outside) its boundaries on the market at the moment, and I’m particularly seduced by the Georgian townhouse on Park Terrace (£850,000) offered by Humberts, but I can’t quite imagine myself living anywhere here without a slight feeling of foreboding. The quietness, on a foggy December day, has an Omega Man quality to it, the deserted traffic islands – one of which was home to a much-loved cart horse in the early Seventies – mocking the hectic outside world. “People do have a sneaky look in one another’s windows here,” says Jean Pension, who lives in an airy flat on the northernmost edge of the community, a property whose value has doubled in the half decade since she bought it. “But they also keep themselves to themselves and go very quickly from their cars to their front doors.”

Has it changed much over the years? “The cars are certainly a lot more expensive,” says Pension. “It seems awfully chi-chi these days, what with the boules tournaments on the traffic islands,” says Kindberg, whose 92 year-old mother still lives here. Such well-heeled pursuits seem a far cry from the early Seventies, when my parents rented a flat here for eight pounds a week: a time that’s painted as some kind of bohemian, worry-free heyday in family memory. I wasn’t born at that point – this explains the “worry-free” bit, possibly - but the pristine, misty ambience and quiet streets make it easy to recreate in my mind. The Young Professionals have taken over, perhaps, but when a place has this many BMWs – not to mention this much upheaval just yards from its boundary - and still retains such a genuine sense of its spectral past, you know it must be something special.