Ambitious plans for Broadmarsh are set to revitalise the area surrounding the shopping centre. But 100 years ago the streets around Cliff Road — formerly known as Narrowmarsh — were among the most notorious slums in the country.
Tramps, vagrants, hawkers and prostitutes had made it their stamping ground; and the sheer numbers of people living in a small area meant that disease and death rates were high.
It wasn't always this way. Compared to cities further north, the industrial revolution came late to Nottingham. Rural workers began to head for the city circa 1850. They bought their families, and needed temporary places to stay while they found permanent positions.
Common lodging houses were the answer — whether organised businesses or private rooms rented out to make the owner a bit of extra cash. But as the number of workers looking for accommodation increased, so did the problems. Whole families would sleep in one bed. Rooms were stuffed with as many beds as possible. Animals would also share the space, and there was no clean water supply.
The transient nature of the accommodation also led to more undesirable elements moving in. Narrowmarsh was rife with prostitutes, and they were none too fussy about cleanliness. Nottingham was not unique; other cities shared the problems thrown up by the proliferation of common lodging houses.
This led to a government inquiry into the state of large towns. Assistant commissioner James Ranald-Martin said of Nottingham: “It is so bad as hardly to be surpassed in misery as anything to be found in the entire range of our manufacturing cities.”
Water and disease surveys agreed. A study of the Trent found 44.57 grams of solid effluent in every gallon of water. A new act was brought in requiring common lodging houses to be registered. This barely scratched the surface of the problem, and crime and disease still prevailed.
Even as late as World War I, the army would patrol the lodging houses, pulling out any soldiers on leave that they found — in an attempt to cut rates of venereal disease in the forces.
The problem was eventually dealt with in a very final way. The slum clearances of the 1920s led to the majority of the buildings in the area being pulled down. Now little remains of an area that was once home to thousands.
Teacher Sarah Seaton will deliver a seminar on the common lodging houses of Narrowmarsh on Saturday 17th March in the Dearing Building on Jubilee Campus — part of the Centre for Local History's Saturday Seminar programme. Sarah researched the history of Narrowmarsh for her dissertation on the area while doing an MA at The University of Nottingham.
“I really enjoyed the research and the subject,” she said. “So I was happy to come back and share my findings in a seminar.”
Previously, it was thought that all the lodging houses had been demolished in the slum clearances, but Sarah's painstaking detective work found that one building still stands. It's now a block of flats just below the luxurious Lace Market.
For more information on events taking place in the Centre for Local History, visit www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/centres/clh or call 0115 846 6466.
Notes to editors: The University of Nottingham is Britain's University of the Year (The Times Higher Awards 2006). It undertakes world-changing research, provides innovative teaching and a student experience of the highest quality. Ranked by Newsweek in the world's Top 75 universities, its academics have won two Nobel Prizes since 2003. The University is an international institution with campuses in the United Kingdom, Malaysia and China.