ABS                    This house and this estate           27 September 2005

This estate is, I imagine, unique in the world.  If anyone knows differently, I would welcome a call from them on cdcnottm@aol.com   The following essay may interest builders and historians of building construction.  Having been in the construction industry before retirement, I find the place fascinating.  Below you will find a link to a website that talks about the history of this type of building, and shows a picture of a typical house.  I avoid the word 'home' that seems so popular today as, to me, 'home' and 'house' are not synonyms; the two words have quite different meanings.  A hole-in-the -wall can be a 'home' to a field mouse, but it is certainly not a 'house'.  And a house can become a home, provided that it is adequately furnished

The house where I currently live, is in Scalford Drive, Wollaton Park.  It is a semidetached bungalow.  The construction is as described in the Lenton Times link here http://www.lentontimes.co.uk/oct88_05.htm    The picture shown (if you click on the link) is typical of these bungalows.  Most of them have been modernised with gas fires and modern windows, instead of the open coal fires and tiny glass panes of the past.  This bungalow is typical of the remainder with a fifteen inch cast iron flue in the loft that carried the smoke up from the open coal fire in the lounge to the chimney pot at the peak of the roof.  The lofts were originally lined with very heavy black felt, as in the early days condensation from the cement-asbestos pan-tiles caused almost a flood of water in the loft during the cold weather.  I have removed all my felt because it was filthy and breaking up.  I have now lined the roof with heavy white lining paper and fitted two fluorescent lights.  You could almost use the loft as a bedroom, as the floor is boarded.  It is certainly a useful storage place.

The frame of the building is mild steel angle iron of various sizes. and the loft floor stands on the framework ceiling of the rooms below.  The original room ceilings were cement asbestos sheet that rested on the horizontal member of the angle-iron.  Before I plaster-boarded the lounge ceiling, the room looked like a ship.  The steel framework was on display giving a very nautical appearance that was not at all decorative.  In the roof space the original cast iron flue is still there.  I got a local builder to do a bit of work here and I asked him if he could replace the fourteen inch cast iron flue with a stainless steel one.  He baulked at the job saying that  it was at least a two-man job and he would rather not tackle the task.  So the cast iron pipework is still in position supported by its original steel supports.  I would hazard a guess that the metal weighs half more than half a ton (any old iron ?)

The first picture seen on the  Lenton Times site shows Middleton Boulevard in the very early days.  Since that date approximate a mile of countryside behind the camera has been transmogrified by the building of the Queens Medical Centre (QMC), and an elevated road that crosses the Trent.  The Boulevard has an underpass constructed to cross the main Derby Road that joins Nottingham City Centre to its sister city about twenty miles to the west.

I have seen a picture of Middleton Boulevard taken in the intervening years that showed a trolley bus.  With the demise of those vehicles, private and public traffic has filled the road to its maximum limit.  If it were not for a few sets of pedestrian traffic lights, vehicles would be unable to leave this estate between seven AM and seven PM.

But despite the enormity of the traffic on the Boulevard, the roads of this estate are quite quiet.  Being built in about 1930, the amount of traffic was minimal.  Probably the only motor car to use the road would be a local doctor.  Everything else would have been horse and cart.  The problem nowadays is that the roads are so narrow that two moderately sized vehicles cannot pass without one or both of them mounting the pavement.  But Nottingham has not gone down the path that Richmond on Thames has with traffic wardens touring the housing estates looking for a car that has been parked so as not to obstruct the road, by putting two wheels on the footpath.  There may be another reason other than common sense, there are one or two parts of Nottingham where, if a yellow peril did that, their body would be found in the gutter alongside their pop-pop scooter,  My concern is that because it is often essential to drive along the pavement to get past a parked van or lorry, that someone may walk out of a front gate and straight under the wheels of the passing vehicle.  Many front gardens are so overgrown with shrubbery that the pavement is obscured until you are actually on it.