A walk in the park

“You could take Little Man to the park,” my daughter suggested, as we prepared to look after him for a whole afternoon for the first time. “We’ll manage,” I replied, stoically, wondering which park she meant and where we would find it. They had recently moved house, crossing the city from the south west to the north east side and into an area of Nottingham that was quite new to me.

Woodthorpe Grange Park turned out to be the one in question. “There is a bit of an old railway line there,” my wife interjected, having made an earlier foray with the pram in that direction. My ears pricked up, and what had started out as a leisurely walk to the park suddenly became a bit of a mission.

The Nottingham Suburban Railway was only three and a half miles long. It ran from Trent Lane Junction, Sneinton, in the south, where it left the Great Northern Railway, to Daybrook Junction in the north where it linked once again to the wider arc of lines on the eastern side of the city which were part of the Derbyshire and Staffordshire Extension. That route also belonged to the GNR and it subsequently became known locally as the “back line.” To the south, the GNR had insisted on a flying junction to cross their existing main line at Trent Lane, so that there would be no interference with eastbound traffic. The NSR opened in 1889 and served three local brick-making concerns near Sherwood and Thorneywood, the two short branches east of the line finally reaching the factory sites up rope-worked inclines driven from engine houses.

This part of the city is distinctly hilly, as any seasoned, local, pram pusher will tell you, and there were no less than four tunnels required during the line’s construction. The double track formation climbed for two and a-quarter-miles at gradients of up to 1 in 50 before dropping down towards Daybrook at 1 in 70. The tunnels were interspersed with the three intermediate stations of Thorneywood, St Ann’s Well and Sherwood. The hope was, as the title of the line suggested, that the railway would attract workers in their daily commute to the city centre from these expanding residential areas.

Circumstance dictated otherwise. In 1900, the Great Central Railway opened their line into Victoria station and took away much of the northern outskirt’s passenger traffic from the NSR. Its importance was further reduced by the establishment of an electric tram service close to all three of its stations over subsequent years, a network which also made its way into Nottingham city centre past Victoria station.

As a result, all three NSR stations closed in 1916 and it became a through route only for passenger trains thereafter, in addition to the sparsely operated pick-up freights and the brick works wagons. In 1923, the independent NSR [though it had actually been run by the GNR, by agreement, up until that time] became part of the LNER. The line was singled in 1930. It was severed at the Trent Lane end by an enemy bombing raid in 1941 and was never re-connected. Freight ended in 1951 and the last passenger service to pay a visit was an enthusiasts’ special, via Daybrook, in 1954. That was followed by the dismantling of the track, which was eventually completed three years later.

Woodthorpe Grange Park occupies the grounds of the former family home of Henry Ashwell, built in 1874 and now a Grade 2 listed building. Though compensated when the NSR cut a swathe both across and beneath his estate, in 1889, and in spite of having had a tunnel named after him, Ashwell decided to sell the property - to Edward Parry, no less - who was the designer and the chief engineer for the railway in the first place. By 1905, Parry had sold it on again, to a local councillor called Godfrey Small. In 1922, it opened as a public park, finally having been purchased by Nottingham City Council. In more recent times, it has gained a Green Flag Award, recognising it as a well managed park and open space as part of a national scheme that was set up in 1996, though, come to think of it, hardly the first time it would have enjoyed the presence of green flags.

From the house, now used as council offices, we wandered down the slopes that had made the digging of Ashwell’s tunnel a necessity. Both the former portal sites are fenced off and the material that had been dumped to block the tunnel mouths is now covered by mature vegetation. Just outside the park on the south side, blocks of flats occupy the location of the former Sherwood station. The cutting on the approach to the south portal is clearly defined and is currently occupied by a concrete cul-de-sac and a line of garages.

On the north side of the tunnel, a brief section of the former railway’s course is just about discernible, with an even shorter section of single track rail bearing a full-size model of the front end of a steam locomotive. It has been bricked in under the bridge carrying Woodthorpe Drive over the formation, as a sculptured reminder of the old NSR. A cast iron plaque nearby informs visitors about the landscape’s history.

The bridge carrying Woodbridge Drive over the former NSR, looking north.

The cutting, and ahead of it is the site of the south facing portal of Ashwell’s Tunnel.

I found these discoveries all very interesting, of course, but Little Man did not bat an eyelid throughout our perambulations, in spite of my “off path” diversions across some fairly rough terrain. “Sleep well, Little Man,” I thought. There is plenty of time for heritage and for lots of other stuff in between.