How Nottingham was nearly Birmingham:

[bamber 128]

Here's a link to an interesting blog article about Nottingham's abortive urban motorway system.

http://internetcurtains.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/how-nottingham-was-nearly-birmingham.html

[Cliff Ton 10,497]

Very interesting. I'd heard about some of those features, but a lot of it is new to me. So whatever people say about Nottingham now, it could have been much worse!

It ties in well with the recent thread about Nottingham in the past, people leaving the area to live abroad, and how the grass always seems to be greener somewhere else.

One paragraph in particular stands out... For example most people in St Ann's were without hot water, baths or their own toilet, never mind their own inside toilet. All this was embellished through Ken Coates and Richard Silburn's sociological study "Poverty and Forgotten Englishmen" - although much of this was refuted by various local residents (more on that later). There are reports of gutters blocked with industrial fat, flooded cellars, broken sewage systems and epidemics of lice. Independent surveys showed that most people actually wanted to move out into better areas and so the stories of displaced communities when St Ann's was redeveloped are not clear-cut. There was little room for car parking, terrible through traffic in residential streets, no room for new consumer goods and many houses in very poor structural condition with streets covered in brick dust

The good old days?

[mick2me 3,033]

An interesting find Bamber.