Location - YMCA hut & railway station ?


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This has turned into a greater mystery than I ever expected when I started it.

One possible solution.....anyone who has an account with Ancestry.co.uk (not me) could they look at the old telephone directories and see if the YMCA place is listed there.

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Saturday 23 December 1916 , Nottingham Evening Post A Christmas tree will be held in the Y.M.C.A. hut, opposite the Midland Railway Station, on Christmas Day, and gifts will be welcomed by the lad

One last go, then I give up On the 1916 map Queen's Bridge Road exists but what is now Sherrifs Way does not. This was then a pedestrian walkway with trees. The yellow patch is where I think the YMC

So now we know ! One further piece of evidence to add to Ian Dawson's work....the building in the background (on the left) was definitely the one now known as Karlsruhe House; the triangular features

Saturday 23 December 1916 , Nottingham Evening Post

A Christmas tree will be held in the Y.M.C.A. hut, opposite the Midland Railway Station, on Christmas Day, and gifts will be welcomed by the lady superintendent. ...
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Well done. Glad we've finally cleared that one up. A great topic with no confrontation. Right, bring on the next picture for us all to chew over.

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Sorry to resurrect the subject, but a photo made me think about how long the YMCA building could have lasted.

At the Wollaton Industrial Museum is an aerial photo showing the Midland Station in 1927. By then, Queens Walk appears to have been converted into a through road. The trees and wide pedestrian walk have gone, to be replaced by a dual carriageway road with a narrow central reservation. If we knew when this was built, it would give us the very latest date the YMCA could have existed, as it would have had to be demolished to make way for the road - if it had not been demolished before.

Also, following up on the sign photos, I finally managed to do a bit of enhancing in Photoshop. My gut feeling is that the third letter on the YMCA photo must be an R, a P or a B - the top left hand corner s definitely square, not round. There is more than a suggestion of a horizontal bar midway down the letter.

Maybe CORN? (just the first idea that came into my head - there must be other possibilities.)

It could even be 2 words or a hyphenated word, as the gap between the second and third letter appears wider than the gap between the first and second letter.

Although it is difficult to be sure, because of the awkward angle of the Coombs' Flour lettering, the Coombs' letters appear to have a much squarer typeface than the letters on the YMCA photo sign. In fact I would suggest the Coombs' 'O's would be pretty much as wide as they tall. The O in the YMCA photo, on the other hand, is very narrow in relation to its height, even though it is seen much more square on.

jak1_zpsdw9ubjm7.jpg

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Maybe cliff could post that aerial shot on this thread to shed any light?

Also I have read reports on the internet that Coombes lettering can be seen from Midland station.

Magnification of this aerial shot shows ( in the 40's) a large demolished building to the right past the pub- except the street level windows which have been left...could this be the building in the rest hut background... that is standing?..prior to demolition?

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Just to clarify the position of Coombes' Mill, I found this photo on Britain From Above. It shows the Midland Station bottom right and (I assume) Coombs building under the arrow.

This is a 1930s image, so there is a large 'modern' building obscuring it - I am guessing that may not have been there before the end of WW1. Even so, there is a very tall warehouse in the middle of the Midland goods yard and buildings on the other side of the canal that might limit the view of Coomb's from the station.

Yuk2_zpsalktchte.jpg

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See the map at #9, the top of Queens Walk, the bit shaped like St George cross. I believe it was situated there. Also the picture #38 just to the left, within those iron railings, the orientation also shows the distinctive roof corner of the warehouse (Karlsruhe House) and trees. Look at the hut again, the entrance is clearly on the right, which would be on Queens Bridge Rd. It directly faces the station. There is nothing on the other corner as my mam remembered, just goes down to the rail lines. I don't believe the letters can be the Coombs building on Castle Blvd, or the letters actually spell Coombs, but have no idea on that.

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Here is a long shot.

If upu look at the picture of the hut that Cliff posted you can see that it is not rectangular in plan - but more of a trapezium shaped. Therefore, one approach is to look at the old 6" and 25" Ordnance Survey Maps on the NLS website for that era and see if there are any buildings near Midland Station with such a trapezium shaped footprint.

The attached is an extract from the 1920 6" map - and I have circled a possible contender for the YMCA Hut - if this is in the photographer wold have had his (or her) back to the railway and would be facing south. That would put the tall building with the CO letters somewhere in the Meadows.

I am not at all 100% sure that this is right - but the approach of looking for odd shaped buildings might help!

YMCA%20hut_zpsqg5yiozs.jpg

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It's surprising, but there's an old photo of the area which hasn't appeared before. And it's been on PTP all the time. It's described as "circa 1927" which makes it almost 20 years earlier than the other aerial views.

In this, the area which is later marked as "Wood Yard" has many more buildings in it; but there is still nothing in the middle 'island' of Queen's Drive

queensdrive_zpst8l3jnqs.jpg

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That is like the photo I saw at the exhibition. Compared with the 1916 map, the Queen's Bridge Road area is different. There is a wide road down the centre as well as the original road next to the wood yard. In the 1916 map there was only the narrow road next to the wood yard. The rest is like a park with paths and trees. They would probably have eased the gradient at the top too. I think the 1927 photo shows an area very different from 1916.

uyuururururur_zpsptyfrlfu.jpg

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One last go, then I give up ;)

On the 1916 map Queen's Bridge Road exists but what is now Sherrifs Way does not. This was then a pedestrian walkway with trees. The yellow patch is where I think the YMCA was located in 1916 - too late for the map survey, but then documentation suggests it wasn't built until 1916.

uyuururururur_zpsptyfrlfu.jpg

The YMCA photo in post #1 shows a wide walkway to the right (east) of the building which matches the map. There are also trees in the background of the photo, trees are shown on the map behind the building, so that matches the photo too. In 1916 this area looked very different to the 1927 aerial view because the new road called Queens Drive (now Sherrifs Way) was put in replacing the wide pedestrian walkway. Unfortunately, the next large scale map is 1954, but it shows the general idea

Yuk3_zpsrtkbkx83.jpg

The clincher though for me, I think is this extract from the 1920 large scale map which clearly shows a building where it ought to be, (circled in orange). It even has the acute angle to the frontage, just like the photo in post #1. There is no new road at this stage - the walkway and trees are still as in the 1916 map.

Yuk4_zpskme4efc2.jpg

and the area of the frontage had a metal fence exactly like the one in #1, as shown earlier in post #38.

So, if it was there, it must have been demolished sometime in the early 1920s, before the 1927 photo which shows the new road.

Following on from that, the large sign in the background cannot be 'Coombs' Flour' - it must be something else. But I have already shown (I hope) that it doesn't really look like the Coombs' sign anyway.

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RE the sign, I wonder if anyone has other old pictures of the Meadows which may show this from another angle, or maybe give us a clue.

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Well done notty!

Good detective work- my injection of Coombes muddied the waters somewhat!

Still might be worth establishing what CO...means

Just had an e-mail from Mandy Caddy regarding YMCA huts.

At the Cadbury Research Library at Birmingham University they have "everything "logged.Special- collections@bham.ac.UK

Might have more for us?

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Hopefully we can put this baby to bed!!

The hut WAS where we thought it was- kindly executed by notty ash the other day,an acute angled structure of 'available materials'.

Near Nixon & Knowles timber yard.

the YMCA had a night buffet in Midland Station between 1915 and 1916 for soldiers.

Across the way ( top of Queensbridge rd.) a rest hut was built in 1916 for British soldiers, this was erected by J.McManus contractors at the princely sum of£1013.

The cash being donated by local subscribers, serving food and refreshments- also it housed 50 beds.

After the war it was transferred to another location and an extension was added by Silk & Sons builders at a total cost of £256.

Information regarding these huts are found in YMCA green books.

By the 1920's the hut had been moved...Amen!!

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So now we know !

One further piece of evidence to add to Ian Dawson's work....the building in the background (on the left) was definitely the one now known as Karlsruhe House; the triangular features match. And the name on the lettering was GORRINGE; once you know the name you can see the first letter is a G not a C. In the 1920s the company at 20 Queen's Bridge Road was Gorringe & Co, Warehousemen.

gorringe1_zps5dceesup.jpg

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This topic has brought out the best in Nottstalgia - collaborative research, involvement of lots of members, open debate and testing ideas, and lots of friendly banter

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  • 2 months later...

And just when you thought everything had been covered...........I was looking at the old film of a tram-ride through Nottingham in 1902 and right at the beginning I noticed this.

 

This is the scene from the front of a tram looking up Station Street, with Carrington Street going across the top, so the YMCA place was off to the left. On the wall, slightly obscured by the lamp-post, is an advert for Gorringe's.

gorringe_zpsenwntqi4.jpg

 

The buildings and the wall are all still there today.

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