‘I’m sure if you asked anyone on Derbyshire County Council they’d tell you Chesterfield was part of the East Midlands.’
‘Oh what do they know, silly people!’ she says, agitatedly putting down her teacup and rooting fruitlessly through her handbag. When she looks up again, her cheeks have turned quite red.
‘I know, for instance,’ I go on, wanting to press my point home and show off a little of my research at the same time, ‘that Derbyshire County Council are dependent on the East Midlands Development Agency here in Nottingham for various kinds of funding. Which would appear to confirm that Derbyshire is in the East Midlands.’
Elizabeth looks briefly crestfallen.
‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ she says with a mildly hysterical laugh. ‘I accept, then, if I must, that I am by some definition a Midlander and that Derbyshire is, again by some definition, in the Midlands. But I would say that it is a border area, in the same way that Belarus and the Ukraine are … Is Warwickshire in the Midlands? It’s an interesting thing but I think the general perception is that rural counties aren’t in the Midlands.’
‘I’m getting the impression that you wouldn’t want to live in Nottingham, then?’
‘I wouldn’t want to live in a city anywhere, if I’m honest, although I have to say I’d rather live in Leeds than Nottingham.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because Leeds has got a fresh Northern feel, whereas Nottingham just feels a bit depressed. It does! It’s like that everywhere in the Midlands. I took a train from Birmingham to Nottingham a few weeks ago and it nearly undermined my will to live. Go to Wilkos here and I challenge you not to be depressed!’
Poundland, Wilkinsons – it sounds an improbable itinerary for a woman like Elizabeth. But it’s telling that she seems to think her misadventures uniquely expressive of life as it is lived in the Midlands.
* * *
Can you locate Nottingham on a map of the UK? Probably not, at least if Private Eye is to be believed. The London-based satirical magazine marked the recent, much-trumpeted opening of a major new art gallery in the city with a Young British Artists comic strip by illustrator Birch.
‘It all sounds very exciting!’ says one metropolitan YBA enthusiastically of the inaugural exhibition, which was designed to put Nottingham on the art map.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ replies his pal.
‘No, nor would I. Near Liverpool, isn’t it?’ rejoins the first YBA, returning to his senses and moving from the figurative to the straightforwardly geographical.
‘Even further, I think,’ concludes his sceptical mate. (Just in case you’re unsure: Nottingham is 120 miles from London, Liverpool is 200.)
The message being: Nottingham, like the Midlands generally, is even more alien to the Southern media than the North, and nothing the city does – not even the brilliant Nottingham Contemporary art gallery – is going to tempt the Establishment to reconsider its attitude.
When they do manage to locate it, outsiders often find it hard to take Nottingham seriously; respect can be hard to come by when you used to be known by the name of ‘Snottingham’. That was in the Middle Ages, when it was settled by Saxons led by or descended from a chap named Snot. In more recent times, Nottingham has been no less unglamorously known to millions as ‘Dottingham’, the go-to railway destination for all cold-sufferers, thanks to that bloody ad for Tunes cough sweets. Condescension is thus the preferred mode when metropolitans deign to notice the Queen of the East Midlands. For instance, when another London-based publication, briefly warming to the charms of its chic Lace Market district (once the centre of the nation’s fashion industry – while we’re on the subject, Sir Paul Smith, the classic-with-a-twist design guru, is Nottingham born-and-bred and still has a flagship store in a beautiful Grade II-listed town house in the centre of town), recommended the city as a weekend getaway destination, it couldn’t help adding patronisingly: ‘Sales of tights can’t be high in Nottingham. Or coats, for that matter. This is the kind of town where outfits start low and end high, and the fine art of going out has been honed to perfection. Don’t knock it, they have a style of their own – it’s just not style as we know it.’ How we laughed.
Still, at least the magazine’s assessors claim to have enjoyed themselves in Nottingham. One of the great heroes of the Golden Age of British detective fiction, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, hailed from the Midlands. But when, in the 1929 mystery The Man in the Queue, an investigation carries him from the metropolis to Nottingham, his heart sinks: ‘Grant came out of the station into the drone and clamour of trams. If he had been asked what represented the Midlands in his mind, he would unhesitatingly have said trams … Grant never heard the far-away peculiar sing of an approaching tramcar without finding himself back in the dead, airless atmosphere of the Midland town where he had been born.’ ‘Dead’, ‘airless’: sounds irresistible, doesn’t it? You’ll be glad to know that, after doing without one for several decades, Nottingham has recently reinstituted a tram service – you can catch it from the Forest Recreation Ground when Goose Fair isn’t on. Inspector Grant would be pleased.
Anyway, if, despite the best efforts of journalists and that Tunes ad, you are planning a visit – and until the arrival of the gangs and guns and the Channel 4 programme The Best and Worst Places to Live in the UK, Nottingham was regularly cited as one of the nicest, most welcoming places in Britain – here are a few local highlights to look out for:
1 The vast Market Square is the largest (about 22,000 m²) in the country. It’s also rather dull.
2 The tallest freestanding work of art in the UK, Ken Shuttleworth’s Aspire, is here. You almost certainly won’t have heard of it before, although you will definitely have heard of the much-photographed, much-publicised – and much smaller – Angel of the North by Antony Gormley. Gormless’s Gateshead icon gets written about and photographed a lot more because it’s self-advertisingly Northern. By contrast, Shuttleworth’s much more ambitious structure has a lame pun for a title (it’s like a spire, see, and it’s on a university campus, where the students presumably aspire to reach new intellectual heights). It should have been called Midland Thrust or something like that instead, but, as we’ve already seen, the Midlands doesn’t go in for that kind of self-promotion.
3 The castle. William the Conqueror was responsible for the original building, which quickly became the chief royal fortress in the Midlands. Crusading King Richard had to lay siege to it to reclaim it from his wicked, Robin Hood-bothering brother, John, in 1194. Most of the original structure has been destroyed; the Italianate building that has replaced it is rather anaemic.
4 There’s a statue of Robin Hood – did I mention that he was a local? – at the foot of the castle. The most important ’Oodie-related site, however, is the Major Oak out in Edwinstowe. Robin’s paramour has her principal incarnation in the form of a ring road that encircles Nottingham city centre, Maid Marian Way. Romantic, like.
5 The pubs. Like Mansfield, Nottingham takes its drinking seriously. You can tell because a lot of the local hostelries claim the distinction of age. The Bell Inn on Angel Row, running along the bottom side of the Market Square, says it’s the oldest in Nottingham, although its purported foundation date (c. 1437) pales besides that of Ye Olde Salutation Inn, which traces its origins to around 1240. Nestling in a half-timbered building beneath the castle, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem goes one better and claims to be the oldest inn in the whole of England. It’s said to date from 1189, the year Nottingham-loving monarch Richard the Lionheart ascended the throne. Legend has it that when old Dickie Coeur de Lion announced his intention to lead a crusade against the Saracens, the king’s followers had a swift one at the inn before setting off on their journey to Jerusalem – hence the name. So if you find Nottingham a bit characterless and try-hard, you can at least rest assured that it’s