City Life | 6 December 2008

At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot

‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has stuck, even though knives have replaced guns as the young criminal’s murder weapon of choice. Sheffield has its steel, Liverpool its music and its football — and Nottingham its guns.

How had it come to this? The defining image of Nottingham in the early 1960s was that of an angry young man, Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton, working on a capstan lathe at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But Seaton wasn’t that angry. He might use his fists, but he would never use a gun. Sillitoe was born and brought up in Radford, then a proud working-class community, now a chilling example of the urban decay which is withering the soul of many a northern town. Radford is not quite a no-go area, but no one wants to go there. Neither do they want to go to St Ann’s, the Meadows, Bilborough, Basford and Broxtowe, all pockets of deprivation, crime, drug addiction and third-generation welfare dependency, where you can smell the stench of hopelessness. The despair is fuelled with anger because many of Nottingham’s more salubrious suburbs, such as Wollaton, Mapperley and Rushcliffe, are bang next door.