Why Nottingham City Transport's 35 History Bus deserves to be better known

Preparing for Nottingham City Transport's official launch today of their 35 History Bus Guide I came across this poster published in 2014 to publicise the first free day out organised by TravelRight and led by me. The poster below was designed by local historian and graphic designer Chris Matthews and put up in community centres and libraries along the route of the 35.

That bus on Saturday 24 May 2014 was one of a new generation of double-decker buses returning to the route after a decade of it being single deckers and it was driven by Anthony Carver-Smith, NCT's Publicity Manager, the man behind this latest guide. Without him none of these things would have happened and that I thank him sincerely.

I love the crisp lines of Chris's poster and how it draws in the eye in.

Chris has an online link to his version of my 35 History Guide (click here to see Chris's version), which uses my text but is very different to mine. I love it all the same as I do NCT's version designed by Nicola. I doubt if there is another bus route England which has received as much attention. By my calculation five guides in five years, albeit three by me (one for Bilborough, one for Lenton and one for the city centre)

Chris's poster gives away our shared interest in promoting and remembering the historic importance of municipal housing, better known to most as council housing. I love the juxtaposition on the poster of prefabs in Bulwell, which the 35 passes right by as it makes a final dash from Cinderhill Island to Bulwell Bus Station, with Wollaton Hall. The latter might fairly be described as a rich man's folly insomuch as it served no useful purpose as far as the ordinary folk who lived in its shadow for over 300 years before it was bought by Nottingham City Council in the early 1920s, except to remind them whose power and wealth it was that condemned them to live in poverty (I suspect that most did not see it in these terms, that was the way life was ordered and they made of it what they could). A good comparison for us in 2018 is to think of our childhoods and how we accepted the world we knew as the order of things. Time and again people say, despite the comparative poverty, how much they enjoyed their childhood. It's certainly how I feel about growing up in the post-war 1940s and 1950s.

The 35 is such a great urban bus route as much for what it represents as for what it is. Here, on a 54 minute bus journey, is a little glimpse of England!

This will be my message today when I attend the launch of NCT's 35 History Bus Guide at Wollaton Hall in less than 80 minutes from now!

A page about the 35 bus route and the new Nottingham City Transport Guide which has been published in the latest issue of Breeze, a door-to-door free magazine on the west side of Nottingham.

Click on image to enlarge and read.

A Homemade 35 poster

A photograph I took in 2008. I have it mind to create some stark posters promoting the 35 History Bus. One a week I think.

How the 35 History Bus helps reveal a city which grew from the outside in

I admit to getting a little buzz every time I see a 35 bus with its History Bus 35 logo emblazoned on its sides, because it can be traced back to a question I was asked at the end of 2013: 'If you had a Nottingham bus for a day where would you take people to see the city's history?'

I didn't need to think. I knew the answer already. 'On a 35 bus from Bulwell to Nottingham Central Library'.

At the time, Nottingham City Council was funding a temporary initiative to promote cycling, walking and using public transport on the north-west side of city, called TravelRight, which was based in Bulwell and they had come up with the idea of a series of local history walks and recruited, Chris Matthews, one of Nottingham's top local historians to help them.

It was to Chris that TravelRight first posed the question and he kindly suggested that it was a question they should ask me. At the time I was mid-way through a six year stint of running the Angel Row History Forum, which met quarterly in Nottingham Central Library's Local Studies Library, with the support of Library staff and the Nottinghamshire Local History Forum (NLHA).

The 35 was the progenitor of a response by me to the 900th anniversary events held in 1986 to mark the compiling of William the Conquerer's survey of England, which became know as 'The Domesday Book' because it was subsequently used to settle arguments about who owned what and records, for much of England, in minute detail who owned what and where in 1086, including Nottinghamshire.

The local historian in me has always been (and remains) a vocal critic of Nottingham City Council's 'citycentric' approach to local history and promotion of Nottingham as a tourist and visitor 'destination' — I did live in Lenton between 1979 and 1984, a place which has played a large part in the making of the Nottingham we know today. Had there not been the powerful Lenton Priory a mile south-west of the town, the Nottingham we know today would be very different.

The coalescence of Nottingham into a city greater than the sum of its parts remains a largely untold story. Without the likes of  Bulwell, Bilborough, Wollaton, Lenton, Radford and its other Domesday settlements, Nottingham today might be no more than a small town with a ruined castle. The map below dates from 2008 and shows places recorded in the 1086 Survey/Domesday Book by Nottingham City Council ward boundaries (these will change in May 2019)

I subsequently compiled another map in 2010 showing extant Domesday communities (Sutton Passeys disappeared during the medieval period, but is believed to have been subsumed into the Wollaton Hall estate and when the City Council built council houses on the estate's eastern edge in the 1920s the main road on the new housing estate was given the name 'Sutton Passeys Crescent' (Morton was another lost medieval village, now under Nottingham University's main campus, near the Portland and Trent buildings. My wife, Susan, took part in trial excavations in c.1970 whilst studying history and archaeology at the university, so its location is known).

So, what I hope the above maps show you is that there is no truth in the story that 'In the beginning there was just Nottingham and as it grew it took over the surrounding land...' You might argue that the 35 bus reveals a city which grew from the outside in — not the other way round — all of which makes it worthy of its new name as Nottingham City Transport's History Bus 35. Look carefully and you can see these roundels on the side panels of every 35 bus: