The Nottingham printA Nottingham print in a black frame, on a warm red-brown wall, in low indoor light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Nottingham print, drawn from the real map

52.9548°N / 1.1581°W · United Kingdom

How small the old centre is strikes you first, and how tightly packed: a dense knot on high ground, ringed by a road. Nottingham never built itself around its water.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Nottingham print

What the map shows

A core that could not spread, and a river it kept at arm’s length

That compactness is not a style, it is a hundred years of being stuck. The town grew sixfold in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries without being allowed to spread outwards, so it packed itself into the ground it already had. When the land was finally released, the new streets went down towards the flood meadows in one go, which is why the grid below the core looks like a different city dropped in beside it. The old centre sits on a ridge between two heights, with the castle rock at the southern one, and the medieval wall ran along what is now Parliament Street, on the northern edge of the knot.

Read on

One thing this map cannot show you, and it is the best thing about the city. Underneath the old centre there are more than eight hundred caves, all of them hand-cut into the soft sandstone, some of them over a thousand years old, and they are concentrated almost exactly inside the line of the medieval walls. The council states that no other British city has anything like as many. There is no way to draw them: what you can do is know that the densest part of this print is dense twice over, once above ground and once below.

Compose your own

What suits Nottingham

The palette

Two reds, and keeping them apart is what makes this print specific: the red-brown sandstone of the ridge and the caves, and the brick red of the terraces below. Let the old core carry a fine dense weave with no grid to fall back on, and let the Meadows be frankly regular underneath it, so the two halves argue. Give the Trent a broad calm tone but keep it low in the frame; it borders the city, it does not run through it. Green comes in firm masses at the edges rather than scattered through.

The framing

Vertical, and read from the top down: the knot of the old town, the grid beneath it, then the river turning away at the bottom. Come in closer and the core becomes legible street by street, which is tempting, but the bend of the Trent leaves the sheet and with it the point that the city keeps its distance from the water. Wollaton Park lies further west than this framing reaches; if you want it, you will be trading the density of the centre for it.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street on the ridge, a date, the name of a cave: that line is what turns a plan of Nottingham into your plan of Nottingham.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1068Two hills, and a town in the dip between them

The fortified Saxon settlement held the eastern height, where the Lace Market is now, around St Mary’s church. In 1068 William the Conqueror built his castle on the other height, to the south-west. The town then filled the saddle between the two, with a French borough under the castle and an English one around St Mary’s, and the wall ran along the line of today’s Parliament Street. That is the shape you are looking at: not a town that grew out from one point, but two settlements that met in the middle.

1845The city was locked in for a century

Nottingham went from about ten thousand people in 1740 to sixty thousand in 1840 without expanding at all, because the common fields outside the walls were held undivided and could not be built on. A hundred years of growth had nowhere to go but inwards. The Enclosure Act of 1845 finally released those fields, and the city then grew in layers laid one after another rather than in neat rings. This is the single fact that explains why the middle of the map is so tight and why the edge of it is so abrupt.

1800sThe meadows were the last part to be built

The grid south of the centre, The Meadows, was exactly what its name says: medieval flood meadows on the Trent, common ground that stayed open long after the town around it had filled up. It was laid out in red brick terraces through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the Victoria Embankment along the water. So the part of the city that touches the river is the youngest part of it, which is the opposite of almost every river town, and it is why the Trent sits at the bottom of this print like a border rather than a spine.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Nottingham

The hill you came up, the terrace you grew up in, the walk down to the water that always took longer than you thought. The ridge is the same for everyone. Which side of it you lived on is not.

Compose my Nottingham print