England

Nottingham’s 10th Light Night

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Nottingham’s 10th Light Night took place on Friday 10th February and as usual the city centre was packed with people taking in the light displays from the Castle, to the Galleries of Justice, the Wheel of Nottingham and for the first time this year, the Arboretum. There are so many events going on around the city centre and beyond – the event has spread out to include areas of Sneinton this year – that you really need to have a set plan of where you want to visit. Since this is the first time the Arboretum has taken part I definitely wanted to visit there, but first we went to Market Square to see the lovely light display on the Wheel of Nottingham, which also had a screen up playing Frozen, a nice touch since it was lightly snowing at the time!

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Cathedral Church of St Barnabas, Nottingham

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St Barnabas has been on my list of places to visit in Nottingham for a while now, somewhere I kept meaning to visit every time I went to the Playhouse nearby, and I finally found time in November to take a look. Designed by Augustus Pugin, the architect of the interior of the Palace of Westminster, construction of the cathedral began in 1842 and it was consecrated in 1844 when a bishop from Rome brought the relics of St Barnabas with him. When it was opened it was the largest Catholic church built in England since the Reformation.

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Brackenhurst Hall

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The last place I visited in September as part of Open Heritage Day was Brackenhurst Hall in Southwell, part of Nottingham Trent University that isn’t normally open to the public. I arrived just as they opened so I got to go on the first of the tours that day, which is just as well as there was a fairly constant stream of people arriving throughout my visit.

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St Martin’s Church, Bilborough

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The second site I visited as part of the Open Heritage Weekend was St Martin’s Church in Bilborough. I’d been planning on coming here anyway, as an exhibition on Evelyn Gibbs, whose mural can be found at the church, had caught my eye on my last visit to Nottingham Castle, so this proved to be a good opportunity to visit.

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Behind the Scenes at Nottingham Central Library

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[Note: This took place before it was announced that Nottingham City Council have sold the library building as office space. At time of writing there is no clear plan as to what they are going to do with the library].

I managed to visit three different sites during Heritage Open Weekend in September,  (yep, that behind with writing things up again!) where places in England open up for free or access is granted to places normally closed to the public. One of the options available that caught my eye was a behind the scenes tour of Nottingham Central Library which is my local library.

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Hardwick Hall: Estate and Gardens

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On a sunny day last year we headed to Derbyshire and Hardwick Hall, a stunning Elizabethan house built by Elizabeth Shrewsbury, best known as Bess of Hardwick. Rather than explore the house on this visit we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and go on some of the walks around the Estate and the gardens, which did however bring us close enough to admire the Hall.

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Leicester Architecture – Part One

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As well as exploring all things Richard III on my trip to Leicester I also took a lot of photographs of buildings that caught my eye – finding out about the significance of these buildings was greatly aided by information panels conveniently positioned nearby, a practice of which I heartily approve and that Nottingham could really do with emulating.

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Creswell Crags

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Creswell Crags is one of the UK’s most important Ice Age sites and at only an hour or so away from Nottingham, a relatively local place I’ve been meaning to visit for some time.

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St Mary’s Church, Sudeley

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The lovely, and somewhat compact, St Mary’s Church in the grounds of Sudeley Castle is the final resting place of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife and the only one to survive him. She is the only queen to be buried on private land.

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Sudeley Castle and Gardens

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Sudeley Castle is famous as being the home to Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife and the only one to survive him. It is also the place where Lady Jane Grey, Katherine’s ward and Queen herself for only 9 days before her execution at the Tower of London, resided for some time. Lady Jane is probably my favourite historical figure, someone I’ve been fascinated by since a school trip to Bradgate Park, Lady Jane’s supposed birthplace, so I was very interested to walk the same hallways she did.

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