The Streets Are Ours...

The city shouldn’t just be the place where you do your shopping, eating and drinking... The city streets should be our gallery, a place of inspiration. We go on city breaks to do this very thing and bizarrely we look more when we’re in Rome or Berlin than we do on our own doorstep. Architecture gives a city its character, its uniqueness.

At present, there’s loads of buildings sprouting up around Nottingham and sadly the majority of them lack invention and imagination. Aesthetically they're awful. For example, take the building which will house Waitrose soon, it’s the blandest building you’ll ever see – akin to something out of East Germany during the Cold War. What goes through the minds of developers and architects? Do they even live in Nottingham? If they do, do they look away when walking past their buildings?

This leads me to an architect with a real imagination – some might say too much – Watson Fothergill. Born Fothergill Watson in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire in 1841, he was the son of a lace merchant. He changed his name to Watson Fothergill in 1892 to continue his maternal family name.

You will know his buildings. They’re the huge red-bricks with the dark wooden eaves; a mish-mash of Gothic and Old English styles with gargoyles, stone carvings, turrets, Bavarian balconies and bay windows which jut proudly into the air. They’re the product of an artist, a man overflowing with creativity.

Sadly, some morons made the decision in the 1960s to knock down his masterpiece, The Black Boy Hotel, and replace it with the concrete soul-grinder that we now know as the Primark building. It was like torching the Mona Lisa and replacing it with a doodle on a fag packet, a disgrace.

It wasn’t the only Fothergill to be demolished over the years but thankfully many still exist in the city centre and in surrounding areas. My favourite is Fothergill’s office on George Street. It’s smaller than his other creations and as a consequence it’s more subtle. Currently it’s vacant so if you’re in the market for a new office…

Fothergill Watson rarely ventured out of Nottingham and the beauty of this is, in our world of homogenised high streets and outer of town retail parks, we have magical buildings unique to our city – worthy of a visit from tourists.