EPW057131 ENGLAND (1938). Mapperley Brick Works, Nottingham, 1938

Mapperley Methodist Church [closed 2020]

The Wells Road

Thakerays Lane

Paddling pool. A stream fed the pool from the direction of Scout Lane and exited via a culvert that ran beneath Sherwood Station and out along the backs of houses on Cavendish Vale, into a drain at the junction of Dornoch Avenue and Winchester Street, Sherwood.

Beginnings of what became Somersby Road.

Clay was excavated from the whole of this field together with some excavating in the adjacent field on the other side of Breck Hill Road from the 1930s through to the mid 1950s. A railway tunnel similar to the one beneathe Woodthorpe Drive was driven beneath Breck Hill Road.

Breck Hill Road

Railway tunnel beneath Woodthorpe Drive (previously called Scout Lane)

Breck Hill fields. The site of former clay extraction.

The Grange

Coronation Road

Woodthorpe Grange Park.

Site of earlier brick kiln, chimney and associated works and drying sheds.

Mapperley Rise.

Morley Avenue, Mapperley had been the site of an earlier brickmaking. The works of which were situated where there is now a cul-de-sac and small factory.

Maurice Drive: a truncated part of the vision of the directors of the Mapperley Brick Company for the reuse of previously worked-out lands for housing development. There had been plans to take the road through worked-out wooded land to Sherwood Vale. Roads given the names of Mapperley Rise, Gordon Rise, Morley Avenue and Sherwood Vale having been laid out for house building with a public transport link to the City and elsewhere being provided from the new railway station at Sherwood. Either the railway came too soon or, the speed of housebuilding was too slow for passenger receipts to grow. Added to which Nottingham Corporation's decision to rapidly expand the electric tramways had either not been known or, had been ignored, by the promoters of the Nottingham Suburban Railway. The land close to the station bounded by Maurice Drive, Mapperley Rise and Sherwood Vale was not built on in any significant way until 1960. Until 1958 large sections of it had been rented to allotment holders and fortytwo years after the last local train service had been withdrawn and the station closed in 1916.

First phase of housing on Sherwood Vale built during the late 1920s and early 1930s on land from which the best clay had been previously taken. Many of the houses on the north (Park) side of the Vale have cellars due to the contour of the land dropping steeply towards Woodthorpe Park.