OS Explorer map 260, Nottingham: Vale of Belvoir – I do not own this map, but had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 26th September 2023.
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, travelling around Britain by train, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 10 of the trip – for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead. The Previous Visits section will be new though!
On the final day of my All Line Rover trip, I was making my way gradually back home from Haltwhistle to Cambridge, with a few stops on the way. I’d also decided on a plan: if I stopped in Blackpool, Sheffield and Nottingham, I could tick off the remaining three British tram systems, and thereby have visited all of them on this trip. That was the plan!
I arrived in Nottingham from the north, on the Robin Hood Line, having changed at Worksop from a train from the Sheffield suburbs. Instead of continuing to central Nottingham, I got off a few miles north at Bulwell, a station that’s also a stop on Nottingham’s tram system. The trams out to the north share the route of the train line, with one track for each, so the train and tram platforms are adjacent here, which is fun.
I got the tram into the city centre, thereby having visited all of Britain’s tram (and metro) systems on this trip! Honestly I think Nottingham’s trams are my favourite of the trams I’ve been on. As well as just being generally nice-looking and clean inside and out, I enjoyed the section just north of the city centre where the north- and southbound tracks take different routes along some narrower suburban streets, very normal non-posh streets with lots of kebab shops, slightly tired-looking hairdressers and the like. I feel like the trams I’ve been on so far tend to either be street-running in fairly polished city-centre districts, and in segregated off-road tracks, usually on a former rail route, when further out, so you rarely get them on the street just in normal-seeming areas where people might live. So I enjoyed that.
In the city centre, I had a short wander around – again, it was pretty nice, though I think I’m realising on this trip that few city centres are nasty – before heading to the train station.
My final two trains of the day were an East Midlands Railway service to Ely – that same Liverpool to Nottingham service again – and finally a Great Northern to my home station of Cambridge North, ending my trip!
Previous visits
My Northamptonshire childhood home is not so far from Nottingham, and I’ve been several times over the years. My cousin Guacamole went to university there, and Mother Dearest and I went to visit her there a good few times.
My most frequent reason for going to Nottingham, though, has been Warhammer World! As has come up on this blog several times before, one of the main things I did with my school friends – and still do when I meet them occasionally – is the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, which we’d put together and paint collections of models for, and then play the game.
The game is produced by Games Workshop, who also make the Warhammer games, and Warhammer World is their main national centre – there’s a giant gaming hall where you can book out tables, and a big shop, an exhibition, and a restaurant. A good few times in my later schooldays, or the couple of years following that, some of us would go up to Warhammer World for the day and play a few games. On one occasion I believe Cabbage and I entered an organised tournament!
Visiting all the maps! 