Carrington Street Transformation Area

A lot has changed around here. Some buildings have gone, and lots have had makeovers thanks to a Heritage Lottery Funded restoration project. Over the past few years, we have documented the changes on Carrington Street and we’d love to share those changes with you.

Nottingham City Council were awarded £682,400 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a Townscape Heritage Scheme to restore the historic buildings on Carrington Street, Arkwright Street and Station Street. Grants are being given for repairing historic building frontages and reinstating lost original features. 

The Townscape Heritage Programme is part of Nottingham City Council's ambition to make the most of the city's heritage sites and regenerate the southern side of the city. 

Repair and reinstatement of the historic shopfront at 38 Carrington Street was one of the first projects completed under the scheme, with funding from the project helping to fit out the space for use as Nottingham’s Urban Room.

How the area changed over time

(Work conducted by NTU students)

Lots of things have changed on Carrington Street - from entire buildings being demolished to the smaller details that you might have missed.

In 2016, students from NTU did start to research public perception of Carrington Street. The common theme seemed to be that Carrington Street was thought of as a bit run down and in need of attention. Words such as “avoid”, “uninspiring” and “run-down” were used to describe the area.

In 2017, the large building at the south end of Carrington Street was demolished to make way for the new Unity Square offices.

At the start of the project, it took time to convince people to take a leap of faith to get involved. There were no other examples of projects like this in Nottingham, but now Carrington Street is a great example of why work like this is so necessary.

NTU research continued. By 2017, opinions were largely the same as in 2016 (probably because no building work was getting started yet).

In 2018, the Broadmarsh Bus & Coach station was finally demolished to make way for the new Central Library. It took 18 months before the first building project was properly underway. The first building to be worked on was Barley Twist. Similarly to previous years, public opinion of the area remained largely the same.

In 2019, the construction of Unity Square began. It took about two and a half years for the first handful of projects to get going. The work started on the North end of Carrington Street with Bhatia Best, Elliot Mather and Eye-Catchers.

The NTU research from 2019 started to show a shift in public opinion. Some people were pleased to see the old bus station gone, others had noticed that the street had a lot of building work.

Due to the pandemic, no report was completed in 2020. Fortunately, some building work could continue under government guidance.

Buildings to the west of Hopkinson were demolished following completion of the building to the east. Work also continued on several buildings along Carrington Street starting just north of Canal Street.

In 2021, lots of exciting work was completed that really changed Carrington Street for the better. The North end of Carrington Street was partially pedestrianised next to the newly completed Central Library. The massive new Unity Square office building was completed, whilst demolition work on Broadmarsh Shopping Centre began. The final building works of the project were also finished.

There was a huge difference between the 2019 and 2021 reports completed by NTU students. The perception had become much more positive and themes such as quality and cleanliness were common. Carrington Street is described as “classy” and “elegant”. Even being described as “lively” rather than “busy”, showing just how the experience of Carrington Street has changed.

We would like to invite you to take a stroll down Carrington Street. The construction work undertaken here has been built to last with the highest quality materials and expert craftsmen. We hope that whenever you get a chance to visit, Carrington Street will be as beautiful as at the end of this project.

With special thanks to Architecture students from Nottingham Trent University for their hard work in gathering all of these opinions!

Townscape Heritage by Emma Hewitt

As part of our commitment to working with students and the community, we asked undergraduate Emma Hewitt, who studied Architecture at Nottingham Trent University, to illustrate and describe the beginning of the Carrington Street Townscape Heritage project.

We are currently working on the content of this page, her work will be shown here soon.

Midland Railway Station

With many thanks to A P Nicholson from nottshistory.org for all of the fantastic information!

Carrington Street Poem

Carrington Street public perceptions research

(Work conducted by NTU students)

Architecture students at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) have been researching public perceptions of Carrington Street since the very beginning of this project.

Participants’ demographics

We adjusted the questions asked from report to report to give us the most meaningful results possible.

In 2021, we asked participants for the first part of their postcodes, as this could be useful when assessing their perception of Carrington Street. A similar question was asked in all previous reports, which was whether or not they are residents in Nottingham. As you can see, particularly in 2018 and 2019 we had almost a 50/50 split between residents of Nottingham people from elsewhere such as students living in Nottingham.

SURVEY RESULTS

Have you heard of Carrington Street?

2016 - circa 60% … … … 2021 - circa 95%

Can you find Carrington Street on the map?

Generally, participants struggled to pinpoint exactly where Carrington Street is. In 2021 a much higher percentage of people correctly identified Carrington Street on the map, perhaps this could be partly due to the ongoing work on the street.

If you were to visit Carrington Street, how would you arrive?

Of course, the Nottingham Train Station is on Carrington Street so anyone coming from outside of the city centre may arrive by train. Surprisingly, though, by far the most common response was arriving by foot.

Why did you visit Carrington Street?

We wanted to see whether Carrington Street was becoming more of a destination than a place to just pass through. By 2021, people seemed to be visiting for more social reasons than in previous years.

How often do you visit Carrington Street?

We also wanted to see whether people are starting to visit Carrington Street more regularly as a result of the project. It’s difficult to tell in this case, so many people use the street as a route on their Commute regardless of whether they like the area or not.

LOCKDOWN

No report was completed in 2020 due to the pandemic. We thought that it was important to get some thoughts and opinions reflecting the situation such as:

How do you feel visiting the city after lockdown? Have you noticed any changes?

After such a long lockdown in the UK, some people were starting to visit the city centre for the first time in a long time. Work on Carrington Street had slowly continued under Government Guidance - so we wanted to know what people thought of all of the changes. We left this question open-ended and asked for any thoughts on the changes, most of which were very positive!

Describe the changes in Carrington Street

This question was adapted from the previous years. It had previously been about general impressions of the street, although now lots of changes had been implemented we wanted to focus on them. There are lots of positive ideas and themes about the area!

HERITAGE

To finish the 2021 questionnaire, we asked which places the participants associated with Nottingham’s heritage. There are some very interesting themes here, such as Broadmarsh Shopping Centre getting selected 8 times. Sometimes the buildings widely thought of as “ugly” do actually have lots of memories attached to them and will sometimes be missed when they’re demolished.

Thank you!

A huge thank you to everyone that took part, we greatly appreciate your time.

We would also like to thank Architecture students from NTU for producing this research throughout the years, with special thanks to Ryan Morris, Alexandra Evans, Emmett Seelochan, Julia Daniszkowicz and Cesar Jaramillo for their excellent work.