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NOTTINGHAM PAST & PRESENT: STREETS AND YARDS
THE CORNER OF MARKET STREET AND PARLIAMENT STREET, 1890
The corner of Market Street and Parliament Street as it appeared in 1890 reminds us of the great changes that have come over Nottingham during the last thirty years. The scene here presented to us by Mr. Hammond has something of the bucolic about it and might be looked for in a small country town. Nobody could accuse the Theatre Square of having anything rural to show now-a-days!
Until seventy or eighty years ago the northern exits from the Great Market Place must have been extraordinarily inconvenient. There was the main route through Chapel Bar and there was the route through Clumber Street, but the latter would be much occupied by the coach traffic which centred on the Blackamore's Head Inn, then standing at the corner of High Street and Pelham Street and the White Lion Inn in Clumber Street, which has come down to our own times as the 'Lion Hotel'. For the rest there were many narrow passages branching off from Long Row, some of them still remaining, which wandered through a wilderness of small tenements till they emerged into Parliament Street. One of these thoroughfares was rather more roomy and convenient than its neighbours; it even went so far as to admit of wheeled traffic. Our fathers knew it as 'Sheep Lane', but before their day it was called 'Organ Lane'. Out of this 'Sheep Lane' the modern 'Market Street' was evolved. It was ready for traffic in 1865 and on the 2nd October of that year Alderman Page, the Mayor of Nottingham at the time, after opening the Goose Fair proceeded to the foot of the new street and declared that its name was and should be 'Theatre Street'. Time, however, belied this statement and the name of 'Theatre Street' was abandoned for the more dignified 'Market Street'.