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Old Assembly Rooms, 7, Low Pavement
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THESE four fine fluted columns with their Corinthian capitals, together with the wall behind them are all that remain of the Assembly Rooms of Nottingham. In their time they have looked down upon scenes of much gaiety in days when beaux wore beever hats and tight breeches, and belles were adorned by crinolines and turbans.
As early as 1739 there was an Assembly in Nottingham for cards and dancing, and by degrees this grew in importance and a hall was built upon this site.
The assembly held within its walls was a very exclusive affair, intended only for the gentry. It was called " "The Ladies’ Assembly," and was ruled with a rod of iron by a committee of the fair sex under a series of remarkable and severe rules of which two— "No attorney’s clerk shall be admitted,’’ "No lady shall be allowed to dance in a long white apron" —will serve as examples to show the sort of house that these Jills built.
There was a rather less exclusive assembly called "The Tradesman’s Assembly held in Thurland Hall at this time to which those cast out by the dragons guarding The Ladies’ Assembly might turn for solace.
In 1807 the Assembly Room on Low Pavement was enlarged and beautified at a cost £1,545, and at the same time the regulations governing the Assembly were further tightened up until its exclusiveness must have been positively painful.
The taste of the times, also, was remarkable, for when this Assembly Room was completed and decorated it was so much admired that it was resolved to keep it exclusively for assemblies, and a resolution was accordingly passed that henceforward no concerts should be held within its walls!