We Laced this City with Cogs & Coal

What truly makes Nottingham the City that it is, is the industries that the City had been built upon. To honour this I focused on three industries that had been essential in Nottingham’s development.

Lace making is such an iconic industry to Nottingham that one of the oldest inhabited areas of City is rightfully named the Lace Market. Beginning in 1768, Richard Arkwright constructed a small cotton mill and as demand grew so too did the industrial area. Pioneering advancements of the Lace making machines from John Heathcote and John Levers meant that by the 1840s the once domestic industry grew into an international export providing Lace to some of the world’s leading design houses such as Christian Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Gucci and Paul Smith.

Nottingham owes a lot of its industrial heritage to the use of Steam, whether pumping drinking water, powering our railways, driving the factories or rolling our roads, the engines and more importantly the engineers were to thank for Nottingham’s industrial boom. The Basford Steam Engine built in 1858 by R. W. Hawthorn was at the forefront of the industrial boom and still runs to this day.

Established in Nottingham in 1887 the company led the way for many years as one of the world’s oldest and best-known bike brands. Made iconic for its knowledge, technology and innovation, the companies fame has produced world famous bikes such as the Burner, Grifter and the Chopper.

Luckily for me all three of these famous Nottingham industries were housed in the grounds of Wollaton Park. The Nottingham Industrial Museum were so kind to grant me exclusive access into their museum. It was such an honour to capture the Lace Lever’s machine and a range of historic Raleigh bike and it made the world of difference to capture my sources with no rush or pressure.

I wanted to capture Industry; the creaky doors, the workers, the repetition of the machinery with their parts spinning, chiming, grinding and squeaking. Initially the raw captures felt as though it was a piece of a historical aesthetic, capturing the sounds of an industrial era once passed. As it came to process and arrange the composition took to more of a creative aesthetic, spatially and spectrally exposing the qualities of each capture.