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Description: | Information taken from www.lentontimes.co.uk; In medieval times, troops stationed in a town were entitled to seek quarters in any suitable building whether the owners wanted their company or not. Of course, the practice caused much resentment until in 1689 a royal proclamation largely restricted the soldiers' choice to the various inns within a town. The innkeepers were obliged to take these 'guests' and were often unhappy with the arrangement. So local landlords must have been among the many Nottingham people who gave thanks when in 1792 they heard that a cavalry barracks was to be built to house at least some of the soldiers stationed in Nottingham. The Duke of Newcastle had leased a portion of land to the army board of ordnance and the barracks were built in the north-western corner of the Park. The open space at the centre of the barracks was a huge cobbled yard around which a variety of brick buildings were constructed, the whole surrounded by tall brick, walling. The buildings consisted of officers' quarters, a huge building containing more than eighty rooms and of barrack rooms for the ordinary soldiers, a small hospital and surgery, a sutling house in which provisions and supplies were kept, a magazine, and stabling for three troops of horse. Little has so far come to light as to life and conditions within these barracks. Local newspapers reported the comings and goings of the various regiments, but rarely devoted space to anything else. This is probably a reflection of a general indifference as to what was happening within the barracks. It was only the publicity given to the sufferings of the British troops in the Crimea that eventually aroused public concern for the living conditions of the forces. In the 1850s a variety of commissions and committees investigated Army affairs. Among them, a committee on Barrack Accommodation, found that conditions in barracks were frequently wretchedly bad, with overcrowding, poor sanitation and little ventilation. Married quarters were virtually non-existent. A married couple were often just given a bed in the corner of the barrack room and children had to sleep alongside them. (The Army actually tried to restrict the number of married men to a maximum of six per hundred men. The wives of 'unapproved' marriages were obliged to live separately from their husbands in lodgings outside the barracks). Later committees examined the conditions at every barracks in the British Isles and outlined what improvements should be made. At about this time, for reasons made clear later, the Nottingham barracks were closed down and so no mention of them appears in any of these official reports. In September 1855 the lease of the barracks expired and the duke preferred not to renew it so that the site could be included in the housing estate being designed by the architects, Hine and Evans. The Duke did agree that the troops could stay on until an alternative site was found. On the 30th of May 1860 the 11th Hussars left the barracks for new quarters at Burnley and the Army transferred its East Midlands Command from Nottingham to Sheffield. Thereafter the barracks never again housed troops on a full time basis, but were probably used for soldiers passing through Nottingham on their way to their barracks. In a few years almost all the barrack buildings had been pulled down and the large houses now standing on the site built soon after. A few of the nearby buildings were retained as private residences but these too have now gone. | Format: | JPEG/IMAGE | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/ | Publisher: | North East Midland Photographic Record | Source: | Picture the Past OAI feed | Creator: | Stevenson, F W | Identifier: | http://www.picturethepast.org.uk/fronten... | Language: | EN-GB | Format: | JPEG/IMAGE | Go to resource |
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Lease
1. The Right Honourable Marcus…
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