Whether it was for living space, work, shelter or punishment, our ancestors were obsessed with going underground, with over five hundred caves dotted across the city. They’re all being catalogued by the Nottingham Caves Survey - and according to Project Leader David Strange-Walker, putting a sledgehammer through a pub door has
never been more educational...
Has cataloguing every cave in the city ever been attempted before?
A lot of individuals and little societies have recorded and excavated caves to various degrees over the years, but in the 1980s the British Geological Survey thought it would be a good idea to catalogue the caves, and found 450 of them. They did a lot of asking around and knocking on doors, which is something that we hope to do on a wider scale. A lot of it is built on the work of other people; in 1938, for example, the country was looking for potential air raid shelters - and a cellar survey of Nottingham inevitably found a lot of caves.
And you’ve found even more.
There’s 534 that we know about, and I’m sure that there are more. When you look at the city on the map what you see is cave, cave, cave, gap, cave; you wonder why that area hasn’t got a cave, but it probably has - it just hasn’t been mapped, or it could have been blocked or filled in. Take the tea shop on Bridlesmith Gate - they’ve got a cave. So has the shop next door, but they recently put a new floor down which covers over any sort of hatch; so that one now gets marked on the map as blocked.
How did these caves originate?
They’re almost all man-made. There are those that back in to an exposed cliff face, and those that are cut down from street level into the rock. If you go back a million years or so, when the sandstone was laid down, the River Leen pushed through it and created the cliff that Nottingham Castle sits upon. You can actually see it in three other places; Lenton Hermitage, round the back of Nottingham Contemporary, and at Sneinton Hermitage.
How do you get access?
It varies. The easy ones are friends of friends; we’ll do one cave, and the owner will say they know the person who lives across the road. Some of them are Council owned or managed. It’s more difficult with bigger companies; there’s a Ladbrokes on Long Row which has a fantastic medieval cave with carved faces made by the architect William Stretton in the early 19th century, which we’d really like to get into. The problem is you need to be cleared by Head Office, which involves some bloke in London opening a letter asking if we can look at a cave: he just thinks about the Health & Safety issues and says no.
Isn’t it dangerous, though?
Not at all. We have confined space training, we do risk assessments for every cave and we have gas monitors and all the rest. We don’t take risks.
A lady in the Park saw us on East Midlands Today, and told us she had a tiny cave under her flat, but she warned us it was very boring. When we got there, we realised It was part of an 1860s house designed by TC Hinde, and discovered what could only be described as a ‘Gentleman’s Cave’ - a really nicely cut wine cellar with partitions and clear evidence of shelves on one side, and a more rustic cave with three big alcoves, a cut seat and a smoke vent on the other. You would have your friends round for dinner and then take them below stairs to smoke cigars, drink wine and tell stories. It’s a little snippet of Nottingham social history.
Do you think the city has done enough to promote the caves as an attraction?
There have always been issues with presenting Nottingham’s caves. The Broadmarsh and the Castle caves have an advantage of being in a good location, but most of them are in private ownership and are pretty small things underneath someone’s house, flat or pub.
What are you doing to change that?
We’ve been working with Cuttlefish Media, who will be creating a walking tour app for your phone where you follow a route and scan QR codes. The idea is to have a walking tour that you follow on your phone. I love the idea of 500 of these things being scattered around the city; It’ll give people an idea of how many caves there actually are. Anyone who’s applied for funding knows that they love you to talk about Audience Development, and this is a good way of widening the audience, because archeology tends to be a white middle-class subject.
What has the reaction to the project been like?
Really good. The original intention was to understand more about the caves; with the web and social media, which didn’t really exist ten years ago, we’ve really been able to push what we are doing. I’m an archaeologist by trade and ultimately my interest is in the preservation of the caves for the future. This is one of the things where our project has been successful in a slightly unexpected way. We’ve have 170,000 YouTube views from 120 countries and because more people know about Nottingham’s caves and some are archaeologically significant, when one of them is threatened by a modern development we are in a much stronger position to try and protect them. One or two are generally lost a year.
Is it annoying when a place like Nottingham Contemporary is built and they fill in the caves?
It’s tricky because you can’t stay still forever - and Nottingham is not a Heritage city like Lincoln where they might think a little differently about destroying the medieval assets. It’s a shame that that was the old Town Hall site, and if ever Robin Hood was in a dungeon it would have been one of those.
What caves have you not yet surveyed, but really want to?
Round the back of 3-7 Middle Pavement is a courtyard with a manhole, and under there is a malting system that I haven’t been in. There is a lock on the hatch but no one has the key for it. It’s a Scheduled Monument, so it is protected for good. If anyone is reading this and has the key, get in touch. There are bound to be more medieval caves that we don’t know about, because they aren’t mapped or recorded. They could be below someones house, behind a breeze blocked wall or something like that. For instance, the people at The Castle pub told us they didn’t have a cave, but we knew from our records that they did. There was a door to the basement without a key so we knocked through it with a sledgehammer. There was beer down there that was less than twenty years old, so it had been used pretty recently. All it takes is for someone to plasterboard over a door and the caves are forgotten.
It’s amazing that there is a whole other city underneath Nottingham...
It’s extraordinary. The caves under Peel Street are massive. A few urban explorers know about it and people try to get in there every now and again. It’s huge and dark and wonderful down there.
Nottingham Cave Survey website
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