England's Greatest Place

As each week of the ‘Great Lockdown’ of 2020 has passed excursions have either been crossed off the kitchen calendar all together or added to a list on the back page of things that need to be added to 2021’s version. Filey at Easter with my family would have been lovely. The Peak District with the families of my university pals over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend would also have been lovely. Travelling down to celebrate my Mum’s birthday, my sister’s birthday and my nieces’ birthdays with them rather than via Zoom would have been lovely too. I was really looking forward to Trent Bridge though. There will be international cricket this summer, but the first test will certainly be behind closed doors and the final test almost certainly will be too. I am reconciled now that all but the last vestiges of hope remain with not spending two days in the upper tier of the Radcliffe Road End in August.

In 2015 the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) sought to find England’s ‘Greatest Place’. 700 suggestions from the public were whittled down by an eminent panel of planners to ten regional winners, which were then put back to the public for a vote. Liverpool’s Waterfront was the eventual winner. In hindsight I regret not proposing Trent Bridge. As a chartered town planner myself I would at least have been supporting an initiative to highlight the role of the planning system in protecting or improving the nation’s cherished places. I do actually think though that Trent Bridge could be England’s greatest place.

I live in West Yorkshire now, but I grew up in the Vale of Belvoir, which is where Aggers drives into Nottingham from during the Trent Bridge test because he gets to stay at home that week. The other Test Match Special commentators sometimes mention that they are staying at Langar Hall, which is a hotel next to my old primary school. I remember the school getting free tickets to a Notts game and that was probably my first experience of live sport. This was a side getting used to life without Rice and Hadlee. Robinson, Broad, French, et al. My dad stopped playing cricket when I came along, but he was still plugged into the local club scene and we would go and watch benefit matches at which one of those stars was the main attraction.

I do not know how many of those 700 suggestions to the RTPI were sporting venues, but none of the shortlisted ten were and it does seem perfectly legitimate for one to be considered as ‘great’. The first recorded cricket match at Trent Bridge was held on an area of ground behind the Trent Bridge Inn in 1838 and it is the third-oldest test match ground in the world. There cannot be too many buildings or spaces, untouched by the hand of church or state, that have been in continuous, communal, memory-making use for over 180 years.

Beyond durability another measure of a great place is its evolution over time and the extent to which it manages incremental changes. It is against this measure that Trent Bridge scores more highly than the other provincial test venues. Redevelopment has taken place stand-by-stand and each contributes a distinctive charm to a coherent overall character, which contrasts with more wholesale redevelopments at other grounds. The tight boundaries might have been seen as a constraint to redevelopment, but they have spurred innovative, rather than purely functional, design and meant that the ground retains a human scale.

Trent Bridge was also blessed with a pleasingly evocative location. The bridge over the Trent links the busy city with the leafy suburbs and from atop the Radcliffe Road End it is possible to see across the chimney tops to the Nottinghamshire half of the Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire Wolds.

If this piece was a room then the elephant in it that has been avoided until now is Lords. ‘Surely’, I could hear you asking in the second paragraph, ‘if any English cricket ground is to be considered as great place it must be Lords?’ The greatest places are experienced by more people in more different ways and whilst Lords is obviously a special place, it knows it and, more than that, it wants you to know it. Lords is a brand. It is explicitly exclusive. There is an unspoken etiquette about attending Lords that is reminiscent of the sign that Homer and Marge pass when entering the Springfield Heights mall for the first time in The Simpsons. ‘Our prices discriminate because we can’t’. Red chinos, if you are a gentleman that way inclined, would not look out of place at Lords. They do at Trent Bridge.

After primary school I spent five years at secondary school in Nottingham and both the school bus and, as I got older, the Saturday service bus, went along Radcliffe Road between Trent Bridge and the City Ground and then turned right over the over Trent Bridge. During the summer there was a brief moment as the bus passed the tall County Council building that bookmarks one corner of the ground when it was sometimes possible to catch the briefest glimpse of match going on. My first test match was the Ashes series of 1997, which was the summer after my first year away at university. I have tried to go to every Trent Bridge test since, making a particular effort in recent times. Having ticked off the seven traditional test playing venues some time ago Trent Bridge emerged as my clear favourite (with a nod to The Oval in second place), but, beyond it’s greatness as a place, my fondness for Nottingham does get deeper every year and so the pilgrimage takes on a sentimental as well as a sporting dimension.

Lockdown has afforded the time to sit and think. To consider what is important and what is not. I will really miss sitting and thinking and watching the world go by at Trent Bridge this year. The RTPI’s initiative in 2015 was to mark it’s centenary and so there will probably not be a reason for it to run anything similar again soon, but if and when it, or another organisation does try to find England’s greatest place I will be nominating Trent Bridge. It is certainly the place that I cherish.