Going with the flow: what we can learn from the history of the River Leen

When it comes to our experiences with rivers in Notts, the River Trent will likely come to mind first. A lot of us go there to relax, whether we’re fishing, cycling or walking to Attenborough Nature Reserve, enjoying relaxing spots like Beeston Marina, or doing any number of other activities. It also closely relates to mercantile and industrial history in Nottingham. 

But how often do we think about southrunning tributary, the River Leen? For people living outside of the Annesley, Bulwell, and Basford areas, chances are, not quite as much. However, with an ongoing exhibition-showcase at Lakeside Arts, Dr Rachel Dishington and Dr David Beckingham want to change that in a subtle, but meaningful way.

Starting in the Robin Hood Hills, above Newstead Abbey, and joining the River Trent in the Meadows, the Leen has been subject to lots of changes through history; pollution when Nottingham industry started expanding, later more sustainable management, falling in-and-out of the use of private landowners, and innumerable other shifts in the figurative and literal Notts landscape.  

For Rachel, this was a valuable story to tell – there’s complex conversations surrounding our country’s rivers, particularly as flood risks change with climate change and privatised water tends to incentivize pollution, so exhibitions like the one she’s co-curated are valuable for showing how things ‘used to be done’. 

“It’s a story of changing relationships with the river over time, and changing ways of thinking about the river,” says Rachel. “It’s the river as an aesthetic, pretty thing. It’s the river as a source of drinking water, but also for industry, particularly bleaching and dyeing industries. It’s the river as a hazard – as a danger, that needs to be controlled, as a flood risk.” 

Available to see in the main Lakeside Arts building, The Leen exhibition showcases archive materials from the Trent River Authority. It tracks the Leen’s history back to when Nottingham’s lace and cotton industries were in their nascent stages. Some interesting anecdotes emerged from this time, like a point in the late 18th century when cotton mills started being built near Papplewick. The family who owned these mills, the Robinsons, took the fifth Lord Byron to court when he started damming up the lake he owned at Newstead Abbey to hinder their use of the River Leen. 

“It’s really interesting to use the river as a way of interrogating questions about ownership and management of land and authority,” says Rachel. “It naturally challenges the idea that you’re in control of your bit of territory, because fundamentally the river is running through not only your piece, but everyone else’s piece as well. It’s an interesting natural artefact that forces people to work across organisational lines.”

One lesson to learn from the River Leen’s history is that community or local government interventions are integral in preventing serious harm to bodies of water. From the late 18th to mid 19th centuries, Nottingham’s lace industry allowed the city to economically grow at a huge rate. Eventually interventions were needed when locales for dyeing lace, spanning Basford to Radford, started contaminating the water with bleach-work refuse. 

As the 20th century approached, local government in Notts gradually started realising that a larger, organisational body would need to take care of the river. Hundreds of landowners couldn’t be relied upon to do so, not least because co-ordinating them would be pretty much impossible.

“The problem with rivers is that if you do something in one place, it has a knock on effect for every other place on that river,” says Rachel. “If you’re trying to reduce flood risk, for example, you have to do a riverscape approach – going from the source to the bottom, and thinking about the whole thing. Otherwise you’re going to do flood defenses in your little stretch and that’s going to cause it to flood in the guy next door’s house, factory, or cause problems upstream.”

Through the first half of the 20th century, silt and debris, plus other surface level water, entered the River Leen as Nottingham continued to urbanise. This would cause a pretty devastating degree of flooding – through 1960 the Leen flooded roughly 150 properties. 

Responding to this, in the 1960s, the Leen Improvement Scheme diverted the river, fixing it with steel pilings and flood walls, which would immeasurably decrease the flooding risk. These were under the control of a legislative body, and today they’re looked after by the Environment Agency. This was a pretty valuable and unique development, turning the river into one collective responsibility, rather than the responsibility of lots of individual landowners who didn’t really have the capacity to work together. 

Learning about this – how the river was made as safe as it is today by individuals, was one of the most fulfilling parts of the project for Rachel. 

“When you’re thinking about a river, it’s easy to lose the fact that this is a part of people’s lives, and tell the story of a river as an inanimate object that is cut off from its communities,” she says. “So I think some of the most exciting parts for me were the photographs of the people who were in the process of working – either the engineers working in the Leen improvement scheme, or great photographs of soap factory workers from Gerard’s.”

And what about this history’s relevance today?  Could it have lots of relevance for modern debates about climate change and rivers – like the potential nationalisation of our water? That’s beyond the scope of Rachel’s research, but she still hopes that the artefacts on display will spark lots of thoughts in curious minds, encouraging us to tackle modern problems with regard to history. 

“I think it’s really important for us, when we’re thinking about managing water in the future, that we are informed about how it was managed in the past – that the people making these decisions are aware of these legacies,” says Rachel, adding, “ in addition to the physical management of the river there’s also the political management – who’s been responsible for the management, how it was funded… so if the exhibition provokes those conversations, then we’re satisfied.”

The Leen exhibition is showcased at Lakeside Arts, University Park Campus, NG7 2RD, until 15 March 2026.

lakesidearts.org.uk