These Streets Are Ours: Beeston

Towns are strange things to articulate. We understand the concept of a city, we fetishise the idea of a village. Yet towns often sit awkwardly in some transitional space, as if waiting until the dice rolls in their favour and they are bestowed city status, completing their trajectory set in train since the first local set down a dwelling. Nottingham was, of course, an uncity for a millennium before Queen Victoria elevated it in 1897. Towns therefore exist in the public imagination as in nymph state, suburban caterpillars yet to chrysalise and emerge as urban butterflies.

Some towns bide their time by adopting a prefix to lend distinction. A barracks town. A spa town. A market town. Pity, therefore, the town-that-is-right-next-to-a-big-city town, a town that forges its identity while sitting on the shoulder of another. Let’s talk Beeston. 

Despite multiple attempts over the years by various bureaucrats and politicians to annex it into the bigger city, Beeston remains resolutely its own place: to the South, the lugubrious Trent and its trespassing flood plains give it a thick margin. To the East, and Jesse Boot’s grand gift to academia and outdoor good health in the form of the University and Highfields Park create a firebreak from urban sprawl. North, the sandy hills of Bramcote. West, and you’re in a different county altogether. It is a place that you feel shouldn’t exist, a precarious place.

Yet it doesn’t just survive, it thrives. Beeston’s attitude to urban absorption is not just geographic, but something in the populace. We love Nottingham, for sure… but Beeston is our place.

Since light industry scaled back – no phones are assembled at Plessey, and much fewer potions and pills are concocted at the sprawling Boots factory – Beeston has reinvented itself. Our relationship to the University of Nottingham places it in a ‘Goldilocks zone’: not too close to be scorched clean of identity by the heat of the campus; not too distant to feel the benefit of its warming rays. Here, we bask, fresh energy (and cash!) flowing into the town each September. While Lenton, Dunkirk and others are transitory places, Beeston is where those who study consistently go on to make their home. We are awash with professors.

Across town, the flooded gravel pits of Attenborough Nature Reserve sees seasonal mass migrations of both birds and visiting humans. It wasn’t ever guaranteed: the original plan was to fill the pits with (toxic) ash from Ratcliffe on Soar power station. “No”, said the heroic visionaries of the day, “Let’s flood it and make a nature reserve” They did, and while the elephant-foot cooling towers no longer gape out constant steam, the Reserve looks like a greener future should.

Beeston is a writhing, living thing, constantly shapeshifting within its tight geographic constraints. Where a brutalist bus station once squatted over the town, now a neon lit cinema offers more aesthetic pleasures. A tram clangs and rumbles through the town – once thought an alien invader (oh, the Great Beeston Tram Debate of 2006 -2015! You made the later national Brexit debate feel like a mild tiff! But, unlike leaving the EU, how fast and fulsomely we all made up!), now an ubiquitous and embedded part of us.

Inevitably, we moan about change – but I think of Siobhan Coppinger, a sculptor who, in 1987 designed and created The Beeston Seat – the High Road centrepiece that is more commonly known as The Beeston Beeman. She remembers the hostility to the piece when it was first put in place, and how it was, in its first year, repeatedly attacked by vandals. And I contrast that with now: if it was announced on a Thursday that The Beeman was due to be removed, there'd be a human shield a hundred Beestonians thick tight around it by the Friday. 

Our history is a selection box of oddity: we birthed a King Killer (Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton), had Gandhi pop over for tea (in 1931 – his nephew was lodging near the train station) and even had the Rolling Stones host an aftershow party here (and where Charlie Watts took a call to hear they’d hit number one in the US for the first time). Sir Paul Smith, then just a bike-obsessed scrawny lad from Chilwell, grew up and developed a taste for stripes on our streets, around the same time a young Richard Beckinsale decided that his boyish good looks might work on TV and film. 

We don’t just spawn, we attract. Shane Meadows is a local, Vicky McClure is just round the corner. Forest players seem to like the quiet and golf of Beeston Fields. Soul legend Edwin Starr made this his home, until his death in 2003. Why did the Nashville born igniter of a million dancefloors choose lil’ ol’ Beeston for Chez Starr? I asked his widow once: ‘He looked at Wollaton,” she explained, “but preferred Beeston.”

Such weirdness is, paradoxically, the norm. When mysterious bowls of bananas began turning up into the town, we were baffled it made national news. “What? Other towns DON’T have such apparitions of fruit?” was the vibe.

Yet can such a place truly have an identity, other than being in the shadow of a larger neighbour? 

As I write this, Beeston is coming together to prepare a bid to become the first ever Town of Culture. As you read this, a panel led by the esteemable Phil Redmond, of Grange Hill and Brookside fame, will be sifting through the entries and most likely reading about how a fairly unknown East Midlands town is crammed with so much excellence we’ve had to write in a minute font to get it all on the entry form.

If Redmond and co decide that our town, with out street art, our art trails, our annual charity festival, our poets and film makers and musicians and authors ad infinitum are enough to see us receive £3 million to stick a spotlight on ourselves for the duration of 2028, then that’s great. But if they don’t – well, so what? We’ll just keep on being Beeston: Nottingham’s odd, little sister that seems on a constant joyful sugar-rush of creativity.

beestonian.com