Sneinton is an odd area close to the city centre that’s split in two by a huge cliff. The top half of Sneinton is balanced on the peak of a hill. Terraced council houses squat on steep slopes beneath the masculine ego of a block of flats at the very pinnacle of the rise.
My grandparents lived in this part of Sneinton. All of the houses built into the hill have deep dark basements lined with glittering stone. Cats patrol stepped gardens adorned with redcurrants, gooseberry bushes and greenhouses.
There’s a windmill too. Green’s Mill, with an attached science museum featuring a huge magnet stuck all over with blunt nails, and a glorious glowing plasma ball that small children tease with their hands. You can go inside the mill and watch the corn being ground, buy the finished product in small stamped hessian bags.
Below the mill there’s a children’s park with a huge slide built into the side of the slope. Bruised grownups too large for the narrow silver trough get stuck in the bends half way down. At the bottom a gigantic wooden climbing frame is waiting. Bridges and catwalks hang swings and tyres. Children used to crack their heads and graze their knees on the tarmac floor until a thick layer of cork and bark chip was spread beneath the frame. In damp springtimes poisonous toadstools grow insidiously in the playground mulch. Watched by wary grandparents, children run rings around fairy fungi in the shadow of the windmill.
This part of Sneinton is the rich part of Sneinton. Petit Bourgeois, affluent working class families and rising ethnic households all live here. The elder generation too, the real Nottingham folk who’ve struggled up from their thirties roots in the former slums of the Lace Market. The women who smoke like dragons and wear pink mule slippers with bits of fluff on the front, satin night-gowns with fur trims, and own small white yapping Pekingnese dogs. These are the women who formerly worked in the cotton mills and factories and are dying slowly of emphysema and lung disease from the fibres, and the same folk who call you “Darling,” “Love,” and greet you with a husky “Ay up me duck.”
By contrast, lower Sneinton houses their poorer relations. The ones who didn’t get better pensions and whose children never made it a rung up the class ladder. The streets are a warren of dilapidated, graffiti covered shops and run-down terraced housing. Broken windows boarded over, groups of kids wearing puffer jackets with their hair scraped back with styling products and tied in scrunchies. Beat up cars. Curry houses. No gardens for miles, and on every available space the territorial marker pen of teenagers; “Gary is a puff”; “Daz and Millsey are gay”; “Tracey woz ere ‘9T9″. This is an area rife with crime and violence and vandalism.
There’s still a sense of community in Sneinton, but like most suburbs in Nottingham today, that community is fragmented. New folk move in, old folk die or move on. The elder generation of curtain twitchers all seem to know each other from way back when – but they don’t mix with the ethnic families, or the rough white families who come to live in the council houses with their six squealing kids and two dogs. Some people are quiet, and go relatively unnoticed. They keep their noses clean by not yelling in the streets at night or parking their cars in front of other people’s houses.
Some interesting sorts manage to live here without being bothered. There was a story in the paper not so long ago reporting on a woman who lived in Sneinton who was sentenced to jail. The police were called out to her house one summer after repeated complaints from neighbours regarding a potent putrid smell issuing from her open windows.
The ensuing search revealed a boarded up cupboard under the stairs containing a decomposing corpse. The corpse, later identified as her common law husband, was estimated to have been dead for some five or six months.
Her story goes; she came back home after work to discover two prostitutes in her house who claimed her partner had become over-excited and died of a heart attack. They then forced her to help them conceal his death by boarding up his body in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The woman continued to live in her house with the body of her partner decomposing behind the cupboard door until the police arrived at her house later that year.
Not a rare event for Sneinton, stories of curious murders and skeletons discovered in closets appear in the local paper on a regular basis. Because amongst all of those solid, upstanding affluent working class people I think there are just one or two Fred and Roses lurking.
