Named after the saxon chieftain Snot, Snotingaham means simply “the home of the people of Snot”. The previous British name was Tigguo Cobauc, “Place of Caves”, but my ancestors killed, enslaved or drove out to Wales everyone who might have called it that. Anyway, who’d want to live in a place named after a bunch of caves when you could live in a place named after Snot?
Later, after our ancestors were done brutalising the British (and then being invaded by a wave of some other ancestors of ours), we all got invaded by some French with a bit of Viking ancestry, who thought little of conquering a foreign country but couldn’t quite manage to pronounce two consonants in succession at the start of a word. Hence “Snotingaham” lost the initial “S”, and later the first “a” went the way of all flesh. The locals often replace “ng” with “n”, and sometimes miss out the “i”, reducing “Nottingham” to the two-syllable “Nottnam”. Also we’re far enough north that the “tt” should really be pronounced as a glottal stop if you want to say it properly.
This is a building by some famous Victorian architect on King Street. On the ground floor is the Tropeiro brazilian restaurant. Represented by a slightly incoherent scribble on the bottom right is a statue of Brian Clough (pronounced “Cluff”), venerated in Nottingham for his leadership of Nottingham Forest football club.
This is the Nottingham Council House. (As in, “The House Wherein the Council Doth Hold Council”. “Council House” also means “cheap houses built by the local government”; these generally have a poor reputation.)
On the corner of King Street and Long Row can be seen this very nice house.
This is one of the houses on Derby Road, near St. Barnabas’ cathedral. (Derby Road continues through the north edge of Beeston, where I grew up, and – as may be guessed by its name – continues to Derby. A significant stretch of it was renamed “Brian Clough Way” a few years back, as before Notts Forest, Clough managed Derby Country for a while, and is thus remembered with honour in both cities.)
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