February 2010
Illustration of the Daily Express Offices, Parliament Street, Nottingham, c 1876
Reference: X/PR/24/1
This illustration shows a Nottingham scene at the end of the nineteenth century. The large building is the Daily Express Offices, which was built by Nottingham's eminent Victorian architect, Watson Fothergill. He designed many buildings in the centre of Nottingham which carried his trademark style of riotous Neo Gothic design, featuring spires, gables, conical pinnacles and elaborate Rhenish and Bavarian decoration.
The Daily Express Offices is the earliest completed work by Watson Fothergill, finished in 1876. It occupies numbers 17 - 21 along Parliament Street in the centre of the city. Elain Harwood in her new Pevsner Guide 'Nottingham' (London, 2008) describes the east corner as 'Fothergill at his most Burgesian Gothic, a colonnaded tower over an entrance decorated with heads of Liberal politicians'. Other Liberal MPs are commemorated on tiles alongside Queen Victoria and Prince Albert inside the entrance hall. The author Graham Greene worked as a sub-editor at the offices here in 1926, and used Nottingham as the town of Nottwich in his novel 'A Gun for Sale', in 1936.
This brightly coloured illustration marks the 50th Document of the Month. Revisit some of our favourites here.
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