Hello and ayup me ducks!
It is March 2020, and in what turns out to be the last few days
when you were still free to travel anywhere you want,
I’ve come to a housing estate in the East Midlands.
Now this is exactly the kind of unremarkable side street you’ll see all over Britain
– except, this particular unremarkable side street hides a secret,
because just around this corner, carved straight into the sandstone rock,
is the entrance to an old tunnel.
And it looks for all the world like an old abandoned railway tunnel,
but there’s never been a railway here.
No car has ever driven down here either.
So why is it here?
Who built it?
And where does it go?
Ok you can stop the stupid music now.
Welcome to the bizarre story of the long-forgotten Park Tunnel.
This is Nottingham, pretty much slap bang in the centre of England.
It’s a historic town with a rich architectural heritage,
and it’s most famous for 3 things:
Robin Hood,
the oldest pub in England,
and absolutely everyone calling you a duck.
Even if you’re actually a goose.
And slap bang in the centre of Nottingham is the beautiful Nottingham Cas...
Seriously is *this* the footage we’ve got of the Castle?
Did no-one check if it was going to be open?
Who is responsible for research on this channel?
That’s better.
The beautiful Nottingham Castle was the historical home of the Ducks of Nottingham.
*QUACK*
Sorry, the Dukes of Nottingham.
Haddaway, man!
Sorry, the Dukes of Newcastle.
Howay the lads!
Newcastle? Really?
Oh THAT Newcastle.
Now the Dukes didn’t just own the castle, they also owned the park land around it,
which they used for hunting, falconry, and other things that Dukes like doing,
until 1822 when the 4th Duke said
“right, I need some more money so I’m selling some of the land
and I'm building houses.
Also, I hate Catholics.”
The houses he built were deliberately large and expensive,
because the Duke didn’t just want anyone moving in,
although he ended up chucking out some of his early tenants when it emerged that they
didn’t hate Catholics,
after which some of the people who didn’t hate Catholics decided that they did hate
the Duke,
one thing led to another,
and Nottingham Castle burned down in 1831.
Anyway, fast forward 20 years and the son of the 4th Duke,
the imaginitively-named 5th Duke,
has picked up where his father left off,
by selling off yet more land and building yet more houses
and to top it all he decides he wants the estate to have a grand entrance.
So he calls up his chief architect, Thomas Chambers Hine.
RING RING
HINE: "Blimey mate this will be a lot easier when they invent the telephone”
DUKE: Yes sorry but it’s the best I can do for now.
Anyway, I’m very pleased with the houses you’ve been building.
Tell me, how hard would it be for you to do a tunnel?
HINE: A tunnel? It ain’t usually my fing to be honest
DUKE: Excellent! Well I’d like you to build one from here to the Derby Road,
and it should be suitable for a horse-drawn carriage
HINE: An ‘orse? Alright ok I’ll get on it I suppose
DUKE: Thank you. Have you ever driven a horse-drawn carriage old chap?
Hello?
Thomas?
Oh.
He must have gone in the tunnel.
And this is what he’d gone and built.
A magnificent tunnel, carved through 125m of Nottingham sandstone,
and with an open section in the middle to provide natural light and ventilation.
The space was easily tall enough to fit a horse-drawn carriage,
wide enough for two to pass in opposite directions,
and it ran from the estate up to the Derby road,
just as the Duke had requested.
In many ways there was only one thing wrong with it.
They’d built it on a 1 in 12 slope,
and no horse was able to pull a carriage up it.
DUKE: Oh Thomas, you had ONE job!”
HINE: That’s not strictly true guv...”
DUKE: Well forget it then. We’ll use another entrance. You get back to making houses.
The tunnel was never used
and history doesn’t quite record how an otherwise accomplished architect
made such a basic error
but the pair moved on and worked together for another 30 years,
and it seems the tunnel was brushed under the carpet and forgotten about.
In fact it was so forgotten that the Derby Road end was almost completely built over
in the 1990s.
And that is why Nottingham has a grand old tunnel
that ends in a car park.
If you’d like to visit the Park Tunnel
it’s a public footpath and therefore open to anyone,
but there are a few steps at the Derby Road end
so for anyone using a wheelchair it’s best to approach from the Park Estate.
Either way it’s a 5 minute walk from the town centre
or about 15 minutes from the main railway station.
A big thank you to Sky Revolutions for their beautiful footage of Nottingham Castle,
I’m very lucky that a professional drone filming company
just happened to have made a video of exactly the thing I needed
and was nice enough to let me use it.
There’s a link to their channel below in case you’d like to see more.
Meanwhile thank you everyone for watching and I will see you soon.