Not West Bridgford No. 3

Like all affluent suburbs, West Bridgford is well provided with retail facilities, and among its shopping parades are those in Melton, Loughborough and Abbey Roads, Compton Acres, Hilton Crescent and Trent Boulevard. The principal shopping thoroughfare is Central Avenue, which leads off Tudor Square, with businesses now creeping into the ends of Rectory, Albert, Bridgford, Davies and above all Gordon Road.

Traditionally, Central Avenue boasted all the usual run of shops for food and household items, including a Co-op, and the Tudor Cinema. Since the turn of the millennium the emphasis has changed, not as in so many places downwards in the direction of pound shops and charity shops, but towards refreshment. In this small area there are well over a dozen coffee shops, bars and restaurants catering for the well-heeled population, plus a handful of travel agents, opticians, florists, building societies, pharmacies, and other businesses. As an evening venue, Central Avenue offers an attractive and relatively quiet alternative to the centre of Nottingham.

 
Unusually, compared with most shopping streets, Central Avenue is not completely hemmed in by shops, and for part of its eastern side is bordered by what has long been known as the “croquet lawn”, in effect an extension of Bridgford Park. Once lined by giant poplars, in Springtime magnificent blossoms are now to be found here, and the area continues to rebuff the encroachment of car parking and other philistine developments, which would destroy much of the attractiveness that brings people here in the first place. Another location that features such an arrangement of adjacent greenery is the east London suburb of Wanstead, and the accompanying  illustration shows Wanstead High Street, E.11. Wanstead has an ambience, a pleasant “feel”, very similar to that of West Bridgford, although it enjoys the additional attraction of having its own tube station..

Introduction to 'Not West Bridgford'

Like jokes, paintings are probably best left unexplained. And like many other creative endeavours, it’s often the case with paintings – at least in my experience – that the ones destined to succeed are completed relatively swiftly and painlessly. The troublesome ones requiring endless alteration and fiddling around with are usually, though by no means invariably, those that are never going to be any good.

One of my favourite recent paintings, currently on show at Bingham library, Notts., that (a) needs little explanation, (b) proceeded easily to completion, and (c) appears to have succeeded, is “Road near the park”.

 

“Road near the park” (greyscale version), © R. Abbott  2015

 

The road in question is Edward Road, near its junction with Crosby Road, and the park is Bridgford Park, in West Bridgford, Nottingham. Visiting the location last autumn I was immediately entranced by the scene, by the angles of the roads, the sunlight on the brickwork, and the tall telegraph pole with its characteristic little curly spike on the top, one of my earliest fetishes of street furniture. Instantly I knew that I had walked into a successful picture, so I took a photograph for reference, and the painting followed speedily and with little effort.

The location is within half a mile of my childhood stamping ground. The road in which I grew up was once described by the local evening paper as being typically suburban, though now I cannot recall whether this judgement was deemed favourable or not. From my perspective I am happy to be associated with such a background, and while aware of the popular sneers against suburbia, I see little that is fundamentally wrong with this component of the urban environment; after all, statistically, suburbs are where most of us live.

Many years of travelling around, in the UK and elsewhere, have widened my knowledge of suburbs, of how and why they came to be, what they look like, how they feel. More than a few, I’ve discovered, remind me of West Bridgford. Several  years ago I had the whimsical idea that it would be fun to put together a small exhibition of images that would be called ‘Not West Bridgford’, photographs of places that looked like West Bridgford, but weren’t. Ideally, I imagined that the exhibition would be a physical collection of photographs and explicatory text, perhaps held in the local public library. Perhaps one day it will be, but for the time being I am proposing something more modest.

 
Instead, therefore, I am planning to post images from this ‘Not West Bridgford’ collection online, at intervals over the next few months. The intention, apart from some mild amusement to those who recognise what the images are not, is to explore some themes of suburban life in this delightful Nottingham district and to consider how they relate to other specimens of suburbia.