Sandiacre - Part 1
- From The Market Place
w/e 2 October 2005
All
this week's pictures were taken with a Kodak DX6490
I'd never really considered Sandiacre to be a "village"
in the truest sense of the word and even when I looked it up
on dictionary.com I found a couple of definitions that seemed
to back my point of view. They were 1) a small group of dwellings
in a rural area, usually ranking in size between a hamlet and
a town and 2) a community of people smaller than a town.
Even after reading that, I would still have classed Sandiacre
as a small town - why even their local football team is called
Sandiacre Town F.C. But that is where I would probably have been
wrong. You see, the expansion of both Sandiacre and its near
neighbours of Long Eaton to the south, Stapleford to the east
and Risley to the west mean that its borders merge almost imperceptibly
into the others and give the overall impression of a much larger
place than it really is. Only the northern border to Sandiacre
is to open countryside and even then there is precious little
of it. But a village it is and has grown up around a sandy field
that gave rise to its name from the Old English of sand meaning
"sand" and aecer meaning"field". For the
purpose of this series, I shall once again be basing the route
on a "Village Trails" leaflet produced by a number
of organisations including Groundwork Erewash Valley, Derbyshire
County Council, the Erewash Museum, the Countryside Commission
and the Sandiacre Parish Council. The leaflet was printed in
1994 and such has been the pace of redevelopment and change that
I am not certain that I will find all the sites and sights mentioned
but we'll begin at the market place which can be seen in the
title image above from the junction of Longmoor Lane and Station
Road. The lorry is emerging from Town Street and the cars waiting
at the traffic lights are on Derby Road.
(Multimap link opens in a new window)
 Sandiacre
was granted a royal charter in 1268 by Henry III and this was
once the site of a weekly market. The St Giles Festival, an eight
day annual fair was also held here and a mediaeval right allowed
the erection and use of a gallows. Such is the volume of the
twenty-first century traffic at this road junction that any market
or fair here would now prove equally as as hazardous for the
onlookers as the hangman's noose did formerly for any miscreants.
And on a similar theme the building at the junction of Longmoor
Lane and Derby Road with the boarded up windows next to Bowley's
the butcher, used to be a slaughterhouse.
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 Not only
is the market place at the intersection of four roads it is adjacent
to the Erewash Canal and a bridge over it. The bridge that crosses
the canal towards Stapleford and will eventually be the route
we will follow along Station Road. The view above is from the
far side of the canal back to Town Street and the small image
left is of the same area but along Town Street from the market
place side of the canal. This stretch of the canal is now called
Padmore Moorings but back in 1813, there were lime kilns here,
lime being important in the area as it was worked into the soil
to improve the land for agriculture. Both of these images are
just to the north of the canal bridge.
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On the southern side of the bridge on the bank from where this
picture was taken, there used to be a coal wharf. The site is
now occupied by public toilets and a couple of landscaped areas
with seats strategically placed to overlook the canal. Water
fowl and narrow boats can often be seen here. On the opposite
bank a ropemaker's ropewalk once ran alongside the canal. Lime
kilns, a slaughterhouse, a coal wharf and a ropewalk together
with a market in close proximity all give an impression of a
what a busy little place this was in the past - a veritable hive
of industry and activity.
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The bridge over the canal which carries Station Road to the traffic
light controlled junction with the other three roads at the market
place replaced an earlier humpback bridge. Four decorative cast
iron lamp supports (inset), at present minus the lanterns, adorn
the four pillars of the bridge.
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Our walk around Sandiacre will first of all take us eastwards
towards Stapleford before turning north and west to cross back
over the canal and then eventually head back twisting and turning
southwards to the market place. Crossing the bridge along Station
Road, the first building we encounter is the former United Reformed
Methodist Chapel dating from 1866. Sadly like so many other chapels
and churches, its function is now of a capitalist nature rather
than a spiritual one.
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But chapels are not the only buildings to undergo a change of
use. Next door to the former chapel a water pumping station that
once served Sandiacre and Stapleford has found a new lease of
life as the Headquarters of the St John Ambulance organisation
for the Stapleford and Sandiacre Division..
Continued in Part
2
Click here to
view other parts in the series.
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