Ilkeston - 'Your Choice'
w/e 18 June 2006
All this week's pictures were taken with a Kodak DX6490

I regularly receive emails that mention places in and around Ilkeston. Several of them ask if I have photos of various places. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't but I usually say I'll try and get some the next time I'm in the vicinity. I'm afraid I've been a little lax and the number of locations requiring a visit have accumulated on my 'Things To do' list. The time has come though for me to resolve this and make the effort to keep my promises. This selection then is the first part of two where the locations have been chosen by various email correspondents. Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

Steph Palmer asked for pictures of Ilkeston's Fire Station and here it is on the corner of Derby Road and Oakwell Drive. I would say the building is functional rather than architecturally or aesthetically pleasing and it now also operates as a base for the Ambulance Service. In the smaller image (right) the training tower that stands in the yard behind the building can be seen too but Steph is probably too young to remember the old Fire Station in Stanton Road. For those of us of more advanced years that building can be seen in Stage 07 of the Ilkeston Town Walk. Click here to see it now in a new window.

Another email correspondent, 'Seagrave265', asked about the Ilkeston Skate Park on Manor Fields. It took me a while to track this down as I initially thought of Manor Fields Drive which is off Derby Road but the Park is actually situated on the playing fields at the Abbotsford Community Centre on the Shipley View Estate. As the crow flies Manor Fields Drive and the Community Centre are not far apart but I think you would have to be a dedicated skate boarder to make a special visit here on a regular basis if you did not live close by. It is in a bit of a remote place and even from the Community Centre it requires a walk across a football pitch.

Just around the corner from Shipley View on the main road back towards the town centre is the old bridge that crossed the railway lines at Ilkeston North Station. This site is now occupied by Ilkeston's new Police Station and the Old Station Surgery (Town Walk Stage 26) but Bill Devey of Vancouver, Canada informed me that his grandparents lived at 'The Homestead' just north of the bridge on the left hand side of Heanor Road when his mother was born in 1927. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate 'The Homestead' but it is possible the house names have changed in the intervening years. I thought it may have been demolished for the two bungalows but reference to old O.S. maps make this seem unlikely as no buildings were shown on the 1899 map where the bungalows now stand.

June Wiggins from Hertfordshire is another, like Bill Devey looking into family history and she found that a William Auld lived in a property at The Triangle in 1949. Mr Auld lived in one of the properties directly in front in this view on the far side of the green. For a bird's eye view of The Triangle in the beta version of Windows Live Local powered by Virtual Earth, click here. The road to the right of the green is Thurman Street which leads to Nottingham Road and to the left The Triangle continues to the eastern end of Little Hallam Lane.

At the western end of Little Hallam Lane is Little Hallam Hill and John Daykin's delve into the past and his family history led to a number of addresses in Ilkeston including two at Little Hallam. An ancestor of John's by the name of Richard Daykin lived in two different properties according to the 1871 and 1881 census records which leads us to believe that, because of the dates, they would be here on the 'Hill' rather than on the 'Lane' where the properties did not appear until into the 20th century.

I have to admit that I have sporadically dipped into genealogy and tried to trace my own family roots with a varied amount of success but it was a great surprise to receive an email from Bob Armstrong in New Zealand. It appears we have a common ancestor in Mark Wheatley born in 1763 and the Wheatley family occupied two of these four houses that can now be found just off the Awsworth by-pass. They are marked on old maps as 'Foundry Houses' and in truth are not actually in Ilkeston at all. Being on the eastern side of the Erewash, they are in Nottinghamshire but for the purposes of this exercise it's not worth quibbling about. To see the second instalment of 'Your Choice' click here.

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