At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot
‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has stuck, even though knives have replaced guns as the young criminal’s murder weapon of choice. Sheffield has its steel, Liverpool its music and its football — and Nottingham its guns.
How had it come to this? The defining image of Nottingham in the early 1960s was that of an angry young man, Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton, working on a capstan lathe at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
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