I’ve been seeing a lot of lions during my recent surveys in Carlton, Nottingham NG4 (possibly starting with this house), and therefore decided to make this Diary post.

We English seem to be obsessed with Lions – or at the least, obsessed with Lions cast in concrete or stone. One of my open-mouth-in-astonishment moments occurred when I went to see my brother at his home in Huddersfield. The sight that greets you when you leave the train station is of an 11 foot (3.4m) long lion on top of a building (the Lion of St George’s Square — the building had to be specially reinforced to support the original beast that graced the plinth):

The Huddersfield lion has been replaced with a fibre-glass replica, but the 2 Nottingham Lions in Slab-Square are (as best I know) the 1920s originals carved from stone. This is the Oscar, the southern Lion (RHS), photographed by myself a week ago:

You will not be surprised to hear that children love to climb all over those lions.

A couple of days ago I was surveying in a road off Carlton Hill & came across two neighbouring houses that each have a pair of metre-high lions:

These following lions are more typical of the ornaments found in English gardens. They are in Myrtle Road and, physically, are not very far away from the previous lions. The householder’s father used to work for Trent Cement in Nottingham, and they were sourced from that company. My grateful thanks go to her for allowing me to photograph them, even moving her car so that I could get the best picture possible: