This used to be the 1869 William Bancroft Building, pictured above showing the former main entrance on the corner of Robin Hood Street and Roden Street.

The building is close enough to Nottingham City Centre that the legendary Robin Hood would have been able to easily hit the walls of the town with his arrow whilst standing on the steps of the building. Of course, when those steps were built those city walls no longer existed, but then neither did Robin Hood, so let’s just pass on.

This area of Nottingham was the first construction outside the former city walls (within Clay Fields, now called St. Anns), and the first opportunity therefore for (some of) the folks of Nottingham to escape the dreadful cholera- and typhoid-ridden living conditions prior to the 1st Enclosure Act locally of 1845. The nearby houses were built in ~1860 upon Robin Hood Terrace (listing), Campbell Grove (listing) and The Promenade (listing). Curiously, those houses were built in Radburn style, 70 years before the American experiment and 110 years before the Wimpey experiments nearby.

This former Blouse Manufacturer (by repute, but no-one seems perfectly sure of that) was redeveloped in 2003 in a £3.7m GBP makeover into a total of 64 apartments, with the cheapest 1-bed (pdf) selling for £100,000 GBP (112 year lease; annual service charge + ground-rent are extra), and is now known as William Bancroft Buildings.

There is more about this building that I do NOT know than I do know. An example: the building runs in a block and there are 6 floors max (including basement & roof buildings, the latter of which are almost certainly originally the former lace/cotton workshops, which needed the best light to produce the finest work) with a central atrium used for surface parking & more access to apartments. On that basis, there should surely be far more than just 64 apartments.

Another good question is how on earth am I going to map this behemoth? It is key-entry everywhere. My final question is about the rear corner of the building (at the furthest end down Roden Street), which used to have a couple of businesses operating within a substantial set of buildings, originally part of the main block but which now, I believe, are separate from the main block. Are any occupants still there? It all seems abandoned.

April 1 update:
Those industrial/commercial buildings were owned by a CL Estates & Management at one stage, but that company is now long gone. The number on the building is reliably ‘5 Roden Street’, but I whilst I can trace former occupants I cannot trace any current owner nor occupant.

I cannot even find out which year the building was redeveloped. Questions like that are normally easy to answer. So far, the best response was able to narrow it down to a 40 year span. Ah well.

April 1 update:
It is 2003 - discovered due to the presence of an OS Waymark.

I’ve put feelers out and have asked questions, but little response as yet. I’ll do the best I can on the mapping.

Update 22 June 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that use photos stored in Mapillary are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I also hope on yours).