The “largest Rolls-Royce funeral fleet in the world”

The building above (Robin Hood House, start_date=1907) is the Head Office of AW Lymn, funeral directors and, in the winter of 1986/7 37-year-old Alex Kemp would drive past the building above each night and feel most impressed that there was a Rolls Royce sales showroom at the bottom of the hill to his new home. He did not quite get the point for many months.

Those windows above are sliding doors, and the rooms behind were used as a showroom in the 1980s for most of the firm’s stock of Rolls Royce cars, including the 1936 Rolls-Royce 25/30 Limousine. It was dark as I travelled home, the street was badly lit, the showroom was well lit, and I made wrong assumptions.

The firm has expanded since those days and now has ~30 branches with Nottingham at the core of the network. In the meantime it has taken over every building within the block in which the Head Office is situated (with the sole exception of the The Bath Inn on the corner) and the main Showroom is now behind the front of house. The takeover has extended to what used to be the NCC Car-Pound, which runs all the way alongside Liverpool Street and was purchased recently. It is unclear for what purpose Lymn intend to put the building to use, other than as the current parking place for yet more mass-transport:–

Nottingham is mostly pretty flat. Those Lymn Rolls-Royce Phantom cars above were parked on a wet day in June 2017 on the north bank of the River Trent, which runs to the south of Nottingham and then slowly turns northwards as it approaches the River Humber to the east. You will therefore understand that much of the city to the south is a flood-plain established across millennia by the river.

A spit of high-ish land begins to the east of Robin Hood House and rises 200 foot or so as it travels North and East to become Mapperley heights. Much of that land was the source for millions of bricks shipped across the new railways of the Victorian era and which helped make the money to build grand houses upon those hills in the 1880s (and some of which the greedy council razed to the ground in the 1970s, which as a side-effect helped me buy a cheap home in the 1980s).

A little morality snippet

The specific bit of NG3 that I’m surveying at the moment is a mix of industrial & commercial property, and I therefore spend a large part of my time begging for business-cards/compliment-slips/brochures + taking photographs so that I can make my best fist of mapping all PoI (Points of Interest) in the street.

The response is mixed, ranging from interest through indifference to hostility. I had all 3 near the end of the same session that included Lymn when I walked into Bubbles Spa (“sexy full body erotic massage”). The girls had zero clients when I walked in & were happy to find me a brochure. I was about to take the leaflet, make my excuses & leave when the receptionist (6-foot in her bare feet) clocked that I was wearing a GoPro positioned within a chest-harness. Now, to be fair, it wasn’t my fault that they were all half-naked with prominent décolletage, nor had I understood the precise kind of establishment that I was walking into, plus I was unconscious of the GoPro until she asked me about it. They accepted my story in the end and that I did NOT have a YouTube account (all true!) and I left intact. Tricky for a few moments, though. However, that is not the Morality snippet…

The Bath Inn was indifferent to my approach, whilst AW Lymn was enthusiastic. In consequence Bath Inn spent almost zero time on me and has virtually no contact information within the map. In contrast, Lymn wasted lots of time photocopying detailed contact info for all branches and allowing me to photograph the entire site. They now have every single branch on the map with full email, phone, fax & address details; I would think that that represents £1,000s of promotional effort at zero extra financial cost to them. Who’s the clever boy there, do you think?

PS
Start here if you want to take a virtual walk through AW Lymn, Nottingham; the > (right-button) will take you forwards whilst the < (left-button) will take you back.

April 13 Coda

Lymn has a large number of companies registered at their Head Office. It is an assumption, but my best guess is that these are the remnants of companies that they have taken over during their expansion.

As a temporary measure I had placed these businesses into the Cold Store (a little grim humour there) but have now moved them as name_*= into the AW Lymn commercial area. Write in the Comments if there is a better way of handling them.

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).

The same is true for photos within Lymn’s site, and I have updated them as well.