Description: Thomas William Hammond 1854-1935. Born in Philadelphia of Nottingham emigres, and orphaned at the age of four, he came to England with his younger sister Maria and lived for a short while with his grandparents in Mount Street. In 1868 age 14 he enrolled in the Government School of Art. On the 1871 census he is described as a lace curtain designer, and in 1872 he was awarded the 'Queen's Prize for a Design of a Lace Curtain'. Other prizes followed and in 1877 he was again awarded the Queen's Prize, this time for the design for a damask table Cloth. Hammond was an indefatigable worker, and soon began to use his skills as a draftsman to record aspects of the changing town. He began showing his work at local venues in 1882 and in 1890 exhibited for the first time at the Royal academy. His real hobby was black and white sketching in charcoal. He drew about 350 pictures all together mainly scenes of a Nottingham he knew but which has largely passed away today. Extracted from 'The Changing Face of Tom Hammond's Nottingham' by John Beckett which is the introductory essay in 'A City in the Making Drawings of Tom Hammond'. This drawing is probably one of Mr. Hammond's most charming productions and, in addition to its obvious artistic merit, it gives us some idea of the beauty of the site of Nottingham before modern industrial conditions obtained. It must always be borne in mind that until quite modern times Trent Bridge was some considerable distance away from the town of Nottingham, and until the enclosure of the Lammas fields in the middle of the last century, a belt of some mile or so of agricultural land lay between its northern extremity and the entrance to the town at Hollow Stone. The river Trent (about whose name many guesses have been made, some people saying that it is derived from the thirty tributaries which flow into it while others speak of the thirty different fishes to be found within its waters) was always of the greatest importance in English history, and its crossing near the point occupied by the modern Trent Bridge was of tremendous strategic importance all through the middle ages. Not only was the Trent of military importance, but it served as a legal boundary for the two halves of England which were worked by different judges. The northern half was spoken of in legal language as 'Ultra Trentham', while the southern half was called 'Cintra Trentham'. The Trent has been both the blessing and the bane of Nottingham, for on its waters was carried the commerce of the middle - to and from the sea, which made Nottingham prosperous as the port of the whole Midlands, and up its waters also sailed the terrible warships of the Saxons and the keels of the Vikings which wrought such havoc to the land that the suffrage 'From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us' was inserted in the Litany. The five arches on the northern side of the Trent Bridge shown in this picture were reconstructed in the year 1683. The river was diverted behind the site now occupied by the Town Arms and in front of the site where, until recently, stood the Union Inn; the workmen were thus enabled to conduct this re-construction at their leisure. In the background of this picture is shown the woods of Colwick Hill which overhang Colwick Hall, and remind us of Byron's fruitless passion for Mary Chaworth, with all the tragedy and romance of the 'lame boy's' life. Image and descriptive text taken from 'Nottingham Past and Present', published in 1926.