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 view is taken from the southern bank of the river and shows the charm of the old bridge which spanned the Trent for so many centuries; it eventually had to be cleared away because the piers upon which its many arches stood acted as a dam holding up the water in flood time and thus caused inundations to large areas. Its roadway was narrow and inconvenient, being only about nine or ten feet wide, as is shown by the small portion which is still left on the Bridgford side of the river, and which acts as an entrance to Lovers' Walk. Its cutwaters, as is so common in medieval bridges, were made to carry triangular refuges where passengers might take refuge from passing traffic. It is strange to think what this bridge has seen and what cavalcades it has carried. The procession of kings with their courts, nobles with their retainers, churchmen on their journeys, pilgrims on their way to many lands, merchants with their pack horses carrying bales of merchandise hung low on their sides, and all the motley throng of the medieval roads carry back our minds to the far-off days when the Romans used a ford across the Trent at this point. A noteworthy incident in this long procession was when Richard III. With his army crossed it in the year 1485 on the way from Nottingham Castle to Bosworth Field where he was to lose both his crown and his life, perhaps he even rode 'While Surrey'. Another dramatic moment was when King Henry VII crossed it on the way to Stoke Field in 1487 where he overthrew Lambert Simnel at that bloody battle where six thousand men are said to have perished. Image and descriptive text taken from 'Nottingham Past and Present', published in 1926.