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 is surely one of the most beautiful structures that we have in Nottingham. When the first Duke of Newcastle built his great palace on the site of the old Castle fortress in the year 1679, he attracted a great number of the gentlefolk from the surrounding districts, who built mansions for themselves in the town where they spent a portion of each year, making a society season amongst themselves. Many of these houses are still left around St. James' Street, Castle Gate and the Pavements, although now they are nearly all used for commercial purposes. No. 19 Castle Gate is one of them; it is an eighteenth century building and was probably being erected about the time that Mr. Wesley paid his visit to Nottingham in 1753; it was the town house of the great family of Howe, of Langar, the most celebrated member of which was Richard, Earl Howe, who on the first of June, 1794 gained the famous victory, called 'The Glorious First of June', over the French Fleet off Ushant. During the Revolution, Lord Howe represented Nottingham in Parliament. Both the inside and the outside of this house are extremely beautiful, and the decoration is very much influenced by the brothers Adam, the great architects who revolutionised house building in the middle of the 18th century. Perhaps the doorway is the most striking feature, and its beautiful enrichments which include the ox skull and swags of flowers, reminiscent of the decorations of pagan altars, together with the lovely Venetian window over it, form one of the most striking architectural compositions imaginable. Image and descriptive text taken from 'Nottingham Past and Present', published in 1926.