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'. Nottingham is fortunate in possessing one or two examples of half-timbered dwellings from which it is possible to mentally reconstruct the appearance of the mediaeval town. This well-known house in Byron Yard, Narrow Marsh - although in a very decrepit condition - is, with its beautifully moulded barge boards, a fine example of this type of building. It is of fifteenth century construction, probably about the date of the Wars of the Roses; and although it is called a farm house there is little reason for associating it with agricultural pursuits, it is a typical better class house of the period. It is interesting to note that its lower story is half under-ground, showing how much the ground level has risen owing to the deposit of debris during centuries. It stands in the middle of a rather interesting area, and not far away was the King's Head Inn which about the year 1767, was a rendezvous of Dick Turpin with his Nottingham agent Coney and his lady friend the notorious 'Martha'. This neighbourhood was frequented by the tanners of the town for the pursuit of their malodorous calling. When the plague visited Nottingham in the middle of the seventeenth century it was thought that the smells of the tan pits acted as a disinfectant; at any rate the disease was not so severe in this district as in other parts of the town and this led to many people buying or renting lodgings in the neighbourhood in order to escape the dread visitation. Image and descriptive text taken from 'Nottingham Past and Present', published in 1926.