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'. Parliament Street, which occupies the centre of this drawing, was called 'The Back Side' until about 1770, and throughout its whole length is an extremely wide thoroughfare. The reason for this width is that the town wall of Henry the Second's time extended along the ground which is now the middle of the street. Within this wall was a lane, used as a mustering place and a thoroughfare, and when eventually the wall was pulled down, this lane, the site of the wall, and the wide ditch on its outer side, were thrown into one, and so we got the open space which is of such value to-day. Near the centre of the picture stands a market stall which is almost opposite the end of Clumber Street - formerly called 'Cow Lane' - and here stood one of the town gateways known as 'Cow Lane Bar', or sometimes 'North Gate'. Opposite this gateway, near the spot where the policeman now directs traffic, stood the old Maypole of Nottingham, which was not done away with until the end of the eighteenth century. The Coach and Horses Tavern on the right of the drawing was an interesting old Restoration house, built, as its curved gables show, about the same time as the house next to Marshal Tallard's (Newdigate House) in Castle Gate. It had a vesical window, very similar to that still existing in the Royal Children Inn, (so called from the family of Queen Anne who was married to the Prince of Denmark, and who took refuge in Nottingham for a short time in 1688, just before her father James I lost his throne). The 'Coach and Horses' was pulled down about the year 1890: it is interesting to remember that the ground floor was two steps below the street level, showing that in Parliament Street, as in other parts of the town, the ground level had been considerably raised by the accumulation of debris during the two centuries after this tavern was built. Image and descriptive text taken from 'Nottingham Past and Present', published in 1926.