Description:
Showing the front of Peveril House. This building is said to be the old Workhouse. R Mellors' book 'Old Nottingham Suburbs' gives a confusing account of its history.
In it he states that it was built in 1838 at a cost of £2,600 and the furniture and fixtures cost £1,296. It then became home for poor children, housing 120 children from 4-16 under the care of Mr And Burrows. The premises were then closed and the children fostered in homes around Nottingham (he gives no date for this). It then served as a jail for debtors sued in the Peveril Court. An 1844 Directory states that the court was then held at Radford and its powers ceased in 1849. The Charity Commissioners leased the property, and those in Peveril Yard, as two (?) cottages and the income from them used to fund 2 scholarships at 12 Guineas a year, each for 3 years, at the Nottingham and Girls High School.
Looking at this and other images of Peveril House, however, suggests a conflict of information. The roof structure suggests that Peveril House was a far older building than those surrounding it. There are many small intriguing architectural features and alterations in these buildings, arched windows that have been filled in and altered, different brickwork above the second storey, stone copings on the gables, tall (rather than the usual wide) frame-knitters style windows and older stone footings in the middle house. See NTGM001606 and NTGM001607 for an 1898 photograph of the buildings which shows that alterations had been done very much earlier.
The building was demolished in 1961.
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'.