What’s your idea of the perfect UK vacation? Are you looking forward to a hip and modern city break characterized by the vibrant nightlife, dining options, cultural attractions, vivid streetscapes, and shopping centers? Or are you interested in discovering historical sites, parklands, and nature reserves? In Nottingham UK, you don’t have to choose between bustling streetscapes and relaxed greenery, contemporary and classic, urban and rural — the city lets you enjoy the best of both worlds.
Nottingham has plenty of heritage sites, museums, castles and mansions, parklands, and marketplaces, that all beg to be discovered. If you’re staying in a hotel or serviced apartment in Nottingham, here are 10 of the most remarkable places to set your foot on.
1. Wollaton Hall
If you’re a fan of grandiose English Renaissance architecture, then Wollaton Hall isn’t a place to be missed. This astonishing Tudor house built in the 1950s is composed of Ancaster stone and limestone. It has a striking bold Elizabethan/Jacobean style, with beautiful, intricate moldings embellishing its interior and exterior. Tour the mansion and you’ll get a slice of cultural heritage as you step into its Tudor kitchen and Regency dining room.
If you get a deja vu and think that you’ve seen this mansion before, then you might be right: Wollaton Hall is the official home of Batman or Bruce Wayne. The mansion has been used as the “Wayne Manor” in Batman films.
2. Nottingham Natural History Museum & Industrial Museum
The jaw-dropping architecture isn’t the only lovely sight to see in Wollaton Hall — the hall and parkland are also home to the city’s Natural History Museum and Industrial Museum.
The Natural History Museum has more than 750,000 zoological, geological and botanical specimens, including the Dinosaurs of China. The stables at Wollaton Hall, on the other hand, is where the Industrial Museum is built. Here, you can see pieces from the local textile trade, including a 1910 knitting machine and Leavers and Barmen lace-making machines from Nottingham’s thriving lace industry in the past.
3. The Lace Market
The Lace Market is a protected quarter-mile heritage area dedicated to the city’s once-thriving lace-making industry. It used to be a site filled with warehouses and salerooms for storing, displaying, and selling lace. While the narrow cobbled streets and heritage buildings have been surrounded by museums, shops, bars, and restaurants over the years, industrial architecture still takes over the scene. Walk further and you’ll see St. Mary’s Church, a jaw-dropping Gothic-style church founded in 1370.
4. Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery
Are you a fan of contemporary art? You shouldn’t miss this gallery, set in the Lace Market area. And besides, it’s free to enter.
The gallery houses an astounding array of art exhibitions, film screenings, and talks from prominent figures. It’s also one of the largest contemporary art centres in the UK, with a square meter floor area of 3000. Should you get tired from touring the sprawling gallery, there’s an elegant artist-designed cafe to rest your feet on.
5. Old Market Square
Nottingham’s Old Market Square is the largest remaining market square in the UK, with almost 5.5 acres in size. The striking neo-Baroque Council built in 1929 towers the square. Located in the very centre of the city, the old market square also serves as a congregating point for the city with buses and trams nearby.
6. National Justice Museum
The National Justice Museum is set in a former courthouse dating back to the 14th century. The museum brings history to life through interactive interactions, with characters like jailers and judges dressed up in period costumes. To learn more about crime stories in Nottingham, you may visit the underground jail and gallows and get locked into the stocks.
7. Nottingham Castle
Your trip won’t be complete without visiting Nottingham Castle, which looks over the city from its tall sandstone crag called Castle Rock. This heritage site has been torn down in the wake of the English Civil War and was rebuilt.
Today, Nottingham Castle is not just a fortress but a museum as well. It houses the Nottingham Castle Museum, which features a collection of Wedgwood jasperware pottery, watercolors by Paul Sandby, and Richard Bonnington and Nottingham alabaster carvings dating back to the 15th century, and 19th and 20th-century fine art.
8. The City of Caves
The city is built on a soft sandstone ridge that’s been excavated with caves for centuries. In fact, the Celtic name for Nottingham translates to “Place of Caves”. Want to uncover more than a thousand years of history? Go to the top level of Broadmarsh Shopping Centre to embark on an underground journey.
Your underground journey will take you to England’s only known underground tannery, and the Drury Hill slums dating back to the Victorian period. It will also give you a gist of the Nottingham Blitz attack.
9. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem
The site built into the castle’s sandstone crag is a pub that is believed to have been founded in 1189. Undeniably, the quaint pub looks exceptionally old, with passages and caves cut from the sandstone.
10. Green’s Windmill
Green’s windmill is a popular tourist attraction in Sneinton. The father of George Green, a prominent 19th-century mathematical physicist, built this windmill in 1807. The windmill was almost lost to fire, but it was restored. Today, it’s still in working condition and now stands as a symbol of Nottingham’s history through the years.
Author Bio: Carmina Natividad is a free-spirited writer who loves exploring the great outdoors. She loves traveling, eating, taking food and streetscape photographs, and simply enjoying new experiences and writing about them. To know more about hotels and travel blogs, you may visit PREMIER SUITES Nottingham.
