In June 2026, James Walker published an article by John Pateman about a walk through Mapperley by a group of academics and members of the D.H. Lawrence Society on his Substack Blog – An Absolute Necessity To Move
Mapperley Park
The D.H. Lawrence Society, in partnership with the Haggs Farm Preservation Society and Five Leaves Bookstore in Nottingham, organised a walking tour of Mapperley and Arno Vale, attended by 30 people, following in the footsteps of D.H. Lawrence. We gathered outside 32 Victoria Crescent on a warm sunny spring day and shared the story of how Ernest and Frieda Weekley literally moved up in the world after getting married. They arrived in Nottingham in November 1899 and lived at 92 Nottingham Road, in New Basford. In spring 1890 they moved slightly south, nearer the Forest, to 9 Goldswong Terrace. Early in 1904 they moved to 8 Vickers Street near Mapperley Road. Their fourth and final home was a new, tall, graceful stone house, Cowley, on Victoria Crescent, Private Road, a curving, hilly, tree lined street in a very desirable neighbourhood. It was here that Lawrence met Frieda and Kate Foster (Haggs Farm Preservation Society) read out Frieda’s memories of that meeting from her autobiography Not I, but the wind.
We walked along Woodborough Road, tracing the route that Lawrence would have taken by tram from Victoria Station, and noted two significant sites that Lawrence would have passed on his journey: the City of Nottingham Lunatic Asylum occupied 125 acres and was opened in 1880; the Mapperley Brickworks of the Nottingham Patent Brick Company had two enormous circular kilns, each more than 100 feet in diameter.
Arno Vale Farm
We paused for a rest and refreshments at ‘The Woodthorpe Top’ which has two illustrated information panels about Lawrence, Frieda and Jessie Chambers, who was the focus of the second part of the walk. At the top of Breck Hill Road we imagined we were looking down into a wooded valley with Arno Vale Farm, formerly Swinehouse Farm, nestled at the bottom of it. The last occupiers of the farm were the Chambers family, who came from Hagg’s Farm at Eastwood in 1910. Kate Foster gave a reading from Helen Corke: ‘Arno Vale, originally Swinehouse Farm, lies in a green hollow approached from Mapperley Plains by a steep and irregular footpath winding through hilly pasture. The path ends by the gate of an orchard fronting the house’. We followed this path, which today is Long Acre, and imagined the scene that Helen described: ‘From the old stile on Breck Hill Lane we looked down upon Arno Vale farm in its hollow. A faint mist was still entangled in the blossoming apple orchard; and we descended the narrow path through pastures set for hay and starred with marguerites’.
Scene From Sons And Lovers
At the bottom of Long Acre, on the site of where Arno Farm once stood, John Pateman (D.H. Lawrence Society) and Ross Bradshaw (5 Leaves Books) reenacted the famous fight scene between Paul Morel and Baxter Dawes which Lawrence described in Sons and Lovers: ‘The town ceases almost abruptly on the edge of a steep hollow. There the houses with their yellow lights stand up against the darkness. He [Paul Morel] went over the stile and dropped quickly into the hollow of the fields. Under the orchard, one warm window shone in Swineshead Farm. Paul glanced around. Behind, the houses stood on the brim of the dip, black against the sky, like wild beasts glaring curiously with yellow eyes down into the darkness. It was the town that seemed savage and uncouth, glaring on the clouds at the back of him. Some creature stirred under the willows of the farm pond. It was too dark to distinguish anything. He was close up to the next stile before he saw a dark shape leaning against it. The man [Baxter Dawes] moved aside.’
A 1959 photograph taken from Breck Hill Road looking over fields that became Long Acre Road and over where Arno Vale Farm was in 1910 when the Chambers family moved from Eastwood. The houses were built after the farm was sold in the 1930s.
We carried onto 43 Breckhill Road where Jessie Chambers lived with her husband Jack Wood, who she met in 1913 and married in 1915. From the back of their house they could look down to Arno Vale Farm to see how things were getting on there. Anyone down in the stack yard could wave back. Andrew Cooper (Haggs Farm Preservation Society) read extracts from letters that Jessie wrote while she was living at 43 Breck Hill Road. The tour ended at 51 Breck Hill Road where Jessie’s brother, David, lived. Around 1933 Arno Vale Farm and the surrounding area were sold for building and Edmund and Sarah Chambers (Jessie’s parents) moved to a nearby bungalow on Breckhill Road. Sarah died in 1937, Jessie in 1944 and Edmund in 1946. Our guests of honour on the tour were Jen Chambers, the great granddaughter of Hubert Chambers (Jessie’s brother) who, along with his brother, Bernard, emigrated to Canada in 1914.
With thanks to James Walker for allowing us to feature this.