Long Stairs: Nottingham historian on a mission to restore city's medieval stairway
A group of volunteers is raising funds to restore Nottingham’s Long Stairs
A group of volunteers is raising funds to restore a “neglected and forgotten” medieval stairway running down a sandstone cliff in the Lace Market.
Members of a group dedicated to restoring Long Stairs are hoping to one day reopen parts of the ancient passage, which leads out of one corner of Commerce Square down to the former Narrow Marsh area.
The steps are currently closed to the public due to safety concerns, after decades of being out of use. And while Long Stairs will never be a public thoroughfare again due to private gardens now sitting at the bottom, some important historical urban space could be reopened.
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Led by local historian Janine Tanner, from Hucknall, who took over the project in 2018, the group is asking for donations from the public to help save the historic stairway.
Once a passageway for residents of Narrow Marsh working in the Lace Market factories, Long Stairs dates back to much earlier than Nottingham’s industrial heritage, possibly even to before the 15th century.
The stairway is thought to have been designed strategically to defend against armies planning to invade the town from the south.
Where the majority of the town was well-defended thanks to its position on top of the sandstone cliffs, some passageways were necessary to allow access from the marshland below.
Those that had to be left open were made easy for citizens of the town to pass through but hard for heavily armed soldiers to climb, leading to the narrow, one-sided design of Long Stairs.
Centuries later, as the town grew into a city, Long Stairs fell out of use. With the addition of new streets such as Cliff Road, completed in 1933, the ancient stairway was eventually abandoned altogether.
In 2017, after researching historic streets and passageways in the city centre, Tanner noticed that one seemed to have disappeared. When she finally found what was Long Stairs, now totally neglected and overgrown, the passage didn’t even resemble its former self.
“I thought it was just a very very untidy garden at first,” said Tanner. “It was as if the council had just forgotten about it and left it to rot.”
She contacted Nottingham City Council and asked if she could be permitted to be the effective custodian of the steps. And, in 2018, having been approved, Tanner set out to bring volunteers together to do what they could to tidy up the site.
But, aware that previous efforts had been made to clean up the historic site, and themselves abandoned, Tanner decided that Long Stairs needed more permanent love and care. “I couldn’t just leave it as it was,” she says. “I had to do something more permanent.”
The first step was to raise funds to get a blue plaque placed nearby marking the formerly busy thoroughfare, which Tanner achieved. Having done that she has now set her sights on a major set of works which will go a long way to restoring what is salvageable.
So far the team has raised around £4,000 through efforts such as fundraising historical guided tours - through Tanner’s own tour group, NRR Tours - they still have a long way to go before they hit the target amount of £36,000.
More events will be held in the new year, likely in April and May, including several guided tours, the proceeds of which will go to the Long Stairs fund.
Tanner has set up a Paypal account for donations and is planning to start a dedicated crowdfunding page in the new year.
And somewhere down the line, there may be an intriguing twist to the tale. One of the occupants of Long Stairs over the centuries has been a shoemaker who ran a shop from a cave located just off the steps.
The cave and the shop have been long since bricked up, with only guesses as to what might still be inside. That is until, as part of the restoration works, the cave will be unbricked, revealing whatever secrets it has been keeping all these decades.