Qualla: Adams Building, Nottingham

Adams Building, Nottingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vasa1628, CC BY-SA 3.0. The local newspaper, on opening day in 1855, called it the finest erection in the Midlands. The Adams Building looked across Stoney Street like a Florentine palazzo dropped into a Nottingham backstreet, six storeys of pale stone and moulded brick, and the architect had genuinely had Florence in mind. It was, of all things, a warehouse - the sales hall and storehouse of a Quaker lace merchant who believed his workers deserved a chapel, daylight, and a building that did not look like a factory.

Image: Vasa1628 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Adams Building, Nottingham: A Quaker With a Conscience

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smashman (talk). The original uploader was Smashman at English Wikipedia., Public domain. Thomas Adams (1807-1873) was a Victorian industrialist of the kind English manufacturing produced and then largely forgot. He was a Quaker, an active campaigner against slavery and for prison reform, and he believed that the men and women working in his lace warehouse should be t...

Image: Smashman (talk). The original uploader was Smashman at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Adams Building, Nottingham: Phases of Building, Phases of Trade

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. The building grew in stages from 1854 to about 1874. Hine extended it along St Mary's Gate at the rear, and finally along Warser Gate, swallowing an early-19th-century tenement lace factory at the end of King's Place that had once been used as a Roman Catholic chapel. Each new bl...

Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Adams Building, Nottingham: The Lace Market That Made Nottingham

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Superhasn at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Around the Adams Building stretched the Lace Market, a quarter-square-mile district packed with the warehouses, finishing rooms, and offices of the Nottinghamshire lace industry. By the late nineteenth century Nottingham produced perhaps three-quarters of the machine-made lace in...

Image: Superhasn at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Adams Building, Nottingham: Almost Lost, Then Saved

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the 1980s the Adams Building was sagging. Many of its floors had failed under the weight of generations of heavy machinery; the decorative clock tower on the St Mary's Gate front had already been replaced by a crude brick lift-motor room. In 1996 the Lace Market Heritage Trust...

Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Adams Building, Nottingham: Lace Market Today

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smashman, Public domain. The Adams Building is Grade II* listed and remains the largest building in the Lace Market. The neighbourhood around it has done what English former industrial quarters do when the cheap rent and the good buildings meet a creative class - it has filled up with bars, restaurants, ...

Image: Smashman | Public domain