Qualla: City of Caves

City of Caves: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 893, the Welsh bishop Asser was writing the life of King Alfred when he came to describe a place in the English midlands. The Old Brythonic name he gave it was Tig Guocobauc — place of caves. The English would later call it Nottingham, but Asser's name was the truer one. Nottingham sits on a ridge of soft red sandstone that yields to a hand tool, and for at least a thousand years its inhabitants have been digging into the rock under their own houses. The most recent count, from the city archaeologist in April 2025, puts the number of known man-made caves under modern Nottingham at nine hundred and twenty-four. None of them are natural. Every one was carved with a chisel.

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City of Caves: The Tannery Below the Cliff

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The City of Caves attraction is built around one of the oldest surviving sets. Pottery finds date some of these chambers to between 1270 and 1300, which makes them roughly contemporary with the rebuilding of Lincoln Cathedral. The Pillar Cave was originally cut around 1250, colla...

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City of Caves: Drury Hill

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Above the caves once ran Drury Hill, a narrow medieval street that had been wealthy in its day and had become, by the nineteenth century, one of the worst slums in Britain. The basement walls preserved underground are all that remains of those buildings. Families lived in the sin...

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City of Caves: Eighty-Six Holes for May 1941

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By February 1941, Nottingham City Council had located eighty-six public air-raid shelters in the sandstone beneath the city. Some were natural extensions of the medieval caves; others were freshly dug to connect them. The bombing came in waves but never on the scale of Coventry o...

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City of Caves: Saved from the Concrete

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The reason any of this is visible today is a planning fight that nearly went the other way. Construction of the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre began in the late 1960s, and the project initially proposed to fill the caves with concrete — partly because the open chambers were a securit...

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City of Caves: Place of Caves

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most cities sit on the ground they occupy. Nottingham has been hollowing out underneath itself for so long that the rock beneath the streets is shot through with rooms — pub cellars and ice houses, malt kilns and storage chambers, tanneries and shelters and slums. Tig Guocobauc, ...

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