Qualla: Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. Look at the cladding from across the street and the pattern resolves: lace. Not painted on, not printed — cast into the concrete itself, each panel a verdigris-green slab embossed with a traditional Nottingham lace design. The building is Nottingham Contemporary, opened on 14 November 2009, and it sits on what its directors call the oldest occupied site in the city: a sandstone outcrop above Garners Hill where the Saxons built a fort, where medieval Nottingham built its town hall, where caves were dug into the rock long before either, and where the Victorians eventually swept all of it away to drive a railway line through. The concrete was Caruso St John's idea — the London architects whose building, the critic Owen Hatherley wrote, might, irrespective of the leaky roof, be the first masterpiece of British architecture of the twenty-first century.

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Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nottingham Contemporary: Lace, Cast in Concrete

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Superhasn at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Nottingham was a lace city — by the late nineteenth century it was the centre of the world's machine-made lace industry, its Lace Market crowded with warehouses where reels of fine cotton thread were patterned, washed, finished, and shipped. Most of those warehouses still stand, ...

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Image: Superhasn at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Nottingham Contemporary: The Site Beneath

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kafuffle, CC BY 4.0. What is now the gallery's site has been many things. Caves were dug into the soft sandstone of Garners Hill in the medieval period, part of the network that still riddles the ground under central Nottingham. A Saxon fort once stood here. So did a medieval town hall. The Victorian...

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Image: Kafuffle | CC BY 4.0

Nottingham Contemporary: What Has Gone On Inside

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lee Haywood from Wollaton, Nottingham, England, CC BY-SA 2.0. The gallery opened with a David Hockney show drawn from his early work and a parallel exhibition of recent pieces by the Los Angeles artist Frances Stark, both with loans from the Tate. Since then the programme has aimed at four or five major exhibitions a year, with an ambition ...

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Image: Lee Haywood from Wollaton, Nottingham, England | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nottingham Contemporary: Concrete, Light, and a Free Door

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Contemporarynottingham, CC BY-SA 3.0. Admission to Nottingham Contemporary is free. This matters in a city where the average household income is significantly below the national average, and where the gallery's location at the foot of the Lace Market puts it on the edge of one of the more economically mixed neighbour...

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Image: Contemporarynottingham | CC BY-SA 3.0