Qualla: Nottingham Industrial Museum

Nottingham Industrial Museum: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ClemRutter, CC BY-SA 4.0. The stable block at Wollaton Hall has not held horses for a long time. Instead, the seventeenth-century stalls now shelter a stocking frame from 1589, an operational beam engine that once pumped fresh water to the entire city, and a working model of a Robey stationary engine puttering away beside a 00-gauge railway. Most curators would call this an eccentric inheritance. The volunteers who run the Nottingham Industrial Museum call it Tuesday.

Image: ClemRutter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nottingham Industrial Museum: Saved by the Volunteers

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smashman, Public domain. The museum has had two lives. The first ended in 2009 when Nottingham City Council withdrew funding, and the doors closed on the collection that had accumulated over decades. It might have stayed closed - many regional industrial museums did not survive the austerity years - but ...

Image: Smashman | Public domain

Nottingham Industrial Museum: The Stocking Frame Revolution

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ClemRutter, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1589, William Lee of Calverton, a Nottinghamshire curate, watched a woman knitting and decided to mechanise her work. His framework knitting machine could produce stockings far faster than hand knitting, and by the 1760s some 20,000 of these machines were clacking in cottages ...

Image: ClemRutter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nottingham Industrial Museum: Steam in the Stables

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Push through to the Steam Gallery and you meet the Basford Beam Engine, one of a pair built in 1858 by R. W. Hawthorn in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was installed at Basford Pumping Station to lift water 110 feet from the sandstone aquifer below, supplying fresh water to Nottingham u...

Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nottingham Industrial Museum: The Other Inheritances

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buch-t, Public domain. Walk through the rest of the building and the Midlands assembles itself in fragments. A coal truck from Clifton Colliery, last used when that mine fed Wilford Power Station on what is now a retail park. A vintage Brough Superior car, sister marque to the motorcycle T. E. Lawrence...

Image: Buch-t | Public domain