Moving to Nottingham

Pharmacy, health & bioscience

Boots at Thane Road, BioCity Nottingham, Nottingham University Hospitals, Alliance Healthcare

Boots was founded in Nottingham in 1849 and its Beeston campus includes the Grade I listed 'D10' factory of 1932 by Owen Williams, one of the most important modernist buildings in Britain. BioCity, in the old Boots laboratories, was the UK's first bioscience incubator and is still the anchor of the local life-science economy.

Data, credit & financial services

Experian's UK operational headquarters at NG2, Capital One UK, Ikano Bank, Nottingham Building Society

Experian runs one of the world's largest consumer credit businesses out of the Sir John Peace Building at NG2 rather than out of London, and Capital One's UK operation is here too. The concentration of credit-risk, data-science and analytics work is far higher than the city's size would suggest.

Games, hobby & creative

Games Workshop at Lenton, Warhammer World, Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, Antenna

Games Workshop designs, manufactures and ships Warhammer from a single site in Lenton, with a visitor centre and exhibition attached — the entire global hobby is run from a Nottingham industrial estate, which very few people outside it realise.

Universities & research

University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, the Nottingham Geospatial Institute

Magnetic resonance imaging was developed at Nottingham — Sir Peter Mansfield shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for it, and the imaging centre named after him is still a world centre for MRI physics. Between the two universities the city carries around 60,000 students.

Fashion, design & retail

Paul Smith, Boohoo's Nottingham operations, Speedo's UK design heritage, the Lace Market's design studios

Paul Smith opened his first shop on Byard Lane in 1970, three metres square and open two days a week, and never moved the design operation out of the city. Before that Nottingham lace clothed the world — the Lace Market is a whole quarter of Victorian warehouses built on it.

Logistics & advanced manufacturing

East Midlands Airport's freight operations, DHL and Royal Mail hubs, Rolls-Royce at Derby, Toyota at Burnaston

East Midlands Airport, half an hour away, is the UK's largest dedicated air-freight hub, and the M1/A46 corridor around it carries a very large share of national distribution. Rolls-Royce's aero-engine plant at Derby and Toyota's at Burnaston are both inside a commute.

Landmark · City centre, on Castle Rock

A seventeenth-century ducal mansion on a sandstone crag where the medieval castle stood, with a museum, a gallery and a network of caves and passages cut into the rock below.

Local tip: The castle's recent history is the story locals will tell you: it closed in November 2022 when the trust running it was liquidated, twenty months after a £33 million redevelopment, and reopened on 26 June 2023 under the council's own museums service. Book the cave tour rather than just the galleries — Mortimer's Hole, the passage cut down through the rock, is the part worth coming for.

Culture · Under the Broadmarsh, city centre

Part of a network of more than 800 man-made sandstone caves beneath Nottingham — medieval tanneries, cellars, a Second World War air-raid shelter — the largest such network in Britain.

Local tip: The caves are the reason Nottingham exists where it does: the sandstone is soft enough to dig with hand tools and stable enough not to collapse, so people have been carving cellars under this city since the Middle Ages. Its old Welsh name, Tigguo Cobauc, meant 'place of caves'. Above ground, the old Broadmarsh centre was demolished and the site is being turned into public green space — a genuinely unusual thing for a British city to do with prime centre land.

Neighborhood · East of the city centre, around St Mary's Church

A quarter-mile grid of tall Victorian lace warehouses, now flats, bars, studios and Nottingham Trent's law school, with the medieval parish church in the middle of it.

Local tip: It was never a market — it was where lace was finished, stored and sold, and the buildings were designed to show off bolts of it in the best possible light, which is why the windows are enormous. Walk it in the evening when the offices empty and the bars on Broad Street and Hockley pick up.

Nature · Wollaton, three miles west of the centre

An Elizabethan prodigy house of 1588 standing on a hill in 500 acres of park, with herds of red and fallow deer that have been there for centuries and a natural history museum inside.

Local tip: It was Wayne Manor in The Dark Knight Rises, which is the fact everyone leads with — but the deer are the reason to come, and they are genuinely wild animals that get aggressive in the autumn rut. The park is free and open daily; the hall charges for some exhibitions.

Food · East of the centre, between the Lace Market and Sneinton

The Avenues at Sneinton Market — a set of restored 1930s market units now full of small independent food, coffee and design businesses — running into Hockley's bars, the Broadway cinema and the independent shops.

Local tip: Sneinton is where the interesting food is now; Hockley is where it was ten years ago and where the drinking still is. The Broadway is a genuinely good independent cinema with a bar people actually sit in. Go on a Saturday, when the Avenues traders are all open.

Culture · Sneinton, a mile east of the centre

A working black tower windmill on a hill in Sneinton, restored and grinding flour, with a small science centre attached.

Local tip: George Green, the miller who worked here, was almost entirely self-taught and in 1828 published an essay introducing what are now called Green's functions and Green's theorem — mathematics without which modern physics, and MRI scanning, would not work. He is buried across the road. The mill is free, it is run by the council, and hardly anyone in the city has been.