Old Market Square

About this place

Ask anyone in Nottingham where to meet and the answer has been the same for nearly a century: by the Left Lion. Two stone lions of about two tonnes each, carved by Joseph Else for the building's opening in 1929, flank the steps of the Council House, and the left-hand one became the city's meeting point long before mobile phones. Stand beside it and turn round: the whole square is laid out in front of you, roughly 12,000 square metres of grey granite in shifting tones, one of the largest paved squares in Britain. The square is older than anything standing around it. A market traded here from the eleventh century, and the 700-year-old Goose Fair was held on this ground until 1928, when it was moved to the Forest Recreation Ground so the square could be rebuilt and the Council House raised. Look down for the stainless-steel drainage channel cut into the paving: it looks like an engineering detail but it traces the line of the old wall between the Norman town on Castle Rock and the Anglo-Saxon town around St Mary's church. The square was, literally, the no-man's-land between two settlements. The Council House gives the place its gravitas: a neo-Baroque front by Thomas Cecil Howitt, opened in May 1929, topped by a dome of around 61 metres in which the ten-tonne bell 'Little John' sounds the hour and carries for miles. The councillors' offices moved out to Loxley House in 2010, though the chamber still hosts full council meetings and the register office; the ground floor is now the Exchange, a small, polished shopping arcade, so you can walk in under the dome without a ticket. Set your expectations honestly: this is somewhere you pass through, not somewhere you allot time. Gustafson Porter's 2004-07 redesign cost around 17 million pounds, and its stepped fountains at the western end are the square's best feature in summer when children wade in them, but they are switched off in winter and the space then feels wide and cold unless an event fills it: the Christmas market and ice rink from mid-November to the end of December (parts of it are ski-bar territory, so stick to the market and the rink), or the summer 'beach' with sand, a small pool and children's rides from mid-July to the end of August (it too has a bar at one end). The surface is level and pushchair-friendly, the tram stops on the south edge, and the castle and the Lace Market are each within ten minutes' walk in opposite directions.