Miners Homes
The arrival of the mining industry in the 1860's created a housing boom in Hucknall to accommodate a rapidly expanding population.
The new homes were often built as small developments of a few terraced houses to several streets of houses dispersed around the existing village. This piecemeal approach allowed the newcomers to assimilate more easily into the local community. The properties were built to be rented and mostly developed by the original land owners or private investors who purchased land for housing.
Hucknall was not developed as a 'company town' as seen in some other mining areas, such as Creswell in North Derbyshire, where both housing and the public buildings needed to support the community were planned, built and owned by the colliery company. Only two small housing projects were developed by the Hucknall Colliery Company, one in Beardall Street and the other in Watnall Road (pictured above). These 'colliery rows' were built in 1873 and were of a superior quality to much of the other speculative housing (notice the decorative brickwork). It is likely they were built to house workers with essential skills recruited from other coalfields.
The drawing to the right is a rough architects sketch, to be found in the Nottinghamshire Archives, of five houses built in Thoresby Street in 1876 for a Mr Ephraim Harris. This was part of a larger development including Betts Street, Cavendish Street and Clarence Street.
The front door opened from the pavement into a living room which had a fireplace and measured 10ft by 11ft. The back room was the scullery (kitchen) which measured 9ft by 10ft and had a range for cooking, a stone sink and the staircase leading to two bedrooms upstairs. Outside was a communal yard, at the bottom of which was a toilet and the middens (ashpits for faeces and kitchen waste). Hung on a nail on the back wall would be the bath.
Housing of this type was considered relatively spacious, but the sanitary arrangements were not adequate and outbreaks of diarrhoeal illness were common.