BY Dr. Carmen M. Magion

Hyson Green, a desperately impoverished area of Nottingham in the East Midlands of England, was, according to Andy Smart, a reporter for the Nottingham Evening Post, notorious for “crime, social unrest, poor housing and deprivation”. What was a “tight knit community” in back-to back terraced houses was replaced by the Hyson Green Flats (1965 1987), a “concrete jungle” of high-rise flats along a maze of corridors. Towards the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, recession and high unemployment due to downsizing by local employers and “globalisation” (manufacturing overseas) of the textile industry had taken its toll. Riots in July 1981, on Radford Road adjacent to the Flats, caused even further devastation to local homes and businesses. Referred to by locals as “Sing Sing” (after the maximum security prison in New York), Hyson Green, adjacent to a red light district, had a reputation as an undesirable neighbourhood beset by social problems.