Now, though, Broad Marsh is dead, with Nottingham City Council this month expected to finalize plans to complete the center’s demolition — paving the way for a vast redevelopment scheme for 1,000 homes and 20,000 square feet of new retail, office space and entertainment. It will, as you may have guessed, completely transform the area.

To those familiar with Nottingham, this will surely be welcome news: the shopping center closed in 2020 during extensive renovation works. For the past five years, locals have had to meander through a half-demolished site, through makeshift walkways and past mounds of rubble, to get from the train station to the city center. Behind a bright green hoarding sits what’s left of Broad Marsh, an unsubtle metaphor for the 20th century consumer dream laid waste. Yet more than the mistakes of the past, Nottingham’s story has future lessons too — not least on the dangers of private investors, and how towns don’t even need mass retail to thrive in the 21st century.

In many ways, the Broad Marsh story is unremarkable, both in its rise and fall. Around 300 shopping centers opened in Britain between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, while over 250 have closed, been demolished or are scheduled for redevelopment. There’s no shortage of ailing precincts, and 2025 is set to be a busy year for the wrecking ball. The Core in Leeds; the St Nicholas Center in Sutton; Slough’s Queensmere — these are just three demolition schemes among many.

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The future of Broad Marsh has been hanging in the balance since the mall’s operator, intu (the lower-case “i” is trendily deliberate), went into administration during the first Covid lockdown. But the saga stretches back decades, with unrealized renovation plans dating back to the millennium. To many, indeed, it has become little more than a mark of urban blight. In 2020, a city-wide consultation found that more than two thirds of residents and businesses would prefer green open space, and premises for hospitality and the community — while retail polled poorly by comparison.

Things weren’t always so depressing. As that royal opening so tantalizingly hints, shopping precincts were once all the rage, as local authorities hoped to revitalize declining town centers, many of which had been crumbling since the war or even earlier. Several factors contributed to this boom — not least planning recommendations to alleviate and anticipate growing car traffic in urban cores.

Private property companies were crucial to the financing and delivery of new shopping centers. With a government ban on out-of-town developments, owing to concerns for the viability of the British high street, as well as limits on commercial office development in London, provincial towns across Britain suddenly became appealing investments.

In Nottingham, the Broad Marsh area had long been earmarked for redevelopment, with plans to build a bus station on land majority-owned by the council. The impetus to do so came from an offer of a partnership with Town and City Properties, a company better known by the name of its shopping centers: Arndale. It was, on paper, an excellent offer. The council would get its bus station, and the city would secure a modern shopping complex inspired by the latest international malls.

The developer, in turn, would secure a lucrative cash cow, as Arndale Centers were simultaneously constructed from Bradford to Bolton to Nelson. Like at Nottingham, all these examples are currently awaiting demolition. And, as at Broad Marsh, they tended to offer drab architectural fare, their enclosed pedestrian malls a spaceship-like presence in the wider city.

Partly for this reason — and notwithstanding the enthusiasts in local government — there was vocal public opposition to such developments right from the start. That’s especially when the plans typically came with threats to demolish historic sites. Beyond the remains of a medieval abbey, the Broad Marsh redevelopment also included the demolition of Drury Hill, a public highway dating back to the 14th century. Other objections focused on access to space: some in Nottingham felt the shopping center’s location could be shifted to leave space for a park.

In Nottingham, as elsewhere, several public inquiries were held into the redevelopment of Broad Marsh. Yet the strength of local feeling was ultimately ignored. What good, wondered the powers-that-be, was a rundown, centuries-old passageway, when it could be replaced with something modern and weatherproof?

By the mid-Seventies, then, British cities had been transformed. Yet though they offered a cash bonanza for councils and developers alike, this private-public arrangement soon proved something of a Faustian pact. Access to previously public highways was now policed by private firms, gleefully funnelling pedestrians through covered malls. High rents in shopping centers also excluded small businesses from competing with chain stores for space. All this amounted to the colonization of central Nottingham, and the alienation of local people and local enterprise, especially as property takeovers in the late-20th century meant mall operators consisted of an increasingly small cohort of global real estate firms.

No wonder Nottingham boasted the lowest retail occupancy rates in the country by 2011, an oversaturation made worse by the development of a second shopping area, the Victoria Center, just a 10-minute stroll to the north. As those stark closure numbers imply, meanwhile, these problems are far from unique to the East Midlands. Britain’s retail sector never fully recovered from the 2008 recession, while shopping habits have substantially shifted in recent years, a move only exacerbated by the pandemic. For their part, many shopping center operators have adapted by converting shops into leisure space in anticipation of a more experiential economy. Think cinemas, restaurants and bowling alleys: this had been the general thrust of intu’s botched remodeling. Crazy golf is another popular choice.

Following intu’s collapse, in 2020, Nottingham City Council took the Broad Marsh site back into full public ownership. Later that year, it launched a city-wide public consultation into the future of the area, with the findings reimagined in a scheme by Thomas Heatherwick, the designer provocateur responsible for the redevelopment of Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross (and the failed Garden Bridge project). Alongside housing and commercial space, the key idea was to reestablish the area’s lost medieval throughways. Heatherwick mooted a green space too, while also suggesting that the center’s dismantled concrete and steel frame could be used for public events.

In short, then, Heatherwick’s scheme suggested that a better future could emerge from the ruins of failed 20th consumption. And, certainly, there is a clear precedent for this approach. In 2019, for instance, Stockton-on-Tees council purchased a redundant Seventies shopping center — which it has demolished for the creation of a new public park, part-financed by the Government’s now-ended Future High Streets Fund.

In Nottingham, though, the Broad Marsh redevelopment has made slow progress. On three occasions, the council failed to secure Levelling Up funds (remember that?) to finance further demolition. Last May, the architecture firm BDP unveiled its masterplan for the area, in response to Heatherwick’s vision, and in September the “Green Heart” park finally opened. Even so, much of the area remains a building site. Just as bad, and echoing the errors of earlier decades, the Broad Marsh plans are now being adapted in the hopes of securing private investment, with a question mark hanging over keeping that ambitious steel frame — sparked by hesitancy from investors and developers over its viability.

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Whatever comes next must be scrutinized — particularly given the poor decisions of the past. At the height of that mid-century boom, it was not uncommon for municipal amenities to be dropped from final planning schemes, as indeed happened with an undelivered batch of houses at Broad Marsh. With the financial burden of intu’s disastrous departure weighing heavy on the council’s books, any redevelopment in Nottingham clearly needs to pay. But if the past 60 years have shown anything, it’s that the shopping center is no longer (if it ever was) at the forefront of rejuvenating Britain’s urban cores. For this reason, we should be skeptical of anyone claiming that redevelopment needs yet more retail space.

Housing, indeed, is emerging as one of the clearest alternative uses for shopping centers, especially as one way of meeting Labour’s agenda for 1.5 million new homes. But that, too, must come with caveats. In 2020, housing activist Bob Colenutt wrote of a “finance-housebuilding complex” and described it as a root cause of Britain’s ongoing housing crisis. Among other things, he noted that developers are not obliged to follow through on ancillary amenities — health centers, bus stops — once construction is under way. At the same time, recent research suggests that 75% of new housing developments are mediocre or poor, while the majority of Build to Rent developments are operated by foreign private investment funds. It all sounds remarkably like the partnerships that local authorities found themselves entangled in six decades ago.

Though, in short, it makes sense for housing to be high up the agenda for the Broad Marsh redevelopment, there is also an opportunity for the council to be bold. With the area back in public ownership — as is the case with many derelict shopping centers across Britain — the council should insist on a robust, beautiful vision for Nottingham’s new urban quarter. In practice, that means reinvesting in public spaces and local enterprise, from well-designed pedestrian walkways to rent-capped commercial units for local business. For my part, I’d like to see planners retain a small section of Broad Marsh’s broken frame, as a reminder of global capital’s fickle promise of urban utopia.

Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.   

Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”. 

Medieval social hierarchy divided England roughly into three “estates”, according to historian Ian Mortimer: the lords who governed, the clergy who prayed, and everyone else who worked. But as Mortimer also shows, there was huge variation among workers. Pop-history sometimes caricatures feudal life as starkly divided between lords and grubby, miserable peons after the fashion of Monty Python, or perhaps Baldrick in Blackadder. But in reality, the workers’ estate varied immensely — notably in how free they were. 

“Villeins” were tied to a great estate, and entitled to work a portion of its land in exchange labour. They were, in a sense, part of the estate’s “property” and estates that changed hands were sold complete with tied villeins. But over time, and at accelerating pace after the Black Death in the 14th century, much freer working-class groups emerged: the yeomen. Some of these, Mortimer explains, were small farmers with a freehold on their land — a class that gained in prominence with the sharp population fall after the plague. Others might be tradesmen who, again, could command much higher wages due to the labour shortage. 

Meanwhile, over the Hundred Years’ War, yeomen had also become strongly associated with the development of semi-professional soldiery — and particularly with England’s increasingly lethal longbowmen. As one military historian describes, these highly skilled archers came increasingly to typify the rising importance accorded to merit, over inherited rank.

By the time Robin Hood was first mentioned in Piers Plowman, the yeomen’s real-world independence created a class far less compliant than indentured villeins. It was yeomen who led the so-called “Peasants’ Revolt” which erupted in 1381 against John of Gaunt’s excessive taxation. 

Robin Hood emerges, then, as a folkloric representation of this emerging middle class. But in a twist that perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the risks of lawlessness attached to yeomen’s relative freedom, he was also depicted as an outlaw. In medieval justice, this category was reserved for criminals deemed so dangerous they were denied all protection of the law. But in an England whose total population was about half that of modern London, such fugitives would simply flee to forests or other under-populated areas, where they would survive on a mixture of foraging, poaching, and banditry. 

There were many such gangs in the medieval English wilderness, meaning travellers were wise to travel with armed retainers, or as we might call them today “thugs”. But unlike Robin, most historic leaders of outlaw gangs were minor aristocrats, and these gangs would rob, rape, and kill anyone. By contrast, the Robin Hood of early folklore is a yeoman and skilled archer, like the soldiers of the Hundred Years’ War — and while he’s often violent, early stories often emphasise that he directs his attacks only at priests and lords. 

The medieval Robin combines Christian piety with violent contempt for actual priests, and displays a kind of class solidarity even across formal differences in social rank: he often shows sympathy to impoverished knights, while scorning, scamming, or even murdering great lords. In one 15th-century work, The Gest of Robin Hood, for example, Robin lends money to a poor knight so he can reclaim his lands from a villainous abbot. Later, Little John has a huge punch-up with another lord’s personal chef only for both men to shake hands, get drunk together, rob the lord and return to Robin in the greenwood.

The sense that emerges is of a germinal middle class, finding an imaginative language for self-representation. Overall, the sensibility that emanates is volatile, competitive, bloodthirsty, and full of lust for life: a hardy group, independent-minded to the point of recklessness, and shaped against the impersonal forces of church and governance by luck, courage, and in-group loyalty. They are recognisably the class of loyal, warlike Englishmen whom Samuel Johnson would describe in 1760 as possessing “a kind of epidemick bravery”. 

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This pious, violent, sentimental but always fiercely vital character couldn’t be further from the purse-lipped, curtain-twitching sensibility commonly associated with England’s modern middle class. This transformation began in the 19th century; it too can be traced via that era’s reimagining of Robin Hood, from the merry and violent medieval hero into the version whose disappearance from Nottingham Building Society has caused such a kerfuffle.

Johnson’s description of “epidemick bravery” among the English soldiery was written amid yet another round of war with France, now intensified and globalised by these rival nations’ competition for colonial territories. Just four years after that conflict concluded with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Sir Walter Scott defined Robin Hood for Britain’s era of peak nationalism, in his epic three-novel reimagining of 12th-century England, Ivanhoe: a text that arguably made an equivalent contribution to Victorian Britain’s self-image as the cowboy myth did in 20th-century America. 

The story centres on an Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family, struggling to survive amid dastardly Norman occupiers that Victorian readers no doubt gleefully identified with their recently defeated French antagonists. It’s all set against the backdrop of the Crusades, and the forest-dwelling “Robin of Locksley” makes numerous appearances and does heroic things before pledging fealty to the returning Richard the Lionheart. More or less every Robin Hood since has the heroic, patriotic outlaw-underdog traits first depicted by Scott, and many repeat his motifs: for example Ivanhoe is the origin of the famous moment, immortalised by Arrow Cam in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin splits his opponent’s arrow in an archery contest. 

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It’s thanks to Scott, then, that Robin Hood became indelibly linked to patriotism, Englishness, royalism, and (more obliquely) national triumph against those damnable French (ahem, sorry, Norman) fops. But does this Robin make sense today? After all, the global empire that gave rise to and was legitimised by it was dismantled half a century ago. So there’s little point in writing angry articles about the evaporation of its last symbolic memories, save to spare Telegraph readers the pain of thinking too directly about the political and territorial realities driving that evaporation.

And also follows that in the context of modern post-imperial Britain it probably makes sense to bin the Victorian Robin Hood. Aside from anything else, his high imperial Ivanhoe connotations are surely out of keeping with a Nottingham that, since 2001, has gone from 81% white British to almost half ethnic minority according to the 2021 census. Under those circumstances, we can hardly blame the Nottingham Building Society for pivoting away from British Empire-coded symbology toward the more nebulous and ductile “financial diversity”. 

Meanwhile where are England’s yeomen now? For some time now, the picture for what’s left of this class has been bleak. Commentators have long remarked on the hollowing-out of middle class life in the British Isles, and the way both Tories and, now, Labour, seem always to favour policies that fall hardest on their shoulders. 

But perhaps it’s less that they’ve been obliterated, than — like Robin of old — they’re fleeing the priests and sheriffs who would bind them. In Samuel Johnson’s time, or indeed that of Sir Walter Scott, those with the vitality, courage, and lawlessness of the medieval Robin Hood might have found an outlet Great Britain’s imperial sprawl. But where would such a character flourish today? And the grim answer is: probably not in England. Instead, today’s Robin Hood might be flouting employment law to make a fortune job-stacking from a beach in Indonesia, or outraging polite society as a danger tourist in Afghanistan. Perhaps he’d be a mercenary, in one of the modern world’s less-than-completely-official warzones. Perhaps he’d be across the Atlantic, dreaming of conquering the stars.

For there’s still plenty of wilderness in the world, for those yeomen with a taste for danger and a casual attitude to the rules. But there’s none in Sherwood now: just shabby Victorian terraces. The men of the greenwood are all gone, roaming further afield.

Half an hour before kick-off, an ugly grey-yellow cloud drifted over the ground and unleashed a ferocious hailstorm, worsening conditions significantly. But the decision had been made. A large crowd was already inside. The game was going ahead. Charlie Hurley, Sunderland’s revered captain, missed an early penalty. Even 50 years later, he was asking himself whether things might have been different had he converted it. Then, with 27 minutes played, Clough chased a slightly overhit through-ball. Had Sunderland been 1-0 up, might he have been slightly less aggressive?

Clough stretched for the ball and collided with the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. As Harker’s shoulder crunched into high right knee, Clough flipped over the top of him and hit his head on the icy ground. For a couple of seconds, there was darkness. Then he tried to get up but his leg would not respond. He crawled hopelessly and then collapsed; both medial and cruciate ligaments were torn. Clough’s career as a centre-forward was over.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Clough from stomach cancer at the age of 69. Yet he remains a surprisingly constant presence in the mind of English football, the ideal of a particular type of manager, irascible, unpredictable and charismatic, a leader who inspired his teams largely by force of personality. He lives on in countless clips in which he is outrageous, charming and funny, most notably the episode of Calendar on the day he had been sacked by Leeds in which he and his predecessor Don Revie go toe-to-toe.

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It’s extraordinary television and has drawn comparison with the debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had come out on top, while those who watched on television believed the handsome Kennedy had run rings around his sweating opponent. Here too, if you actually listen to the words, Revie makes some good points, but it doesn’t matter, because he is ponderous and thickset, while Clough is nimble, sharp and amusingly provocative. He is also, fairly obviously, pissed.

It wasn’t until the late Nineties when the Arsenal captain Tony Adams spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction that football began to take its relationship with booze seriously. That Clough descended into alcoholism is well known but it tends to be an addendum to his story. His appearance in his final season at Nottingham Forest, when he oversaw their relegation 16 years after he’d led them to promotion, couldn’t be ignored, his skin turned now red and blotchy. It happened to be the season of great change in English football when the First Division switched to the Premiership and the sense was that the new football had no place for mavericks like Clough.

It was a convenient framing. The iconoclast who, armed with little more than a sharp wit, dragged himself up from Hartlepools, got Derby promoted and won the league with them, blew up at Leeds, served his time in the wilderness at Brighton and then returned to lead Forest in the space of four seasons to promotion, a league title and two European Cups, before finding the economics of football had rendered obsolete his brand of messianic unorthodoxy.

And it wasn’t untrue. But there is another way of looking at Clough’s story. He was a prolific and brilliant goalscorer for Middlesbrough then Sunderland, scoring 250 goals in 271 league games before the injury, all in the Second Division. His only top-flight goal came in one of the three matches he played as he attempted a comeback in 1964-65 before accepting, aged 29, that his career was over. Even in the second flight, though, he’d forced his way into the England reckoning; there’s a not especially fanciful alternate reality in which he didn’t get injured, Sunderland were promoted in 1962-63 (rather than missing out by a single point having played half a season without his goals) and he was in the England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966.

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Before the injury, Clough was almost teetotal. “He never had a smoke or a drink — well, maybe a half, you know, when he went out,” said his Middlesbrough team-mate Derek McLean. Clough and other Boro players used to go to a café owned by popstar Chris Rea’s father, Camillo, who persuaded him to replace his regular milkshakes with Oxo as a healthier option.

But the injury changed him. After an operation, Clough was in plaster for three months and admitted he would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how little he had to offer. Brian alone among the eight Clough children who survived to adolescence had failed his 11-plus. He then failed an apprenticeship at ICI. Without his goals, he was just somebody who hadn’t been able to cut it as a turner-and-fitter. He went through arduous rehab, running up the steps in the stadium and along the beach at Roker, but it wasn’t enough. He showed some promise coaching the youth team but Sunderland, desperate for the insurance money that would come when it was confirmed his injury was career-ending, were callous in letting him go. He became embittered and began to drink.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

It’s a strikingly odd comparison, but it’s one that recurs. “I don’t have any O-levels, I don’t have any A-levels,” he said in a TV interview after his retirement, “and when my children chastise me and give me stick… I put my European Cup medals on the table, my Championship medals. I’ve got a tableful — they’re my O-levels and A-levels.” Throughout his career, Clough was reliably anti-intellectual, and yet his 11-plus clearly haunted him. There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.

Clough’s Derby County were controversially beaten by Juventus in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. In both his autobiographies and countless interviews, he spoke of his distress that night, coming home and receiving the phone call that his mother had died. But it wasn’t true. She had actually died a month earlier, on the night that Derby had beaten Spartak Trnava in the quarter-final. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he conflated the events because he had vowed in his own mind that winning the European Cup would earn his mother’s approbation, and that, as he saw it, cheating Italians had stolen that from him?

If that is the case, if winning the European Cup to honour his mother’s memory became a grail, then suddenly his otherwise incomprehensible decision a year later to take over at Leeds United, a club he had repeatedly attacked, becomes explicable: as league champions, they were in the European Cup and so offered an immediate pathway to his ultimate goal. As it turned out, he lasted just 44 tempestuous days at Leeds and the European Cup wins came in 1979 and 1980, with Nottingham Forest. 

The achievement was remarkable, but behind it all lay booze. When a friend visited him in his hotel in Leeds to help look for a house, Clough preferred to lie on the bed, drinking cans of beer, watching the cricket on television — as though perhaps he knew even then that there was no point buying property there. There was booze to calm everybody’s nerves on the night before major finals, booze to celebrate wins, booze to deal with the eternal grind of one game after another, booze to deal with the pain of his break-up with his old friend and assistant Peter Taylor and, in the end, booze just to get by.

The European Cup in 1980 was Clough’s last great success. There were League Cups after that but by the early Nineties, idiosyncrasy and eccentricity had become unreliability and rudeness, his genius had curdled into cantankerousness. After relegation came treatment, excruciating television appearances, illness and death.

Clough’s brilliance is undeniable. Only three other managers have ever won the league with more than one club, and nobody has done it with two medium-sized provincial sides; he had an extraordinary gift. But he never escaped the shame of his 11-plus, never got over the knee injury that denied him playing glory, never perhaps felt he had earned the love of his mother. And his response was to drown himself in alcohol.

His story was one of greatness, but behind the charisma and the outrageousness, it is also one of tragedy.