The Nottingham suburb once won in a card game
In 1523 the Musters family acquired the West Bridgford estate by winning it at cards. Four centuries later their name is still on its main road, and their tight rules on house sizes shaped a suburb so genteel that Nottingham locals mocked it as Bread and Lard Island, full of people too house-proud to afford proper food.
The town began as a fortification. Between 919 and 924, Edward the Elder had defences and houses built at the southern end of Trent Bridge to shield Nottingham from Danish raids, and a survey from his reign counted 192 inhabitants, 19 of them farmers. By the Domesday survey of 1086 it was a village called Brigeforde, attached to the manor of Clifton. Two spans of the medieval bridge still survive, stranded on a traffic island beside the modern crossing.
The Musters held on for a long time. After the First World War they sold the Trent Bridge Inn and cricket ground to the county club, which flipped the inn to a brewery at a profit. Under pressure they released land for housing, but with conditions: a grid of tree-lined streets, limits on density along the main roads, and a set number of bedrooms per house. Smaller terraces went up on side streets for the servants of Nottingham merchants who had moved in. The result grew from a small mid-nineteenth-century village into a town of over 36,000 by 2021.
Sport runs through the place. Cricket has been played at Trent Bridge since 1838, and the ground staged a Test between England and Australia in 1899; only Lord's and Eden Gardens are older among Test venues. Across the river sits the City Ground, where Nottingham Forest, under Brian Clough between 1975 and 1993, won two European Cups. Locally, West Bridgford Colts runs more than 144 teams and is thought to be the biggest FA-approved football organisation in England.
Shopping history was made here too. In 1964 an American firm, GEM, opened Britain's first major out-of-town superstore on Loughborough Road. The venture struggled, managing only two more branches, and in 1966 a young chain called Asda, owned by a Leeds dairy business, took control. An Asda still trades beside the original site.
Source: West Bridgford
