Public Transport and the Meadows
Electric Trams at Trent Bridge
Of all the residential areas around Nottingham, the Meadows is the best served for public transport (and indeed private transport).
With two major bus routes running through the Meadows, fifteen major bus routes running along the periphery of the Meadows and both Tram routes covering us, it should be a simple matter for us to lower our carbon footprint.
In fact, the Meadows has a long association with public transport, with the current Portland Baths site originally home to horse-drawn and later steam-powered trams. The first electric trams came into operation in 1901, a couple of years after the transport company became municipalised and motorbuses were introduced in 1906. These were run from and serviced at the Bunbury Street bus depot which opened in 1901. By the end of 1902, there were 105 electric trams in service.
Nottingham Horse Drawn Tram
Nottingham Bus Services
The bus system went electric again in 1927 with the introduction of trolleybuses. These ran within the city up until 1965 when there were over 155 vehicles in the fleet based at both the Meadows and Parliament Street Depots.
A Trolley Bus on the Embankment
Trolley Buses at the Bunbury Street Depot
Nottingham City Council retained 100% ownership of the bus company until May 2001.
In 2007, Nottingham City Transport became the first Bus Company in the UK to introduce ethanol powered ‘Eco’ buses. These lasted until 2013 when it became unviable to source ethanol, and by 2017 the double-decker fleet based at the Parliament Street garage had been reconfigured using gas power. By 2018 Nottingham was running the biggest gas-powered fleet in the world.
Gas Powered Nottingham City Transport Bus
The Meadows Depot is currently home to Nottingham’s single-decker fleet using low emission diesel buses, but plans are underway to change over to electric buses – see later.
In a separate initiative beginning in 2012, Nottingham City Council (named Nottingham Community Transport) purchased a fleet of their own electric buses. These run from the Park and Ride locations and Centrelink services. In 2021 there were fifty-eight buses in this fleet.
Nottingham Community Transport Electric Bus
In 2020, the Bunbury Street Bus Depot was listed as Grade II by English Heritage.
The New Nottingham Tram
A tram entering the Meadows
Nottingham Express Transit (NET) was built in two phases. The first phase which opened in 2004 was a single line running from the City Centre to Hucknall and didn’t service the Meadows at all. The second phase, which was completed in 2015, included two lines that ran through the Meadows – one going to Clifton and the other to the Queen’s Medical Centre, Beeston and terminating at Toton. The trams that run on the different lines are by different manufacturers.
Extensions to these lines have been proposed to Fairham Pastures beyond Clifton (serving a new housing development), to the HS2 site at Toton and on to Derby. The trams are now run on 100% renewable electricity.
New NCT Electric Bus Fleet
In March 2022, Nottingham City Transport announced that it was to receive £15 million in grants from the Government to purchase 78 new electric buses and make changes to the charging infrastructure at the Bunbury Street Garage in the Meadows where the buses would be based. The new buses will replace the entire NCT single-decker fleet.
Solar Panels will be placed on the roof of the bus garage so the buses can be charged overnight from the energy accumulated throughout the day. The transformer station on the edge of the bus garage site will also be upgraded to accommodate any extra energy requirements.
Electric bus
