Nunsthorpe

Nunsthorpe (known locally as 'The Nunny') is a suburb and housing estate in the western part of Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, England. It is situated between Laceby Road (A46) and Scartho Road (A1243), which respectively form its northern and eastern boundaries. The population is listed in the South ward of the North East Lincolnshire Unitary Council.

There are over 2,400 homes on the estate, mostly former council properties now owned by the Lincolnshire Housing Partnership. There is a small area belonging to the Havelok/Northern Counties housing associations and a small area of private sector housing. There are a number of privately owned former council houses purchased under the Right to Buy scheme.

The pre-Second World War development in the eastern part of the estate is known as Old Nunsthorpe while the post-war development is called New Nunsthorpe. To the west lies the Bradley Park Estate which contains around 430 dwellings, also mostly LHP properties. The combined population of Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park is approximately 8,000.

To the north, on the other side of Laceby Road, is the Grange Estate and on the eastern boundary, in Scartho Road, was Grimsby Swimming Pool, which closed and was subsequently demolished.Scartho Baths closure: Council urges people to back new pool and not look to the past . This is Grimsby (1 March 2013). The Scartho Top private housing estate lies to the south. Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park are part of the Grimsby South ward of North East Lincolnshire unitary authority.North East Lincolnshire Council . Nelincs.gov.uk. The two estates are also within the area served by the South ward neighbourhood teamSouth » Grimsby South and Central » A Division » Humberside Police. Humberside.police.uk. of Humberside Police, based at the police station on Laceby Road.

In 2010 improvements to Nunsthorpe were acknowledged by the environmental campaign group Keep Britain Tidy. A quality mark was awarded after an independent assessment of improvement work undertaken on the estate by Shoreline and partners, Humberside Police and North East Lincolnshire Council, with the assistance of residents.. This is Grimsby (10 February 2010).

Origins

Although built in the 20th century, Nunsthorpe takes its name from the nuns who once inhabited the priory of Saint Leonard.House of Austin nuns – The priory of St Leonard, Grimsby | A History of the County of Lincoln: Volume 2 (pp. 179). British-history.ac.uk (22 June 2003). This stood at modern day Nuns Corner, where Scartho Road joins Laceby Road. "Thorpe" was an old word for hamlet or village. The priory was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. In later years the land was occupied by Nuns Farm, until its demolition in 1935. In 1944 Grimsby College, now called The Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education, acquired the site.

Situated at the southern edge of Grimsby (before the boundary extensions), for centuries the land where Nunsthorpe now stands was farmed using the open field system of agriculture. Lying mainly within the town of Grimsby it stretched westward from the priory, as far as the boundary with Bradley parish and southward, beyond the boundary with the parish of Scartho. Under enclosure awards of 1798 (in Scartho) and 1840 (in Grimsby), this land was acquired by successive Lords Yarborough.

Old Nunsthorpe

Following the end of the First World War decent homes were needed for the returning servicemen. House building was started by Grimsby County Borough Council in 1920, on land bought from Lord Yarborough. Originally called the Laceby Road Site until 1923 the new Nunsthorpe housing estate, with its modern conveniences and large gardens was, as previously mentioned, also known as Garden City.

Most of the streets in this early development, built during the 1920s and 1930s, were named after notable people – Burns, Byron, Kingsley, Leighton, Newton, Walton groves; Milton Road and Shelley Avenue. Dame Kendal Grove was named after a Grimsby-born actress while Sutcliffe Avenue was named after Jack Sutcliffe, a previous mayor of Grimsby.

Saint Martin's Mission Church, a wooden building, was built during 1922 in Sutcliffe Avenue; this was replaced by a new church in 1937. There is still a structure on this site which is currently the base for Grimsby Judo Club. The first shops, including a post office, were built in Second Avenue during 1927–28 and a bus service (route 3) was introduced from Grimsby town centre to Nunsthorpe in 1928. In later years this service was extended to Cleethorpes.

Also in 1928 the greater part of Scartho was absorbed by Grimsby, which brought the whole of the present Nunsthorpe area under the control of Grimsby council. At the same time part of Bradley parish was acquired on which the Bradley Park Estate would eventually be built.

Nunsthorpe's population was further increased when, resulting from the Housing Act 1930, slum clearance was carried out in the Grimsby town centre and the residents were moved to new houses on the estate. By 1939 around 700 houses had been built in Nunsthorpe.

Nunsthorpe School was opened on Sutcliffe Avenue in 1931; previously children from the estate had been bussed to a school in another part of the town. It was two schools housed within one building, one for junior and one for senior pupils. By 1952 all the senior children had been transferred to a new school in Chelmsford Avenue.

During the late 1920s a maternity hospital was established in Second Avenue using converted council houses. This was incorporated into a new building which opened in 1933. In 1943 a number of people were killed and houses were damaged when butterfly bombs were dropped on the estate during a German air raid on Grimsby.

New Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park

The absorption of Scartho into Grimsby made available more land for house building. The pre-1928 boundary between Grimsby and Scartho ran past the Scartho Road Institution (now part of the Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital) to what is the present-day rear gate of the hospital grounds at the end of Second Avenue, next to the resource centre.

From there it continued westward through fields that would eventually become part of the New Nunsthorpe council housing development. It ran south of what is now Redbourne Road, crossed Winchester Avenue, ran to the north of Kirkstead Crescent, along Scawby Road until it reached Stainton Drive. The amalgamation made this boundary obsolete.

In this post-Second World War New Nunsthorpe development the streets were mostly named after Lincolnshire villages, with the exception of Winchester Avenue and a few streets in an area of private housing, which were named after historic English towns. The development included the single-storey prefabricated buildings (prefabs), which were built in 1946 to help alleviate the housing shortage.

In 1947 a large wooden hut was purchased and erected in Burwell Drive. This became the estate's earliest community centre, opened in 1949, at the same time the Nunsthorpe's first community association was formed. In 1951 saw the Nunsthorpe Nursery School opened, and in 1952 the branch library in Wootton Road was established.

In 1963 the Viking Superstore, which had been converted from three smaller shops into one self-service supermarket, was opened in Second Avenue. Coronation Street stars Pat Phoenix and Philip Lowrie addressed an estimated crowd of 5,000 people in the open air before the official opening. This is Grimsby (28 April 2012).

During the late 1970s the Bradley Park Estate was built on land between Stainton Drive and the Bradley Recreation Ground. This land had once been part of Bradley parish. Some place names in Bradley Park, such as Bremerhaven Way, reflect Grimsby's links with its twin town, although Wymark View was named after the actor who was born in nearby Cleethorpes. The development also included Crosby School (now called Woodlands).

Improvement schemes and resident consultation

In 1992, for purposes of resident consultation, Grimsby borough council, then a district of Humberside County Council, divided the area into four neighbourhoods. Because of its size New Nunsthorpe was split into two neighbourhoods – Nunsthorpe Central and Nunsthorpe West, while Old Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park formed the remaining two. Each area had a steering committee.

At that time discussions were taking place on the possibility of setting up a tenant management organisation in each neighbourhood. Independent housing consultants, Priority Estates Project, were brought in to canvass the views of residents but nothing developed from this idea.

In 1994 the Department for the Environment approved multimillion-pound funding for Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park. This Estate Action scheme allowed for internal improvements to council houses and general improvements, such as better street lighting, the provision of off-road parking facilities and dropped kerbs for the convenience of wheelchair users. It also included the installation of traffic calming measures.

All the prefabs of aluminium construction were renovated and are still in use. However, most of the prefabs containing asbestos were demolished between 1994 and 1997. Of the original 181 such prefabs only three owner-occupied ones now remain. Local housing association, Havelok and the Northern Counties housing association, were allocated part of the vacant prefab land for the construction of properties. Some of the land remained empty, part of it forming the open grassed area situated between Burwell Drive and Winchester Avenue.

Consultative forum The Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park Consultative Forum, established in 1992 to co-ordinate the neighbourhood steering groups, was reorganised and became directly elected by a postal ballot of residents at two yearly periods.

The reconstituted forum held its inaugural meeting in 1995, with annual general meetings being held thereafter. In addition to the delegates elected from 13 areas (later reduced to six), ward councillors and council officers also attended meetings of the main committee and sub-committees. The forum was dissolved in 2004.

The forum had three sub-committees, one being the Economic, Social and Cultural Development sub-committee (ESCD). Another sub-committee dealt with council tenant issues only, while the third concerned itself with wider estate action improvements, which affected tenants and homeowners. As circumstances changed, these sub-committees were gradually merged with the main committee.

Representatives from local churches, schools, the police and other bodies were invited to attend ESCD meetings as observers. Along with various local agencies, the ESCD had delegates on the project team charged with establishing a resource centre on the estate.

When the Sutcliffe Special School moved to a new site at Humberston, the empty building in Second Avenue was acquired from the local council at a nominal rent. Resident volunteers helped to clean and decorate the building, transforming it into the new Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park Resource Centre. The project was funded initially from the Single Regeneration Budget, although the aim was for the centre eventually to become self-financing.

Two residents associations, Bradley Park and Nunsthorpe Central, which existed between 1993 and 1999, sent voting delegates to the forum. These associations had replaced the steering committees for their respective neighbourhoods. They were also closely involved with the establishment of the resource centre. Previously operating from members' homes, when the centre opened in 1995 the associations were able to establish permanent headquarters there.