Porchester Press

13/11/2025

So much praise from all quarters for the play Punch that was formed in Nottingham, premiered in Nottingham and has reached the world of theatre.

Police use their own code in conversations. When a detective says "ABH gone wrong”, what do they really mean?
Is it code, cold detachment - or
something darker?
Behind every headline and police press briefing lies a secret language: blunt, efficient, and sometimes brutal.
In this episode Of The Detective's Files, we decode the jargon of murder investigations - uncovering how
words can reveal, conceal, and
even distort the truth. It's a rare
glimpse inside the mind of the
police and the media they feed.

https://open.spreaker.com/A4NZ/so4387kd

13/11/2025

Modern Mapperley owes its existence to the car and the roads that supply it. At over 400 feet above sea level and on a ridge between the main route north from Nottingham and the river, few would walk up it without good reason. Here's a short article on the history of the area.

11/11/2025

10/11/2025

Nottingham's first river crossing in my lifetime is almost in place.

03/11/2025

It’s only right to take them to task

There’s no American Dream behind the mask

Just psychos in suits hiding a dark reputation

Dollars, guns and bibles driving the nation 

A soulless culture in a vacuum flask 

🇺🇸💵🤠🇺🇸💵🤠🇺🇸💵🤠

My introduction to our two-part special, where we ask why the United States has given the world more serial killers than any other country. 

https://open.spreaker.com/A4NZ/agmplwcq

03/11/2025

Thanks to the excellent The Sheriff of Nottingham for sharing a wonderful map of our shire in 1086 that shows the historic Anglo Saxon place names.

We have cropped the image to show the area around Mapperley.

You will recognise most of them as they still exist today, with different spelling.

For example Stoches would appear to be Stoke Bardolph. An important part of the river back then too.

This was of course prior to the Norman French influence where the S was dropped from Snottingeham to give us plain old Nottingham.

This map was produced and credited to the late John Garnons Williams.

30/10/2025

Nurse Waddingham is a name that still resonates in Sherwood Nottingham.

Mahatma Gandhi said: 'the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members'. 

In this case, the murders of a mother and daughter in Nottingham represent a damning indictment of British society in the 1930s. 

Nursing homes were unregulated, doctors played God, and their decisions went unchallenged. It was a toxic soup that nourished the likes of Dorothea Waddingham and Ronald Sullivan, as former homicide detective Jacques Morrell explains.

https://spreaker.onelink.me/A4NZ/zzrntfna

29/10/2025

Memories of Marple Square, Mapperley Street, the Sherwood Railways Tunnel and Mapperley's favourite chip shop

29/10/2025

Jacques visits a village in Derbyshire England, scene of the appalling Pottery Cottage murders.
January 1977. An escaped prisoner is on the run, in a snowstorm. Police believed that he would continue towards the main road, and not onto the open moors in such treacherous conditions. However, William Hughes had done exactly that.

Two hours later, he came across Pottery Cottage. Two days later the most unimaginable crime had been committed and ‘Mad Billy’ made another break for it.
Here’s Jacques speaking from the location of this appalling case.

Want to hear the full story? It features on our podcast

https://youtu.be/JR5215YjTaE?si=q7o3eQsN5AYpQeOQ

25/10/2025

25/10/2025

A fantastic evening of traditional Irish storytelling at Greyfriars Club in Nottingham last night. Dancing, jokes, music, poetry and songs from the old days performed by the Rambling House group.