Manuscripts & Special Collections
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Admission free
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 12noon-4pm
Closed Mondays
Through vivid local stories, Last Orders examines the tensions that mark Britain’s changing relationship with drink. Politicians, publicans, drinkers, doctors, and teetotallers clashed over the place of drink. For some, drinking beer was an expression of liberty. Brewing beer was a source of local pride, and for centuries selling beer had provided employment and tax revenues. In the nineteenth century, however, temperance reformers were ready to call time on drinking. They held drink responsible for disorder. It was harmful to health, corrupting to local politics, and damaging to economic activity.
This exhibition has been jointly curated by Dr David Beckingham (School of Geography) and Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.
Image credit: William and Robert Chambers, Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts (1845). Briggs Collection, LT210.A /C4.
Image credit: L-R Portrait of the 1st Duke of Newcastle under Lyne and the 7th Earl of Lincoln, c.1721. Newcastle Collection, Ne 4 2/15 | Bloomsgrove Mission Temperance scroll, 1883. Castle Gate Congregational Church Collection, CU/Z3/R/1 | Thomas Miller, Gideon Giles The Roper (1841). East Midlands Special Collection, Lin 1.W8 MIL