Trowell is a village situated on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, and residing within the Borough of Broxtowe in the County of Nottinghamshire in England.
Trowell is an old Saxon settlement believed to date back to the tenth century. By 1066 Trowell was a well developed parish with four manors, a church with two priests, and a population of probably around fifty souls. At the beginning of the 13th century coal was being worked on Trowell Moor, and conveyed to Nottingham by the river Erewash.
The moor also yielded excellent building stone – sandstone from the coal measures – and in 1478 Trowell stone went to the strengthening and enlargement of Nottingham Castle. Coal was mined in Trowell until 1928. Enclosures took place at Trowell under the act of 1787; when the transformation of nearly 252 acres of moor and waste into hedged fields began to give the parish something like its modern form.
The turnpike road from Nottingham to Belper (through Trowell and Ilkeston) was constructed in 1745.
The Nottingham Canal had been cut by the end of the 18th century, and in 1820 conveyed 320,000 tons of merchandise.
The main railway line was laid in 1845, and the Radford link in 1878. Trowell station had a useful life of more than one hundred years. There are currently active moves being made to reopen the station. The M1 motorway, which bisects the village, was constructed in 1966, and the Trowell Motorway Services lies within the parish.
In 1951 Trowell became Britain’s Festival Village. It was chosen from among 1600 villages in the Festival of Britain souvenir programme as a representative English rural community, because of the ‘ambition and courage’ of its Festival Scheme, and the fact that it lies within a few miles of the exact centre of England.
Another reason was its ‘unusual name’. The 50th anniversary of Trowell becoming the Festival Village was celebrated in 2001 within the village.
In the late 1980’s the village increased in size by approximately 350 homes, with the building of the Trowell Park estate.