The National Ice Centre is located in Nottingham, in the middle of England. Just east of the city centre, it's close to the historic Lace Market area. As well as ice skating (as you'd expect), it also doubles as the Nottingham Arena, where many popular bands play.

The site has had an ice stadium on it since 1939, but the old building was showing its age: hence it's nickname, "The Barn". To make way for the new stadium it was demolished in July 1997 along with several other buildings, including an Art Deco warehouse on the opposite side of Barker Gate, and bodies had to be exhumed from a 19th Century graveyard found under the car park. This obviously lead to some controversy at the time; but The Old Cricket Players pub was spared, and still sits in the shadow of the new stadium.

The current building was first announced in September 1995 at an estimated cost of £13 million - part of which was to come from National Lottery funds. The plans were unveiled in October 1996, by which time the British Olympic Association had got behind the proposal. The first public skating session took place in April 2000. The final cost of the project was around £40m, 10% of which came from the lottery - one of the highest grants awarded.

The stadium is home to the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey team, founded in 1946 (although disbanded in 1960 and reformed 20 years later). The earlier building was the training ground for Olympic ice dancing champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who lead the first public skating sesion of the new building.

A rare 1,100 year old Saxon jug was turned up during excavations in July 1998. It was put on display at the Nottingham Castle Museum.

External links

Nottingham Arena
A virtual tour of the ice rink, courtesy of the BBC's Nottingham Panthers page

References

--Rich Goodwin 13:54, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)