Working class hero

We spent the weekend in Nottingham on the trail of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, exactly 50 years after the book was filmed there. And now it was Sunday afternoon.

It was a weekend of criss-crossing the city talking about the novel's no-punches-pulled vision of working class life and youthful rebellion. And about Alan Sillitoe, its Nottingham-born author. And, incidentally, about the smallest cinema in the world.

Now we were driving home. We switched on the car radio for the lunchtime news and there was Sillitoe's voice, with its wry edge and its dry intelligence. And then people talking about him; alarmingly in the past tense. And then the newsreader: "Alan Sillitoe, one of the original Angry Young Men, who has died at the age of 82..."

"Angry Young Man"... Sillitoe wasn't keen on that label. It fitted the book's edgy main character, Arthur Seaton, better than it fitted him. "Once a rebel, always a rebel," said Seaton, "a working class Don Juan... a hard-drinking Teddy-boy type" as the Nottingham Evening Post described him during the filming.

The role made a star of the young Albert Finney ("he has an odd kind of aggressive charm," one critic wrote) and the film ushered in a new school of gritty British film-making. It defined the look of industrial England – forever black-and-white. So what survives of the locations which director Karel Reisz used half a century ago?

Not much in the suburb of Radford. Sillitoe grew up here in a terrace house, where the Nottingham paper photographed Shirley Ann Field, playing Seaton's girlfriend, helping the author's mother hang out her washing in the back yard. A fine bit of synchronised pegging.

The house has gone and the area is now all light industry, warehouses and car washes. The Raleigh bicycle factory, where Sillitoe started work at 14, was a major location, but it has gone too, replaced by student flats. Sillitoe Court, they're called. "Protect the Human," says a sign in one window, a nice echo of Arthur Seaton's "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

There used to be a Finney's Bar here. My wife remembers it from a few years back when she did a radio programme with Sillitoe. Now it's called the Beach Bar. "It's a pity in a way," says owner Terry Crofts, who inherited the new name when he took over three years ago. "My father worked at Raleigh from being a boy until he retired. He loved the film for the shots of the factory."

The Savoy Cinema, which has a bit-part in the film, is still there, along with the White Horse pub, where Finney clattered drunk down the stairs. The ornate Victorian tiles are still there, but it's been converted into a smart new caf. Nottingham has moved on. And we do too, driving into the city centre through a smart modern estate called Kittiwake Mews and along Brian Clough Way. Another rebel.

The centre, with its vast market square, is a thriving place, full of shopping, far more cosmopolitan than you might expect in a city this size. But I could happily spend a whole weekend just down the hill in the Lace Market area.

Lace, of course, used to be the big industry here, but it's shrunk and the area has been transformed. Canyons of brick-built factories and warehouses have become apartments, all atmospheric archways and alleys and cobbled streets. Urban chic, if you like (Sillitoe, I guess, wouldn't have).

Among the pavement cafs is the award-winning Galleries of Justice, a museum of crime and punishment that's more interesting than it sounds. You can follow the fates of real criminals from history. The descendants of a man transported to Australia in 1832 for rioting, turned up a few years ago and staff showed them the exercise yard where he had carved his name on the wall.

Across the road is St Mary's Church, as big as many a cathedral with acres of stained glass, a plaque to Thomas Berdmore, George III's dentist, and horse chestnut trees all around. It's alongside the Lace Market Hotel, boutiquey but comfortable and created in a pair of Georgian townhouses. And down the road is Nottingham Contemporary, a slabbish new arts centre clinging to the side of a hill.

When I drop in, the signs say it's hosting the AGM of Bus Users UK, and there are certainly plenty of men in pullovers and sports jackets who look like bus users. But I suspect it's a post-modern theatre event.

Nearby Hockley, a place of milk bars and pioneer Chinese restaurants in Sillitoe's day, is now all retro and boho and Soho-ish, full of tea shops, proper pubs, delis, shops selling circus equipment, and the first Boots the Chemist, now the friendly and fashionable Larder on Goosegate restaurant, with its 1940s drop-leaf tables and big, high windows.

And then... the smallest cinema in the world.

Blink and you miss it. Up a narrow alley is Screen Room, where manager Stephen Jones takes me on a guided tour.

"This is the box office," he says. "This is the toilet and that's the cinema." And that's the tour. "I've put a film on that you might recognise."

I push open the auditorium doors and, on the far wall of a room about the size of a suburban lounge (it seats 21 over four rows) is Albert Finney, up on screen and eating his factory sandwiches in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with – what did the critic say? – an odd kind of aggressive charm.

I'm drawn back into it, trying to spot the locations.

Which, after a Saturday night echoing with stag and hen parties, we do on Sunday morning at Nottingham castle, really a stately home that has become a museum and art gallery and a very good one. The castle terrace was a famous location. Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts met up there.

But where it used to overlook smoking chimneys, it now overlooks retail parks.

So far we've avoided Nottingham's main tourist draw – its connection with Sherwood Forest (not to be confused with Nottingham Forest: many foreign visitors are).

A shopkeeper tells us how a man dressed as Robin Hood passed his shop leading a horse the wrong way up a one-way street.

"Oi," the shopkeeper shouted. "This is a one-way street!"

"I don't care," the man shouted back. "I'm an outlaw."

Angry Young Men everywhere.

Lace Market Hotel (0115 852 3232; www.lacemarkethotel.co.uk) has double rooms from 89, bed and breakfast. Nottingham Tourism Centre: 0844 477 5678 or www.discovereastmidlands. com.

YP MAG 10/7/10