Nottingham

Nottingham  is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is 128 miles (206 km) north of London, 44 miles (71 km) south of Sheffield, 45 miles (72 km) northeast of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robin Hood and to the lace-making, bicycle, and tobacco industries. Nottingham is also the county town of Nottinghamshire and the settlement was granted its city charter in 1897, as part of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Nottingham is a tourist destination; in 2018, the city received the second-highest number of overnight visitors in the Midlands and the highest number in the East Midlands.

In 2020, Nottingham had an estimated population of 330,000. The wider conurbation, which includes many of the city's suburbs, has a population of 768,638. It is the largest urban area in the East Midlands and the second-largest in the Midlands. Its Functional Urban Area, the largest in the East Midlands, has a population of 919,484. The population of the Nottingham/Derby metropolitan area is estimated to be 1,610,000. The metropolitan economy of Nottingham is the seventh-largest in the United Kingdom with a GDP of $50.9 billion (2014). The city was the first in the East Midlands to be ranked as a sufficiency-level world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network.

Nottingham is a major sporting centre and, in October 2015, was named 'Home of English Sport'. The National Ice Centre, Holme Pierrepont National Watersports Centre, and Trent Bridge international cricket ground are all based in or around the city, which is also the home of two professional football teams: Notts County, formerly the world's oldest professional league club, and Nottingham Forest, famously two-time winners of the UEFA European Cup under Brian Clough and Peter Taylor in 1979 and 1980. The city has professional rugby, ice hockey, and cricket teams, also hosting the Aegon Nottingham Open, an international tennis tournament on the ATP and WTA tours. This accolade came just over a year after Nottingham was named as the UK's first City of Football.

Nottingham's public transport system won awards prior to 2015, including the largest publicly owned bus network in England. The city is served by Nottingham railway station and the modern Nottingham Express Transit tram system. In December 2015, Nottingham was named a 'City of Literature' by UNESCO, joining Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Prague as one of only a handful in the world. The title reflects Nottingham's literary heritage, with Lord Byron, D. H. Lawrence, and Alan Sillitoe having links to the city, as well as a contemporary literary community, a publishing industry, and a poetry scene. The city is served by three universities—the University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, and the Nottingham campus of the University of Law—hosting the highest concentration of higher education providers in the East Midlands.