h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The river Trent starts off in the Cotswolds and flows out in to the river Humber Eustary. Where it flows through Nottingham it used to be a very important supply line, and was used by the Romans, which gave the first settlement at Nottingham. These days along it's banks are the Nottingham Forest Football stadium, and the famous Trent Bridge Cricket ground.
In the victorian times it used to freeze over, and people would ice skate on the river, however it no longer freezes over. Also anglers used to be able to catch trout in the river, but thanks to pollution this is no longer the case.

Ah, the Trent. I spent many happy hours as a kid playing on the steps between Trent Bridge and the suspension bridge. The right bank always seemed like a foreign country... maybe because of City Ground being over there.

JTG

Ahhh yes the victoria embankment

Ah, the Victoria Embankment...

I was trying to remember if the bit with the nice gardens and the memorial arch had a name of its own. There was a nice reflecting pond, a formal thing with a low cement wall around it, where we used to try to catch frogs and such, being too young for the pub near the bridge.

JTG

As Harry Hill once quipped...
"Terence Trent D'Arby? River Trent doesn't even go through Derby. Ought to be Terence Trent Stoke"

Strangely, when the River Trent goes through Stoke-on-Trent (which, let's face it, by its very name does the most to promote the river of any of the cities it passes through) it's little more than a trickle - it only acquires what I think of as 'proper river' status when it meets the River Sow at Great Haywood, just southeast of Stafford. There, the river runs parallel to the Trent and Mersey Canal and there's a lovely old stone footbridge that links Great Haywood with Shugborough Hall, seat of Lord Lichfield. The river's pretty wide there, but also quite shallow, and when I was growing up it was a lovely place to go - paddling around, making rope swings out of trees overhanging the river, carving things out of sticks, messing around with inflatable dinghies and the like.