There is a cave beneath Nottingham that has never been filled in. Cut into the soft sandstone bedrock, it is one of hundreds still running under the modern city streets. A ninth-century Welsh monk called them the mark of a place whose very name meant cavey dwelling. That description is older than England itself.

An Anglian tribe called the Snotingas founded the settlement around 600, giving it their own name. It sat on sandstone above the River Trent, and within three centuries the Great Heathen Army had wintered there, Alfred the Great had marched to its gates, and the Danes had traded it back and forth with Saxon kings for generations.

The Normans arrived in 1067 and planted a motte and bailey castle on Castle Rock. It became the hinge of the realm: Richard the Lionheart recaptured it by siege on his return from the Crusades, King John hanged Welsh hostages from its battlements, and in 1330 the young Edward the Third crept through a secret tunnel beneath it to seize Roger de Mortimer, the nobleman who had been ruling England in his name.

The Black Death struck in 1349 and killed roughly sixty per cent of the population. The town survived, rebuilt, and kept its place at the centre of English politics. Richard the Third marched from here to Bosworth Field in 1485.

In August 1642 Charles the First raised his royal standard on Castle Hill. It was the opening act of the Civil War. Parliamentarians took the castle almost immediately, Royalists failed twice to retake it, and in 1651 the castle was blown apart with gunpowder so no one could use it again.

The city that grew up around the ruin was restless and combustible. Through the eighteenth century, food riots, frame-breaking, and labour disputes shook Market Square repeatedly. In 1811 the Luddite movement began here, attacking the stocking frames that were destroying their livelihoods.

The Reform Riots of 1831 were the sharpest convulsion of all. When the House of Lords rejected a modest parliamentary reform bill, crowds burned Nottingham Castle to a shell and torched Colwick Hall. Three men were hanged on the steps of Shire Hall. The castle stood empty for forty-four years before the town reclaimed it.

From that wreckage the modern city assembled itself with remarkable speed. Notts County, founded in 1862, became the world's first professional football club. Boots the Chemist grew from a single shop. The University of Nottingham opened in 1881. Queen Victoria granted city status in 1897.

In 1975 Brian Clough was appointed manager of Nottingham Forest. Within three years the club were English champions. They won the European Cup in 1979 in Munich, then again in 1980 in Madrid: a city of caves and riots and burning castles, briefly the centre of European football.

The caves are still there. Tours run through them most days. Nottingham has been flooded, besieged, bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941, and set alight by its own citizens more than once. What the sandstone holds, it keeps.