Assassin city, gun capital, home of binge drinking, the place where the police can't cope. No British city has endured the kind of negative publicity that Nottingham has suffered over the past two years.

High-profile murders, including the 2003 shooting of Marian Bates, a 64-year-old jeweller who was killed in her shop by two men, including a teenager on probation, have helped create the impression of a city flooded with guns and overwhelmed by unprovoked violence.

Six months ago, a 21-year-old man from Nottingham was imprisoned for a running an eBay business called "Guns2Thugs" from his bedroom.

There has been a series of low points. In February 2004, Paddy Tipping, the Labour MP for Sherwood, asked the Home Office to investigate why Nottinghamshire had Britain's highest crime rate over the past 20 years. Police were answering twice as many 999 calls as their counterparts across the country and had more crimes per officer than anywhere else.

Later that year, Stephen Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police, attracted criticism and praise in equal measure after accompanying a BBC Panorama film crew through the city centre on a raucous, violent Saturday night to illustrate the effects of binge drinking.

"The idea that we can somehow sort of transform into a 24-hour café culture a la continental Europe, that ain't going to happen," he said. "I think what we're going to finish up with, if we're not careful, is a 24-hour version of what we've got now, and that is my idea of hell."

The same summer, John and Joan Stirland, a couple from Nottingham whose son was a convicted killer, were murdered in Lincolnshire, where they had fled after being threatened by gunmen in their home city. They were killed 30 minutes after they had called the police to report a man outside their bungalow.

But the event that shocked Britain and galvanised the city came on the evening of October 9, 2004, when Danielle Beccan, a 14-year-old girl, was shot dead by two strangers who pulled up alongside her and a group of children as they walked back from Nottingham's annual Goose Fair.

The trial of Mark Kelly, 20, and Junior Andrews, 24, the men convicted of her murder last year, revealed that they had targeted Danielle simply because she came from St Ann's, a rival neighbourhood to the Meadows, where they were from.

Nottingham's response was immediate. More than 6,000 people gathered in the city centre to stand in silence and protest against gun crime. Churches in the most dangerous districts of the city began "prayer patrols". A new charity, Mothers Against Violence, was formed and gun amnesties took hundreds of weapons off the street. The council even hired the city's first ever "reputation manager".

But any transformation has been slow. Last March, Nottingham was again seen as a case study in crime when, in the run-up to the general election, Mr Green told The Sunday Telegraph that his force "couldn't cope" with the city's murder rate and was farming out cases to other forces.

Nottinghamshire has the sixth highest murder rate in the UK, but "Category A" murders have almost doubled since the mid-1990s. Knife crime doubled in a single year, from 2003 to 2004.

Mr Green's comments provoked an investigation from her Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, which criticised the police for falling into a "reactive cycle" as officers struggled to keep up with violent crime. But the inspectorate's report congratulated the force on a generally improving situation.

That trend continued last year, when gun crime fell by 16.5 per cent in the city. There were also striking reductions in burglary (down 24 per cent) and vehicle crime (down 18 per cent). But in a sign of how far the city has still to improve, Nottinghamshire still has the worst rates for both of those crimes in the UK.

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