Queen's Dock Basin

Back in the days of the late eighteenth century this was the entrance to what was then the world's largest dock. Getting sailing ships to turn  a right angle from the river to get through those gates must have been fun. Queen's dock was closed down in the 1930's, bought by the Council and filled in to give us Queen's Gardens. This entrance basin was retained as a dry dock until the 1990's.  Like a lot of places near the river it has silted up. The old crane remains; I expect it's got some sort of preservation order on it otherwise the scrap iron boys would have taken it years ago.

Glorious mud

The river Hull as I may have mentioned before is filling up with mud and there are no plans, as yet, to dredge it. So if no-one's prepared to shift the stuff we may as well learn to appreciate it. These three were taken near the new bridge.

And finally just for kicks and giggles:

"Even the mud is beautiful." Yeah, right ...

Here, for completeness, is the view from the new swing bridge looking south towards Myton Bridge and the flood defence thingy. 

I've heard of plays, films and books and so on being reviewed but never a bridge; that is until I came across a piece on the Guardian website reviewing the new Scale Lane Bridge. It's full of the usual meaningless reviewspeak phrases, "As well as being a place, it's an event ..."(?), "Scale Lane bridge is not just a way of getting from A to B, but something in itself. "(???) and the usual 'Hull is really a dump but we're not allowed to say so' comments, "Hull is the city whose misfortune is to sit on a word ladder between dull and hell, and whose associations with Philip Larkin and John Prescott link it to misery and unloveliness, most of which negativity is unfair."(Oh no it's not!) What is missing is any sense of the sheer ugliness of the thing, the massive waste of money and it's complete and utter uselessness apart from being a place to take pictures like this. 

OK rant over.

Arctic Corsair

Here's another view of the old trawler Arctic Corsair moored, if that's the right word for a boat that's firmly stuck in the mud, by the museum quarter. This is taken from Hull's new swing bridge which has already acquired its own reputation for attracting ne'er-do-wells; some have been reported jumping into the river during hot weather. Personally I say leave them there, better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown.

Meditations on Mud and Myton Bridge

One of the features of the river Hull as it approaches the Humber is the large accumulations of muddy silt on the banks. Presumably when the river was busier this would have been dredged but as hardly anything of any size now uses the river it has been left to its own devices with the result you see here. Upstream the silting means that there is barely room for one barge to navigate the channel. Clearly if the river is going to feature as an attraction this cannot go on. The mud banks are impressive but they are a worrying symptom of neglect. Understandably there is little incentive to clear up the river any  time soon but there is really no time to lose to clear up the mess that is Castle Street which crosses the river here at Myton Bridge. The Government has said the money is available and plans are being drawn up and work will start, if ever, in 2015 and last for  four years.(Imagine four years of road works on one of the busiest roads in the country, that is even now prone to gridlock at the drop of a hub cap.) I think Hull might have been consumed by the mud before that particular problem is solved.

For more monochrome delights visit the Weekend in Black and White.

The waiting is over

Regulars to this blog will appreciate the long, long wait (is it really over three years?) that we have endured for this event, the opening of the new swing bridge on Scale Lane. [1 2 3 4 5 6 ] So now we can hop, skip and jump across the river from the Old Town to, well, basically not very much. It's handy for the hotel that sits at the east end and I suppose you could get to the Deep and Victoria Dock and so on but there's really nothing close to the east side to merit any attention unless tarmac turns you on. If I told you the price of this you'd only whistle through your teeth ....

Scenic Route

The usual route to east Hull is a pretty straight forward trip along Clough Road and Mount Pleasant. The last time, however, the taxi driver had other ideas and off we went down the byways of the back of beyond. I managed a few shots as we went along. They're in black and white 'cos the windows had a gaudy blue tint.

The Weekend in Black & White is here.

Any day now ....

I've heard rumours, nothing more than whispers, that the new swing bridge will almost certainly definitely maybe perhaps open this very month or even sooner. You heard it here first.

High hopes on High Street

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a plot of land standing idle must be in want of a hotel. So this site between High Street and the river has been earmarked for an "iconic" 22 storey hotel and conference centre [ 1 ].  Well in the intervening six months 22 has become 18 and no doubt by the time it ever gets built it'll be 5 or 6. Here's an impression of the latest scheme, it's a wonderful box shape don't you think, so original and so in keeping with the area. Readers with long memories may recall a proposal I mentioned to build a hotel complex a little further up the river at Clarence Mill two years ago almost to the day [ 2 ]; well nothing has come of that little plan either.

Non-starter

One picture, two stories. First the on-going non-operation of the new footbridge, as you can see nothing has happened since I last reported in November [ 1 ]. The bridge is ready to rock as they say; both sides of the river have been landscaped and prepared but it just sits there like some beached whale. No-one has any idea when it will open or if they do they aren't saying. I suspect that like most things money or the lack thereof  lies at the bottom of this saga. Money lies at the bottom of the second story too. There have been calls to dredge the river to improve flood defenses. You can see how silted up it's becoming; where that mud is ships once berthed. A figure of £14.6 million was picked out of a hat (where else do they get these figures from?). Fortunately wiser counsels have said it would make little or no difference to water levels in Hull so that  scheme looks like a non-starter. Hull is very good at non-starting.

Navigation

I mentioned a few day ago the difficulties of getting into the old harbour of Hull [ 1 ]. This barge skilfully managed the trick. It was coming upstream from the right of the picture but the current of the Humber meant that it had to go past the entrance to the river Hull on the right and the do a u-ey and let the current push it into the river. Turning a 55m tanker through 180 degrees in the Humber's current is no mean feat. This tanker is the Rix Eagle and plies from Immingham on the south bank carrying oil.

From Scott Street Bridge

In April I posted about Scott street bridge and its plight here. It appears there is little or no hope of restoration, it's too far gone and besides there's no money. Anyhow here is the view upstream, regular readers will recognise Reckitt's chimney lurking in the background.

View across the river

I had to poke my camera through a security fence on Tower Street to take this view of the Arctic Corsair moored up by the Transport Museum. One of the effects of the current financial depression is that the redevelopment of the east bank of the Hull has been put on hold (possibly indefinitely) so it remains fenced off and inaccessible.

Mudlarking

Here under Myton bridge a traffic cone is slowly sinking into the ooze. This seems to be a favourite place for cones to go to die, I spotted three or four others in varying stages of disappearance. It brought to mind the strange but true phenomenon of the 'Cones Hotline' which was introduced in the 1990's by the hapless John Major for reporting errant traffic cones (in those days politicians worried about traffic cones instead of robbing the poor to pay the rich). Perhaps unsurprisingly the scheme was abandoned after it was found that many calls were frivolous, spoilsports!

Half a story

By the mouth of the river Hull these spiked fans are meant to keep the foolhardy from clambering about and falling in and meeting a watery end. A few weeks ago I was talking to someone on the bus into town and he mentioned that as a young boy in the 70's he'd found a dead body in the river, just stuck in the mud. Of course he reported it and received a reward of, I think he said, 50p for doing so. He told me there's apparently some mediaeval law that sets this reward and it was set when 50p was 10 shillings and a shilling was a lot of money. That's the story I was told it might be a load of  hooey for all I know.

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.”

And still we wait for the bridge to open.... Promised in September to open in October and here we are mid-November. What do we do now? Wait ....

Sine Qua Non

So here we are up close and personal with the indispensable tidal surge barrier. Since it was built in 1980 it has saved the city from flooding thirty times, roughly once a year. It was refurbished at a cost of  £10 million a couple of years back, but that's money well spent considering that a year ago it stopped a 16ft high tide from engulfing the city centre. So a big hat tip the engineers who designed and built this 98ft, 212tonne beauty.

Deep Muddy One

The river Hull when it enters the Humber is a completely different beast to the crystal clear chalk stream that rises out of the Wolds. I guess those old Scandinavians and Celts were both right.

Here's the tidal surge barrier's reflection in that deep muddy river Hull.

Before and after

This old dry dock is right at the mouth of the river Hull, opposite the Deep. It used to be home to a Manx steamboat that was used as a nightclub but that sailed off into the sunset ten or more years ago. Unfortunately when it left they couldn't close the dock gates, so for a decade the mud and silt of the Humber has washed in and filled it up completely. The owners of the site are planning to make some kind of tourist attraction out of it so they have cleaned it up with a hosepipe and a pump with the result you now see. The dock gates have now been sealed so they won't have to do it all over again.

Fly in the ointment

Just outside Driffield the river Hull passes round an eyot and at this time of year everything's turning nicely Autmnal. The river is very clear and you can see some really big fish in it. All in all very nice, almost bucolic. 

Shame then that right behind you is Bradshaw's grain mill with its constant noise of turbines driven by the river and deliveries from big lorries.