Let the sunshine in

 On Ferry Street this garage cum car park is best described as a little al fresco.

Alone, alone, all, all alone

 

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I. 

 

Cheery greetings from the grey-bearded loon lost in the deserted city of culture with only Coleridge for company.

Billboard

This site that was to have had an eighteen or twenty-two storey hotel on it at one time, the plan described so accurately by a councillor as looking like a packet of cigarettes, has been cleared and rolled flat to be a car park. You wanna see the other side of this, I know you do ... here then in glorious technicolour.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Saturday Market Place

If you feel a little cheated, let down perhaps, by all the build up of yesterday's post then the feeling is mutual. Saturday Market Place is, as they say, nowt much to look at. These were taken on a Saturday and, well, it's just a car park; the market having suffered as have many others from the progress of the online shopping. Still and all the surroundings are pretty spectacular I think you'll agree. On the one side St Margaret's church and on t'other the splendid town hall, Trinity Guildhall and old prison or gaol house ...ça vaut le détour, n'est ce pas?

Entrance to the old prison

A sign advertising the delights inside the Guildhall. We didn't have time to see these. Another time perhaps.

Some rusting steps

At the back of the Uni connecting one concrete sixties building with yet another is an elevated walk way and being elevated it needs steps. These are those steps.

Colour coded demolition

Well there goes the Osborne Street multi-storey car kennel to make way for a newer brighter better one. Also revealed are the colour codes for each floor in case remembering first floor or second floor or whatever was too onerous a task for the poor drivers of this town

Demolished

It would be remiss of me to allow you to gain the impression that it is all abandonment and decay in the City of Culture, by no means is that the case, oh no sirree! Here the old ambulance station is  being gently pulled apart. The car park, too, is coming down if it doesn't fall down first. Roper Street, parts of Osborne Street  and much of Waterhouse Lane [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ] are also if not already down then soon to be levelled. Since there was no plan to use these old buildings then by all means knock them down and build afresh. But what to build? The fallout from 2008 put an end to Princes Quay's planned expansion. So what to do? "Hmmm I know", says a bright spark at the Council (I'm in a generous mood, we all know there's very little brightness in that place), "let's borrow, oh I don't know, about £36 million and build an arena for "bands" to perform and businesses to hold conferences and such like, (other cities have them so why not Hull?) ... and lets put it where access will cause maximum disruption to traffic, and let's make it too small, and let's make look like a giant yellow slug erupting from the ground and let's force it through planning after it's been rejected and and and ... let's call it, oh I don't know, something like, erm, Hull Venue; how about that for an idea?" See I told you it's not at all doom and gloom.

These delightful images "borrowed" from the Hull Daily Mail.