Up My Street

Hull Road, Cottingham, where I live, is the kind of road where the lower the house number the higher house price. Here's No 4. It belongs to the university and is the residence of the Chancellor or Vice-chancellor I'm not sure which. Swanky, huh?

Unfortunately I live at the other end of the road.

Under Threat

An article I read said that independent newsagents were closing down at 10 a week due to 'competition' from supermarkets and coffee shops such as Starbucks (No, I didn't know they sold newspapers, either). This little shop in Cottingham seems to be hanging on but I wonder how long it will last if the plans for a big supermarket to be built just down that road on the left go through.

Green Wickets & Piped TV

Cottingham at the beginning of the 19th century was "a favourite place of residence for the more opulent portion of the merchants of Hull, ... [with] ..many handsome country houses, gardens and pleasure-grounds". One of those country houses was this one, Green Wickets on Thwaite Street. It was built about 1780 for one Michael Metcalfe. Originally called the Sycamores it has been added to and fiddled with over the years and is now a Grade2 listed building. 

I've passed this building many times little knowing the role it played in the spread of television in the area. Rediffusion  was an early system of transmitting sound and later TV by cable from a central aerial. It was very popular in Hull and the central mast was in the grounds of this house. I seem to remember the system was known as piped TV. Anyhow, Rediffusion is long gone, replaced by satellite and digital advances but the house is still there and looks good for a few more years yet and is still, no doubt, owned by a merchant from Hull.

Reflections on wind power

If you follow the path round the park it goes behind a thicket of trees and bushes emerging at a large pond. It's a fishing pond and there were anglers trying their luck from the bank. Where there's water there's reflections and with a 400ft windmill lurking in the background who could resist?

Pushing on further down a path through the trees brings you out on the banks of the river Hull. Here you can see how the generator stands well apart from the factory it serves, I guess in case it falls over.

Wind Power

The park I mentioned yesterday has a rather large neighbour,  the Croda wind powered generator. I've shown you this before ages ago but that was a distant shot. Up close it's really over powering. At over 400 feet in height it's almost as tall as the Reckitt chimney and is visible across the city. I was surprised by how quiet it was but then it wasn't a very windy day and it was only turning slowly. There's a certain elegance about it as well but would I want to live near it? Not really.

Some more (colour) shots of this tomorrow.

Nature's Playground

In a bid to interest the youth of Hull in nature the Council built a small nature playground in a local park. It has logs that you can play on or crawl through and fake toadstools that you can do, well, whatever you do on a toadstool and this charming piece of welding. I guess it represents some kind of creepy crawly and is meant to appeal to the younger mindset. Well I have to say when went past the other day the nature playground was empty and the unnatural playground with skateboarding facilities and swings and good old fashioned tyres on ropes was full of happy screaming brats with not a care for nature or her ways. Epic fail, I believe is the current term for this ...

Firestation

You know how jealousy goes; well the police get a nice new station so the firemen want one too. Here's the Clough Road fire station which funnily enough is directly opposite the spanking new police HQ. It's been found to be no longer fit for purpose (quelle surprise!) and so a new one will be built on this site for a shade under £4 million, chickenfeed compared to the £60 million being sploshed out across the road. Again this spending comes against a background of budget cuts to the service and loss of 70 or so staff with the same number threatened. We are promised that no lives will lost and that response times will be the same. We shall see.

At The Carwash

I guess you have be of an age to recall a song of that name. Well this place is a miles away from that; you're unlikely ever to meet a  movie star or may be even an Indian Chief. This wash is on the edge of the badlands between Clough Road and Bankside and with millions of cars on the road is doing a fair trade. 

"Well those cars never seem to stop comin'.
  Keep those rags and machines hummin'"

Tangent

This is the gasholder I showed before ( here ) only now it's empty. I've just realised that  it is a totally different design to the gasholder I showed yesterday and that's after thirty years of going to and fro past these things. Something new everyday ...

Form ever follows function

This view on Clough Road put me in mind of this little quote.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

Louis Sullivan

So many numbers

Here's a welding shop on Clough Road and a fine collection of plates presumably from vehicles that didn't make it out of surgery.

This month's City Daily Photo theme is numbers. You can see what numbers others have added  at the Facebook page or here.

St Mary's Cemetery, Air Street, Sculcoates

Many years before the city of Hull was built the village of Sculcoates huddled by the muddy flooded banks of the river Hull. The name, Sculcoates, comes, I've  been told, from Skuli's Cottages; Skuli being a Viking who settled in these parts. Anyhow time passed and a church was built, St Mary's, with its attendant graveyard, is first mentioned in 1232  but it could be much older. The church was rebuilt in 1760 and done up again in 1875 at the cost of a £1000. A description of it reads "An arcade of four bays separates the nave from the aisles. The east window is filled ,with stained glass, representing the Crucifixion. In the chancel is a fine old brass chandelier of 16 lights, of the Queen Anne period."  This  church  ran the old school I showed the other day. So why, you might ask, am I telling you all this instead of showing you a photo of it in all its glory? Well, sadly, the church was pulled down in 1916 and rebuilt somewhere else. So there's only the  old graveyard left, stuck between the RE:group tanks and Bankside's passing traffic. 

The magnificent  tomb must be at least 10 feet tall, unfortunately I couldn't find any inscription on it but it shows the wealth that must have been around in what is now an uninhabited area.

Lovers of graveyards and tombs should head over to Taphophile Tragics.

Rag-and-bone man

Moving with the times the rag-and-bone trade has gone from scavenging through old rags and bones to the scrap metal trade. Here's a long suffering horse puling a precarious load and no fewer than four passengers on Clough Road. No doubt this load was heading for Lord & Midgley's  scrap yard at the other end of Clough Road.

The old school on Bankside

Right next to the corner of Air Street that I showed yesterday is this old building which at first I thought was an old chapel but which was actually a school opened in 1858 and closed fifty or so years later. Since then it has been used as a warehouse. The bricked up entrance leads right onto Bankside so it was probably just as well they didn't have heavy lorries trundling past in those days. Right behind the school runs the river Hull so you can imagine how small the school yard was. See quite how small and other images of this old school here.

Regroup behind the wall

On the corner of Air Street and Bankside RE:Group take polluted water and other nasties and turn it into useable fuel. This is an area where pedestrians are clearly not catered for (I nearly got my foot squashed by a lorry turning left at this junction) and you are definitely not supposed to see what goes on behind those walls. That's the old mill putting in a cameo appearance in the top pic.

The Bankside Tree

Not many trees grow in the badlands, here's one struggling on.

Isis Mill

You have seen all those wonderful shots of the countryside in April and May covered as far as the eye can see in yellow. It's all very pretty but the nation's oil seed rape crop ends up in a place like this.

This is the Isis mill and is a stone's throw from that old mill. It looks similar to the old mill but this one is still working and producing masses of vegetable oil. It is in fact older being  built in 1912 and  owned since 1985 by Cargill. It crushes rapeseed to produce oil and protein meal. The plant can produce over 320 tonnes of oil per day from 750 tonnes of seed. With such figures it's easy to see why nearly a million acres of the UK are given over to rape each year.

Motor trade

Not owning a car means I know little about the motor trade but even I know that these establishments are not the top of the range shall we say. Nevertheless they have a seedy charm all of their own. Should you be needing their services you'll find both on Bankside.

Old Mill

Close by the swing bridge I showed yesterday  is the British Extraction company mill. It was built in 1919 to grind linseed and rape seed and so on to extract oil. The seed was delivered by boat and stored in the large silos to the rear. As you can see it's no longer in use, in fact it has stood idle for over forty years! There was a move to demolish it in the 1990s but  now it has Grade 2 listing so it just sits there watching the river flow. It was so well built it won't fall down.

Like the bridge this building attracts the attentions of photographers who sneak in and explore it.   You can see some of their  images here and here. Climbing up to the roof is definitely a young person's game.

Swing Bridge

This is the Wilmington bridge originally built to carry the railway across the river but now it's just for pedestrians and cyclists, oh and photographers. It was opened in 1907 and the last train crossed in 1968. It still works as a swing bridge to allow river traffic to pass though I have to admit I've never seen it in action as it were.

Peeling Paint

No visit to Bankside would be complete without an image of the Reckitt chimney. It is simply huge (450 ft) and dominates the whole area but it,  like much of the area, is now standing idle and slowly decaying.

The chimney was used to remove sulphur dioxide produced in the making of ultramarine which has many uses not least in paint manufacture some of which could be applied to this wall. There's more, much more, on the history of this site and the production of this useful product  here, this link was written when the plant was still operational, it closed in 2007.

New Brick Wall on Bankside

I took me a walk down Bankside the other day. Bankside is the real badlands of Hull, a once industrial riverside area that is now a rat run for taxis and lorries. There's plenty of dereliction but still some industry  and small businesses hanging on. I passed some bricklayers who were building this nice new wall I thought their work should be recorded. They probably thought I was mad ... more from the badlands over the next few days.

Selective Austerity

Behold the replacement for Queen's Gardens police station. In a farce that could have come from the pages of Sjöwall and Wahlöö  the new divisional headquarters and custody suite is rising from the once poisonous soils of Clough Road. You've got to admit they've treated themselves well on the public purse, the top brass will be able to settle in nicely here and with 50 cells there's more than twice the capacity to lock up the naughty scalliwags. There'll be artwork costing £25,000; that's only fitting for a building that cost £32 million upfront but after interest and other charges comes in at an eyewatering £60 million! Austerity clearly is very selective .... 

Queen's Gardens Police Station

Opened in 1957 Queen's Gardens nick is now deemed to be unfit for purpose and will close in a year or so. In this "age of austerity" frontline policing will be cut by 21% and £30 million taken off the budget by 2015/6 so it remains to be seen whether the force left after all this will itself be 'fit for purpose'. More on Humberside Police follies tomorrow ....

The Haworth Arms

One the best pubs in Hull,  erm probably. This is the Haworth at the junction of Beverley Road and Cottingham Road. Being close to the University it's the haunt of students as well as many  locals. It's a large place and holds many events along with the usual goings on to be found in pubs. A recent refurbishment was completed in February to restore the old wooden pannelling and bar fittings. 

Now again a word of warning, it looks old but it ain't. It's yet another glorious mock-Tudor construction of the late 1920's and 30's (seems they built nothing but this style in those years!). Indeed it didn't use to be such a big building at all, just a dowdy little pub on the corner as this old photo shows. My how it's grown!

It has a website these days and you'll find that here.

Today's Post

River Hull

Ah the bucolic charms of the river Hull as it winds its way past storage tanks and the Mauri factory. Man and nature in harmony ...

Clough Road Gasometer

Taken by Margot K Juby

Just to the west of the Stoneferry Bridge, on Clough Road, stands this gasometer. It's one of a pair that remain on the site of the old gasworks. The land surrounding these old works was until recently contaminated with all sorts of nasties. A novel biological approach was used to clean up the place. The soil was dug up and placed in a large shed and treated with bacteria, so called bioremediation. The whole process took about two years and now a new police station is being built on the site.
A clough is a sluice used in returning water to a channel after depositing its sediment on the flooded land, in case you were wondering.

Stoneferry Bridge

There's been a crossing at Stoneferry for centuries but the big business guys in Beverley prevented a bridge being built until 1905. They were worried about it blocking the navigation up the river to Beverley. That old bridge simply couldn't cope with the traffic volumes and so it was replaced in 1991 with this dual bascule bridge. It can lift to allow river traffic but there is very little of that nowadays.

Lord & Midgley

Taken by Margot K Juby

This scrap yard, or, more properly, recycling plant is by the banks of the river Hull at the end of Reservoir Road. The L & M  yard here  is 7 acres in size and processes 72,000 tonnes of scrap a year and , in their words, they 'depollute' over 3,000 cars a year. L & M have a website here should you want to deal in scrap.

The reservoir in the road's name was an 1840's scheme to draw water from the river Hull to supply the city.  It had to be drawn at low tide so as not to be too brackish even so it was murky and foul tasting and contaminated. The city's water now comes mainly from artesian springs to the west of the city at Spring Head and we're all the healthier for that development.

Taken by Margot K Juby

Latest theme

Round the corner from yesterday's tat shop is the Fishbowl, a public house so I'm told. Over the past ten or so years this 'pub' has had three identities that I can recall, first it was called Hockney's then after that cosed it reopened as Aussie Beach all green and yellow and selling Foster's. Then it shut and magically reopened as the Fishbowl I shudder to think what they're selling now. 

Ye Olde Tat Shop

Tucked away on Alexandra Road is this second hand/junk shop. It sells just what it says on the sign. These places have an undeserved reputation for selling stolen goods. I was there once when a couple of likely lads tried to off-load bikes that were clearly out of their pay league shall we say. The owner mentioned he'd had the police round just the day before and demanded identification from this pair which, of course, they couldn't provide, that is until the least bright of the pair offered his prison release form as ID. I don't think they made a deal somehow. 

Bikes and Trikes

As promised yesterday a selection of the motorcycles on show at Cottingham day. Now I know even less about these things than I do about cars so I'll leave you to look at them without further comment.

If you are a Facebook user I've posted an album photos of Cottingham Day on the Hull and Hereabouts page here.