Work in progress

Do you recall the white van man who got bored and added a splash of colour to his van? I can't be sure but I think he got bored with that as well ...

Breaking eggs

Demolition seems to be the order of the day down Queen Street what with the old Wellington House knockdown and now the clearance for the C4DI scheme by the old dry dock. Good, I say, and about time too.

All that remains of the Hull Art Lab that I posted back in May.

This was a pub called Ruscadors which I have never been in and now never will.

Private Seats

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, before the reinvention of coffee and the banning of smoking indoors, you could take a seat here and rest a while at no expense save to your backside. Now the only seats belong to the self-styled coffee houses that line the quay side selling ridiculous froth at even more ridiculous prices. They are living proof of Say's Law that there is a buyer for every product no matter how bad. So, with the collusion of the Council, they have had the public seats removed and simply taken over this once public space and now no-one can just sit and rest a while without they pay. The result is this line of ugly glass cages, yet another mess. 

Seating Arrangement

These seats on Corporation Pier seem to have survived the purge on public seating currently underway in this town. From here you can rest and admire or loathe if you will the view I posted yesterday. Not many customers though (OK none). Perhaps not surprising since there's still a big hole in the pier. Is it really over eight  months since this damage was done? How time flies ...

Distant Bridge

I mentioned yesterday that they'd built a big bridge up the road from the ferry terminus, well 'up the road' is really five miles as the crows flies. Mind you, if you can fly like a crow then you don't really need a bridge ... It's not allowed to be dull in Hull, we have gloom instead.

Windy weather

This old weather vane sits on top of what was once the British Rail Ferry terminus by Corporation Pier. The figure is of Father Time with his scythe and hourglass symbolising no doubt the hours spent waiting for the ferry to arrive, especially since they built a big bridge just up the road.

I'm told, (OK it's in the Daily Mirror so maybe not that reliable) that Summer is officially over and we shall be having nothing but windy cold weather and rain for the foreseeable future, suits me fine.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Annison Building

This building has had a few uses over the years, a livery stable, funeral directors, ex-catalogue and second hand goods store and now it's a pharmacy. It's a listed building, built around 1900 and it's unique selling point, as it were, is that the stables in the interior are upstairs reached by a ramp, it's thought that road widening restricting space necessitated the move upstairs. This survivor from a by-gone age is at the junction of Witham and Great Union Street near the North Bridge. 

The Local Rag

These are the offices of the Hull Daily Mail, a sprawling block at Blundell's Corner, the junction of Beverley Road and Spring Bank, that used to house a much bigger operation than at present. The paper is no longer printed here, that being done somewhere outside of Hull and then the papers trucked back for sale in the city. Don't ask how much it costs, I haven't bought a copy since Margaret Thatcher resigned! It claims a readership of 170,000 and is the largest regional newspaper in Yorkshire.

Now it has to be said that though it is called a newspaper much of what is reported by this institution is far from being new or even newsworthy. It is often wrong on facts, its standards of grammar are quite lamentable, it is not above copying stories from other sources without attribution. (I know plagiarism is the basis of all culture but when I found a senior HDM employee Tweeting my photo as if he owned the image it was a bit too much too far! Still waiting for some sort of apology for that.) Its reporters, if we may call them that, seem to have scant local knowledge and often misname places and streets. I could go on but you get the gist.

You can check out its web site here, but be warned, I'm told that the mobile site is a jumble of popup adverts that make it unusable, it often gives request timeouts and is generally poor. The only good thing on the site is the comments from readers which run the full gamut of sceptical denial of just about everything to rallying positively behind everything Hullish. I should just add here that I do not read the sports bits so that might be quite superb but somehow I doubt it.

Now having said all that, it came as no little surprise to hear that HDM has won awards for being the best regional newspaper. The judges said it was "delivering a newspaper completely in tune with the communities it served"; well quite! Makes you wonder how bad the other papers are.

Keep Watching the Skies!

The old Corporation Pier, nowadays officially known as Victoria Pier, is a good place to check out the skies and the view over to Lincolnshire. If you're lucky and the tide is right then you might just catch a glimpse of something hunting in the shallows down below. 

Yup, that's a seal, okay not the best photo but definitely a seal. I've seen seals here twice so maybe they're not that rare but still an absolute bugger to photograph.

House eating machine

I mentioned recently that Wellington House was due to be demolished well it seems that they've brought in a monster piece of kit to do the job. The nearby street is closed to traffic just in case the building falls before it's pushed.

Plane old trees

Now I'm feeling a bit old. I remember when these plane trees were put in as young saplings barely half the height of the buildings when King Edward Street was paved over in the early 90's to make a pedestrian paradise. I imagine some planner in an office somewhere said something along the lines of "we must have a little bit of greenery here stick in a few of those cheap little old plane trees, they'll do." Well now those ickle trees are bigger than the buildings and still growing, I've read they can get to nearly 100 feet so still some way to go yet.

Le vélo jaune

Bonjour from sunny Hull. The Tour de France, which finished recently in Paris, this year for some reason or other had its Grand Départ in Yorkshire. Cue lots of Yorkshire tourism advertising, lots of God's own county claptrap and so on and so forth. There can be few things more boring than a professional Yorkshire person gassing on about Yorkshire. Anyhoo this cycling shop not wanting to be left at the back of the peleton and not having any maillots jaunes simply sprayed up an old bike yellow. It does, however, have a red spotted shirt of the 'king of the mountains' which is kind of ironic given that Hull is flatter than a flat thing that's been flattened.

A little bit of rain

Well the weatherfolk had been saying it was coming for nearly a week and sure enough old hurricane Bertha's soggy remains passed over this morning and early afternoon. Pretty impressive rain it was too, at times so hard you could barely see across the street, with thunder and a bit of lightning thrown in to add to the fun. But it's all over now ...

Spoke too soon it's started again ...

What's left of the weekend in black and white is here.

World Cat Day

Yesterday was apparently World Cat Day so here's Bruiser the local tom and connoisseur of roast chicken's gristly bits. Go ahead make his day ...

Both pictures by Margot K Juby his factotum.

Hook a duck

To entertain the young ones (or possibly their parents) during the long vacation a funfair of sorts has sprung up outside St Stephens. Judging by the lack of customers it seems they all have better things to do.

Verse tiles

Oh dear, I feel should apologise for inflicting such doggerel on you ... these tiles on a wall on Torrington Street are thankfully fading with time.

More local wildlife

With zebras and elephants yesterday and hippos today this place is turning in a virtual Serengeti ... I stumbled across this monster while on safari down Clough Road. It's meant to sell a well known brand of mattresses, believe it or not. Think hippo, think bed ... nah.

Zebra

What can I say about this unique shop? Why is it called Zebra? Why does it have an elephant with a hat in the window ...  Why not?  Don't ask me, ask Ann, the owner who has been running this business for years now, only be prepared for a long chat. It's the sort of place where conversation seems to take precedence over selling stuff.  Zebra is on Newland Avenue and sells a vast array of arty crafty ethnic occult goods, cards, jewellery, goth stuff, hippy stuff, mermaids, you get the idea ... Well worth a visit.

*Facepalm*

Behold, one of the seats

Behold, the view from the seats

Now look behind you! D'oh!

It's not like there didn't used to be seats facing the church but at some point in the past two years the Council decided to remove half the seats from round here leaving only those pointing away. This is, of course, in line with the council policy of doing everything wrong that it is possible to do wrong and then say they have no money to do it right. This is the town that claims to be a city of culture ... well there's a definite culture of incompetence and downright stupidity.

Good news or bad?

Well we wave bye-bye to the parasitic blood sucking payday loan sharks on Whitefriargate and wonder just how bad things have become if even these scumbags can't make a living here anymore ... oh and the bookmakers a few doors down has shut as well. Maybe we should all move to sunny Scunny!

That moment when the paint runs out ...

Continuing the 'Take Away Store' theme this pizzeria on Newland Avenue makes sport for its neighbours as Miss Austen might say when ordering her Margherita to go ...

Take it away

The local phone book has two and half pages of take-aways listed so finding one shouldn't really be difficult but just for the truly bone idle or shall I say tech-savvy there's a website devoted to finding you just the place to order whatever cooked carbohydrates and burnt meat you may desire.

Today is the first of August and that being so the theme for City Daily Photo is, in case you haven't guessed, "Take away store" ( who dreams these themes up?). Place your order here.

This old house is falling down

This Victorian relic at the corner of Wellington Street and Queen Street is set to be pulled down as it is structurally unsound and can't be fixed. This rather dull building's sole claim to fame, if that is the word, is that it was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick who also designed Leeds Town Hall and the Grand Hotel in Scarborough. I suppose this was just a bit of practice. There were rumours that it would be rebuilt but frankly I can't see why it should be however these are strange times in the city of infinite culture.

Summer Daze

Deep Brown Mud

Here's the local penguin farm and fish tank reflected in some glorious mud with yours truly in the shadows.

Artlink

Artlink seems to have been going for as long as I've been living in these parts. It's a sort of community arts thing with a gallery in what was part of the methodist church on Princes Avenue. I'm not much taken with the idea of community art (the two words just don't sit together for me) and I have not set foot in the place. I did read recently they got some money from whoever doles out the stuff these days so they'll be happy for the time being and nicely set up for the culture fest that arrives in two and half years time.

Art work with arty symbols

Arty gates

Hull Rickshaw

Seems to be the year for novel ways of  getting around the city and seeing the sights. I told you about the land train a few weeks back now we have a rickshaw to carry you about by foot power. The guy in the shades, Neil Worner, is in charge of this little project, he used to drive a white van now he pedals passengers around town and the Avenues area. It sounds like a nice idea but I expect if you're stuck in the tailback behind him you might have other ideas. I've seen a promo video he made and can only say that shy and introverted are not words that spring to mind. You wanna see? It's here.

Just noticed the England flag, must have taken this during the World Cup, you remember the World Cup? Me neither.

Lockington Memorial

I took this sometime ago but today seems the most appropriate day to post it. The Lockington rail crash on this day in 1986 left eight rail passengers and the passenger of a car dead and a lot of questions to be answered about the installation of automatic open crossings with no barriers. This memorial in Driffield's North End Park was paid for by public donations and erected twenty-four years after the accident.

You can read the official report into the accident here.

Monumental Memorial Madness

Way back in 1935 this thing (well, it is an ugly, phallic monstrosity when all said and done) was rightly considered to be a nuisance and a hazard to traffic and so Hull City Council spent £1,500 moving it from the end of Whitefriargate to the eastern end of Queens Gardens ( see here ). There it stands out of everyone's way, a focal point, if you like, for the view along the gardens. And there you might think it would stay but you would have reckoned without the all pervading madness that has overcome the City of Culture. The recently announced city facelift that I mentioned some days back includes, if  funds from the National Lottery can be found, a plan to put this darn thing back where it was. I am put in mind of the rearrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic ... oh, the cost, I forgot to mention the cost, well multiply the old cost by a thousand and you have it.

Abutilon

Taken by Margot K Juby

It's been hot and stuffy and I can't be bothered with anything to with Hull or anywhere else for that  matter. So here's an abutilon that I grew from seed this year.

Laura Norder

With crime rising in Humberside for the first time in ten years and the police aiming to make £30 million savings over the next few years with the loss of 800 jobs it is, perhaps, little wonder that public confidence in Humberside Police is the lowest in the country. You may think there are five police officers in this picture but in fact there is only one. Police community support officers dress like coppers and stroll around like coppers but no-one takes 'em seriously. 

Sewer Lane

Perhaps not the most attractively named of Hull's streets, Sewer Lane is, however, one of the oldest. It forms the southern end of what used to called Old Beverley Street which is now Manor Street, Land of Green Ginger, Trinity House Lane and Fish Street. Remains of a water course running alongside the lane have been found by those who like to dig up the past. An almshouse for fourteen poor women, Crowle's Hospital, was founded here in the 1660's and remained until demolished at the start of the 20^th century. The lane is now blocked to the north by Castle Street and has a mix of offices and social housing with views on to the marina.

Kardomah Set V2.0

I get you might want to make a buck or two out of the fortunate surroundings you find yourself in, and I'm not going to knock any artistic venture that pops up here and there. But this is Hull 2014 and well, pretending that the City of Culture thing doesn't hang around the neck of everything that happens here, why the allusion to Dylan Thomas and the Kardomah set? Did the estate agent who owns this building and clearly can't sell it on to any commercial concern and who once offered to buy the Humber Bridge, think he could get away with this sleight of hand? And those 'artists' who frequent this place; are they getting a cut of the profits? Thought not.

County Court

I've never really looked at this entrance before. It's on Alfred Gelder Street and is part of the Guildhall. It's no longer in use as the County Court has moved on to pastures new. What intrigued me is the little pile of Edwardian baroque nonsense above the door (you might like to click on the image to enlarge it). Amongst the usual symbols of power, a lion head, sword, axe, keys, royal sceptre and the scrolls of law there are numerous overflowing cornucopias of poppy heads. Now, aren't poppies symbols of sleep and death? Is this some ironic comment on the process of civil litigation? Or could it be that whoever paid for this was in the opium trade? Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh what a lovely war

The Government's announcement in 2012 that it was to spend millions on celebrating, oh sorry, commemorating, the centenary of the slaughter of the First World War must have brought tears of joy to meeja types. With just over a week till the start date no doubt they'll be gearing themselves up for a feeding frenzy. All rather sickening really.  Bookshops' shelves groan with the latest WW1 tasteful tomes as publishers seek to cash in. Not to be outdone, in fact, way out in the vanguard as would be of keeper of the nations memories, the BBC is touting this little touring circus designed to "reflect on the dramatic impact the war had on families and communities", nice work if you can get it. And when this bean feast is over we will, to paraphrase Lloyd George, have to go through it again in 25 years and at three times the cost.