Driffield Navigation

About 18 miles due north of Hull is Driffield, the Capital of the Wolds. It's a pretty enough little town that has probably seen better times. The picture shows the Navigation built to connect Driffield with Hull and the Humber. This waterway is really the River Hull straightened out and made navigable. Nowadays it mainly pleasure craft that use it; the last commercial traffic was in the 1940s.

Grafter

Flood barrier gets an overhaul

This is probably the most important piece of kit in the whole city. The flood barrier must have paid for itself many times over in the thirty years it's been working. It's undergoing some maintenance.

You have got think how dumb the citizens of Hull have got to be. I mean, to put up with flooding every year, more than once a year; for eight hundred years; when the answer was to stop the Humber coming up and filling their houses with the North Sea. Still, better late than never.

The Deep is nicely framed in this shot, don't you think?

In the frame

Shelter

The end of the first week of June brings a predictable change in the weather. The so-called "return of the Westerlies" or "June monsoon" has arrived with heavy downpours over most of western Europe. These collared doves seemed content to sit it out and wait for sunnier times.

Sludge Gulping

All harbours need a bit of maintenance now and then and Bridlington is no exception. The JCB is bolted to the deck of a barge and the guy operating it seemed be having great fun scooping out the mud and gunk that had accumulated over the years.

To build a bridge

In a bid to redevelop the Old Town, a fancy new footbridge is being built across the river. The fact that there is nothing on the other side of the river does not seem to deter these bold entrepreneurs. They are going to build a brave new world on the east bank where at present there is dereliction and decay. The project has been given  a name: the Boom (they've never heard of hubris in Hull!). It's that old "build it and they will come" spirit at work again. You can see what the bridge is going to look like here.