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.