Little Cottages

Though Cottingham has some grand old houses, built for the wealthy merchants of Hull, there are few remaining old buildings for the less well-to-do. Here's a little row of little cottages on Beck Bank soaking up the November sunshine.

I woke this morning to find that Hull had been selected as City of Culture 2017. The usual perps are strutting around saying how proud they are to come from Hull when all they've done is managed to be born and lack the gumption to leave. Oh we've got three more years of this self-serving guff before it even starts and then, well,  we'll cross that bridge later ... with £12 million about to splosh into the city I'll be keeping an eye out for the culture vultures circling in the updrafts of hot air.

Garden Grabbing

Now garden grabbing is the practice of building a house or houses in your back garden. Obviously you must have a fair sized spread for this to be even possible and it just so happens at the Cottingham end of my street the houses are blessed, if that's the word, with large gardens some the size of a small paddock. So within the past few years one garden has been 'grabbed' and now another one is on the way. Now I know there's a housing shortage and this country's idea of economic growth is a constant rise in the price of property but sticking not one but two expensive bungalows in your back garden does seems to me to be taking money grubbing to new depths. 

Still I liked the sign, I have three blacks cats in my home.

After the rain the sun ...

Today we had a cold front pass over (a portent if we are to believe certain newspapers of a cold long Winter) and with it some rain and drizzle. And then, well the setting sun broke through ...

Plane Trees

Something to thank the Victorian planners for: Cottingham Road's mile long stretch of plane trees, really quite impressive at this time of year. Is it my imagination or are the leaves on the trees falling later with every passing year?

A folly or two

I don't know if I've shown this before but it doesn't matter if I repeat myself (a sure sign of creeping old age ...). Anyhow this is or was the top cupola from the old town hall built in 1866 and knocked down to make way for the Guildhall. Clearly there was no shortage of money for public buildings in those days. It now sits among the ducks and geese of Pearson Park.

For those of you who long to see a short film about Hull  the city of culture people have produced a four and half minute encomion. You can see it here and judge for yourself. I suspect Larkin, whose words (taken from an introduction to anthology that appeared over thirty years ago) are used at the beginning, would be laughing his head off  if he could see how much pretentious tosh has been made out of his scribblings.

Little bit of culture, innit.

As the excitement reaches fever pitch for Hull's City of Culture bid, the Minister of Culture, Communications and Creative Industries ( yeah, I didn't know there was one either) paid a visit to the city today to see for himself what exactly is what. So on a suitably grismal day he was touted round all the sites and glad handed by all those who hope to gain something from this potential crumb from the master's table. These street adverts have cropped up recently promoting a new cultural guide . I don't know what good all this does and somehow the cynic in me says that the award will go north of the border to bonny Dundee; there's a referendum on Scottish independence to win after all ... but life is full of little surprises and we await the decision on, I think, the 20^th of this month. Ooh the excitement of it all ....

The next Tesco?

By neatly not quite appropriating the founder of Tesco's slogan this discount store on Holderness Road should go far, possibly as far as Hessle Road, you never know ...