Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

 Orchard Park from Hull Road, Cottingham

A £310 million investment in Hull may not be a pot of gold but it will bring 1000 jobs to the city and a sigh of relief all round. What is this crazed loon talking about, I hear you ask. Siemens have announced that, after months of humming and hahing, Hull is the place they want to build a wind turbine factory. A thousand jobs may sound a lot but the city needs many thousands more and possibly this will bring in more skilled high pay positions; we shall see. There's also the massive skills shortage in the city so quite a few of these jobs may go to outsiders unless training is improved. Still mustn't grumble ...not even as every single local politician and placemen seem to be crawling out from under the woodwork to claim the glory for landing this contract.

Full of hidden surprises

Posterngate

The 'Hull can do no wrong' brigade were crowing again over the weekend after the Sunday Times put Hull in a list of the sixty or so best places to live in Britain. After the usual City of Culture guff and a comparison of house prices (relatively low, since you ask, but rising fast) and inventing a popular road called "The Avenue" (??? typical bad reporting but then standards have been dropping for years) it then, I think, rather damned with faint praise by saying the reason it's great is that it's full of hidden surprises.... well yes it is and not all of them pleasant.

Is this land made for you and me?

Just down my street a sign has gone up for the sale of 7.5 acres of what is essentially flood plain scrub land. Given that there is claimed to be a shortage of housing in this country I expect someone will buy this and plan to cram as many dwellings as possible onto it (no doubt all made of ticky-tacky). Watch out for planning objections and inquiries (not to mention Councillors mouthing vacuous sweet nothings) and in two or three years another hundred or so houses.

Speaking of land or in this case the lack of it, Hull Council is setting up an inquiry into taking over the neighbouring villages Cottingham, Anlaby, Hessle and so on from the East Riding. It claims people are living in these villages but using the facilities (???) of the city without paying anything for them. Hull, it is claimed, is being hemmed in and should be allowed to become much, much bigger spreading to Beverley according to one Hull Councillor. Given the track record of Hull Council in running what is in effect an overgrown town you can imagine the disdain with which this proposed expansion is being greeted in the villages concerned. This isn't the first time this quest for lebensraum has been put forward, back in the 1990's Hull was denied it and will no hopefully fail again.

Millennium Bridge

There seems to have been a bit of  a bridge building craze at the fag of the last century with the result that there are lots of Millennium Bridges spanning rivers up and down the country. Some like the Gateshead Bridge have a stunning original design whilst another suffered well known design failings. Here in Hull we got a simple lift up bridge with a bright yellow counterbalance. I read in a recent article that looking at the bridge one could almost imagine being in Copenhagen. I don't know whether that's good thing or not.

The Weekend Reflections are here.

Sporty little number

I'm not one for motor cars, as regular readers will know. I don't drive, never have and I've never been one for drooling over sports car and so on. I did, however, admire this over decorated Subaru parked up on Fairfax Avenue. It's totally out of place in this suburban environment, a bit like a penguin in an aquarium.

The weekend in Black and White is here.

That was the Winter that wasn't

So a season with no snow, no frosts to speak of, a bit of rain and mild ...meh! I don't call that Winter. Still I'll have saved on the old gas bills and so forth. So from 16.57 GMT it's officially Spring (I had to look that up) and it'll probably snow, did last year.

It's a Hull thing 2

Without going into the whys and wherefores of it all Hull has got two Rugby League teams, Hull Kingston Rovers (the Robins) out in the eastern boondocks and Hull FC (the Airlie Birds) in the slightly tamer west. There's a fierce, friendly, for the most part, rivalry to be top dog in this one horse town. On Savile Street however the two are united in trade as they try to take even more from the poor saps who support them. As an incomer I maintain a position of bored neutrality except to note that Rovers are having a clearance sale...