Plan B? There's not even a Plan A!

Fish Street from Sewer Lane via Castle Street

*Sigh* With the inevitability of night following day the scheme to upgrade, improve or whatever you want to call it, the festering sore that is Castle Street has run into the docile buffers of bureaucratic inertia. Back in 2013 I posted that money was being made ready for this work and the earliest it could start was 2015 and as is my way I cautioned there might be delays. I hate to say I told you so but ... here we are two years later and those who should have submitted plans, the Government's Highways Agency, have yet to do so and don't look likely to act any time soon. (Surely the rumour that they cannot make a decision during the election run-up is a vile canard, perhaps not) So start dates are being pushed further back, 2018? 2020? Who knows when? Meanwhile the Council, for once not guilty of any misdemeanour and desperate to put some kind of bridge (iconic or otherwise) across the never ending stream of motorised madness in time for the City of Culture in 2017, is going quietly bonkers and talking about coming up with a plan B .... 

Road Works

For the past few months the orange bollards and safety fencing have been up at one of the busiest junctions in town where Beverley Road and Spring Bank meet Ferensway and Freetown Way. The plan is to widen the junction, renew the traffic lights and make bigger islands for pedestrians to cross over. They'll also throw in some so-called pedestrians light controlled push buttons but as these won't actually do anything until the traffic has been stopped by the traffic lights they are really just for show. As with all road works in this town delays are inevitable; last Thursday, for example, I was on the bus into town and got caught in a jam so slow that we made 50 whole yards in ten minutes. In the end I got off and walked. (If you zoom in real close to the centre of the picture my bus is the red and cream one still stuck on Beverley Road ten minutes after I got off it!) The rumour is that this work will be completed ahead of schedule, that'll be a relief and we'll be back to the natural background rate of delays. I expect, though, that the junction will look pretty much the same as it did before which is to say not very pretty at all..

...quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.

A new coffee hole on King Edward Street is a blessing, I was beginning to worry in case there weren't enough to satisfy the cravings of the poor in spirit. This one claims to be independent unlike the one next door. It has seating upstairs no doubt with the very Gods themselves. Oh and the view is as I posted just the other day. Heavenly, almost.

The weekend in black and white is sipping a latte over here.

New plans for an old site

Over on North Church Side plans are afoot for a boutique hotel no less, in or on the site of these fairly plain shop units. A local property developer by the name of Allenby (such a fine name, if I may say so myself!) wants to make 30 or so short stay apartments. 

As the top picture indicates this development to this quiet backwater comes with close up views of Holy Trinity's fine medieval brickwork.

Weekend reflections are here.

Some Silly Billyness

For today's offering I present our great deliverer in a reflection of the door way of the King Billy pub on Market Place. I read recently that King William was the very man who introduced this country to gin ("England may I introduce to Gin, Gin meet merry old England; I'm sure you'll get along famously!" and so it came to pass.), well he can't have been all bad.

Shadow play

It's that first-day-of-the-month time once again and the theme for City Daily Photo is the "camera-shy self-portrait". This effort is not much of a portrait and I didn't take it but apart from that it fits the bill. This is what two bored grown-up people get up to on a Christmas evening, haunting the empty streets looking for trouble, so lock your doors, bar your windows and be afraid, be very afraid ....

A load of old rubbish

I'd somehow forgotten the true tale of Hull City Council's attempts to get householders to spy on their neighbours' bin habits. Yes, a few years ago residents of Hull were being urged to 'keep a diary' if their neighbours were putting out bins at the wrong time or putting the wrong sort of trash in the bins. People were urged "Don't turn a blind eye to environmental crime in your neighbourhood." People responded in the manner you might expect them to and I never heard anything of this preposterous idea again. There's sometimes a little brouhaha about bins being left on the street and causing an obstruction. It never seems to be mentioned that all these bins belong to the Council and it is Council dustmen that leave them on the street instead of putting them back where they found them. Ah well, it is a well known fact that HCC can do no wrong.