and so it begins

Having been selected as the cultural omphalos for 2017 why not go the whole nine yards and spruce up the town as well with a £25 million rearrangement of the deck chairs? First for  'improvement' is Queen Victoria Square which is to get fountains in the pavement so your trousers get wet as you walk by. Still anything that gets rid of the acres of boring red brick paving can't be all bad. As in all campaigns you must first fortify your redoubt or the thieving natives will be off with your JCB before you can say City of Culture.

Forget-me-nots

Exactly five years ago this wholesome old romantic posted the first of the Hull and Hereabouts on the pleasant subject of private property and shopping. Well I had to start as I meant to go on I suppose. Anyhow after five years of austerity and working together to secure a solid recovery for all the people of this country and ... sorry, sorry, you try to avoid so many election broadcasts but they seep in by osmosis ...oh yes now where was I? Hmm, now the old fool is reduced to posting pretty flowers and wondering how quick the time flies and thinking how little things have really changed ....

An interesting development

Well, turn your back for a few weeks and all kinds of things can happen. The skeleton of the new C4DI building at the river mouth has gone up like an enormous Meccano set. Plans and drawings are one thing but do not convey how imposing and impressive a building this will be, nor how it complements the Deep's angular construction on the other bank. I like it, it may not be everybody's taste but, no, I think it's just fine.

It's only money

Cottingham Road, Hull

Let me see now it must be getting on for four years since some Council bods turned up and erected this erstwhile sign just down the road.Then it took a few weeks for them to get the electrics all wired in. Oh and a tree had to be trimmed back so it was visible from the road. And there it sat, a device intended no doubt to give useful information to passing travellers. Except that it didn't. It did nothing for months on end then it gave out some message reminding cyclists to take care on the roads; as if cyclists use the roads these days. Its biggest act was to warn of delays over the Olympic torch relay back in 2012. Then nothing again, until, in the middle of last year, it was just removed leaving the two supports. (I don't think it was stolen, though it is a possibility) Now all this might seem a tad uninteresting and indeed it is but consider the hours of consultations, the planning meetings, the costs of ordering the parts, installing, then the plans and discussions to remove it, then the cost of uninstalling. It must come to thousands of pounds just wasted. Then consider that this is just one item of madness among many in this small town and that the same stupidity goes on in one form or another in every town across not just this country but I'd guess in every town across the whole world ... I think I'll go back to bed.

That old insipid feeling

I sometimes wonder if there was once a competition to see who could commission the most uninspiring buildings with the winners getting to see their visions of banality in bricks and mortar at the eastern end of Alfred Gelder Street. So bleak is the architectural canvas is that any little gimmick will temporarily dazzle. Here it's the glass rotunda (if that's the correct term) and silvered cupola of the Combined Courts building poking up above the skyline. It flatters to deceive however as the rest of the building is a mish-mash of styles designed to portray the majesty of the Law and failing. 

Lightship reflection

For want of anything else to offer here's the old Spurn Lightship reflected in a solicitors window. Possibly the only thing they can't charge for...

Weekend Reflections are here.

The old oak ash nexus

Ash flowers

In the perennial race to be be first out it appears that this year, despite flowering away madly, the ash is showing no leaves while the oak is well on the way. Those who study these things for a living (now that's a job I could do!) say oaks are coming into leaf nearly two weeks earlier than they did thirty years ago and ash about week earlier. That'll be global warming, they say,  or climate change as it's now politically correct to call it. And if you're a student of racing form the last time Ash beat Oak was in 1986. Ash is also under attack from a fungus threatening to make it extinct in the UK so this may become a one-tree race in the not so distant future.

Oak

The weekend in Black and White is here.