High Street

I have posted several of the buildings on this street so it's about time for a wider view. This narrow little street was once the busy centre of the city of Hull before the docks were built. The river and old harbour lie behind the buildings on the left. It's always had a reputation as a lively place, in olden days with merchants, sailors, prostitutes and press gangs and nowadays with the Friday and Saturday night revellers who throng the many bars and pubs in the area.

There is no grass on Terry Street

Here's the Aldi store on Terry Street. It opened in the mid 1990's, I used to live in a flat directly behind it. In contrast to the Jackson's store I posted the other day this lacks any fine ornamentation, it's just a very large brick shed. What it lacks in finery though it massively gains in the vast array of goods on sale, far more than Jackson's almost pokey little shop could possibly hope to offer and cheaper too. Living on a tight budget I think I can do without the marble and the mosaic and, any way, I no longer have to look at this shop every day.

If the title has got you wondering if I've gone a bit mad in all this heat it's from A Removal from Terry Street by Douglas Dunn. The line always used to make me laugh because, when I first moved to Hull, this site used to be a large grassy area, indeed there was little but grass on Terry Street in those days after demolition and before the rebuild. 

The Avenues

Not Hull's better known Avenues, that collection of tree-lined Victorian streets to the west of Pearson Park, these avenues lack trees or even a road. This pair of 'avenues' are to be found on High Street and consist of an L-shaped properties that wrap around a  corner building. I supposed they were developed from the alley ways that pervade this area. The one above is near Bishop Lane while the one below is next to the Olde Black Boy on the corner of Scale Lane.

Food Experts

One of the 114 Jackson's stores sold off to Sainsubury's in 2004. This one on Inglemire Lane was surplus to requirements and promptly closed. The marbled facade with mosaic signage was a feature of many of these stores though here it seems not to have impressed the local vandals.

Meditations on Mud and Myton Bridge

One of the features of the river Hull as it approaches the Humber is the large accumulations of muddy silt on the banks. Presumably when the river was busier this would have been dredged but as hardly anything of any size now uses the river it has been left to its own devices with the result you see here. Upstream the silting means that there is barely room for one barge to navigate the channel. Clearly if the river is going to feature as an attraction this cannot go on. The mud banks are impressive but they are a worrying symptom of neglect. Understandably there is little incentive to clear up the river any  time soon but there is really no time to lose to clear up the mess that is Castle Street which crosses the river here at Myton Bridge. The Government has said the money is available and plans are being drawn up and work will start, if ever, in 2015 and last for  four years.(Imagine four years of road works on one of the busiest roads in the country, that is even now prone to gridlock at the drop of a hub cap.) I think Hull might have been consumed by the mud before that particular problem is solved.

For more monochrome delights visit the Weekend in Black and White.

Cop Shop

Here's the facade of Humberside Police's new headquarters. If (and it's a big if) we are to believe the figures issued just yesterday Humberside has one of the highest crimes rates in the country, but the number of crimes fell by an astonishing 11% last year. Just as well that they did because Humberside Police now has its lowest number of officers since it started, losing 60 in the last six months. A cynic might correlate the fall in crime with the fall in police numbers but I'm not that sort of guy, no sir ...Oh and we are promised even more cuts in funding at this rate crime will simply be unfunded out of existence. 

Maister House

Maister House on High Street is an 18th century merchants house. Built, or rather rebuilt, in 1743 after a fire. The rather plain facade is, I'm reliably informed, a typical feature of Palladian architecture. It is owned by the National Trust and you can go inside and look at the staircase and other bits and bobs should that be your desire. OK, I confess most of this comes from a neat little web page here which has more information including pictures of inside the building. One day I might step inside and see what's what.