Upstream and down

From Drypool bridge to North bridge and vice versa.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Oh and the gossip as well ...

Savile Street Skyline

White Hart Blues

A sad little note in the window of the White Hart on Alfred Gelder Street informs the world that it is closed "due to the current economic climate". Optimistically it expects to reopen in the Spring. We shall see. Quite a few pubs have closed in recent years only to "reopen" as apartments.

Hull hole revisited

If there's one thing that can be said about meetings between councils and conservation bodies it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is done with any degree of haste. So it was over a year ago that Hull Council entered into talks with English Heritage over the future of the oversized rubbish bin otherwise known as the Beverley Gate ruins and still there are no puffs of white smoke to indicate just what is going on. The plan, if you can call rumour a plan, is to fill it all in and build some new tourist attraction. Frankly the sooner the better, for despite its links to the English civil war, it is, when all said and done, just a large ugly hole in the ground.

Blaydes Yard

Next door to the old Dock Office that I showed a couple of days back sits this old shipyard belonging, at one time, to the Blaydes family. It's main (if not sole) claim to fame is that a merchant ship named Bethia was built here in 1784. 'Bethia?', I hear you say, 'never heard of it'. Well if I you told that the good ship Bethia was bought by the Royal Navy and renamed Bounty, a few bells might start ringing. Yes breadfruit, Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian,  mutiny, Pitcairn Island, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable all that started here in this silted up dump. A more enterprising city with all that history lurking in its backyard might have made something of it, some tourist trap perhaps, but this sleepy back water prefers to leave it to silt up and rust away.

Here's Blaydes House, just along the road from the ship yard. It was the Blaydes family home but now houses a department of Hull University.

Raindrops on snowdrops

Taken by Margot K Juby