An Englishman's Home ...

“It could be an almost heavenly development,giving scope for infinite variety and the opportunity to create a real community.”  Herbert Walford Anderson, Lord Mayor of Hull, 1967

In 1352 a certain John of Sutton was given permission to crenellate his building, Le hermitage, in a place called Braunceholm near the village of Swine in Holderness. This was after he'd been brought up by the justices for having built a castle without permission. The justices, from the nearby upstart new city of Kingston upon Hull had taken a dim view of castles being built in the neighbourhood and grassed the said John of Sutton up to the King, Edward III. John prayed pardon for the trespass and palmed the King 20 shillings for his troubles and King granted his pardon and the all important licence. (That was the way business was in those days and probably still is ...) Now John must have had a good reason to want protect himself and maybe he'd had a vision of what was to befall his lands in the centuries to come ... 

Fast forward, as they say in the movies, a few hundred years and John's castle is but a grassy mound beside a disused rail line but his precious Braunceholm is now home to thousands in one of the biggest housing estates in the country, behold, I give you Bransholme...

After the last war with half the population homeless and most of Hull's housing damaged and in need of knocking down (the slums that is) the Council and others had a wizard idea, why not build a new town, a model community, well outside of Hull to rehouse all these poor folk (and no-doubt pass what ever problems they might have on to the new town's council) ... well the new town idea didn't come off but land was bought to the north east of town and by the mid sixties everything was ready to rock (I know some twenty years after the end of the war, this is Hull everything takes time (and a little greasing of parts that needed greasing no doubt)) and in a decade Bransholme was built with ~20-30,000 inhabitants (I've read varying figures) a handful of schools, a shopping centre (that closes at 5.30-6.00 and then they throw you out!) and a few pubs. The place was and remains a vast, sprawling warren of meandering pointless roads that lead nowhere but back upon another meandering road. The houses, being built so quickly and so cheaply were as you might expect and within a decade or so demolition of some of the worst was under way, most notorious were the so called misery maisonettes or "alcatraz", a concrete man-made hell hole. The estate  is described as being a place of multiple deprivation with social problems that are common these days (drugs, petty crime, anti-social behaviour and so on) ....and still and yet folk who live there seem to love it ... or so some of them say in the local paper.
So what was I doing in this place? I was on my way home from the delightful Kingswood Shopping Centre on the 11a Simplibus service (simple fares, simple routes, simple times, simple numbers!) that takes what is possibly the most circuitous route from A to B;  it's basically the scenic route taking in the delights of Bransholme, Sutton and Holderness Road, just don't be in a hurry.

"Little boxes made of ticky-tacky ..."

"... little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same ..."

This odd looking building is a pub called the Nightjar and not, as we both thought, the Nightmare.


The weekend in black and white is here.