The Old Police Court

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

You've no doubt heard the spiel at the beginning of Law and Order (if not  then you've had a lucky life). However it wasn't always the case in this country (that is to say England and Wales, Scotland has its own way of doing law and don't even ask about Northern Ireland)  that the police and the prosecutors were separated so neatly. Up until the mid 1980s police officers could and would prosecute offenders in certain cases. Officially they were acting as private citizens in court but in reality the same officer could investigate an offence, arrest a suspect and then prosecute the case, no doubt they would have been judge and jury as well if they could. Clearly this was unsatisfactory and prone to corruption of process. I give this little  history lesson to explain how the Guildhall comes to have an entrance marked Police Court. Nowadays we have an independent Crown Prosecution Service and Magistrates courts and everything is all just tickety-boo, well that is their story. 

The fat putti, the medusa head, the teeny George and Dragon, and the freemasonry handshake (!!) I leave to your imagination. They show signs of having been damaged at some time and stuck back together; the Guildhall was hit by bombs during the last war so maybe that explains this. The entrance is down the street from the equally well adorned Crown Court entrance I showed some while back and now serves the Coroner's Court.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The place to be is Withernsea

If you haven't been to Withernsea then all I can say is that you haven't lived. With its balmy sandy beaches and inviting blue waters Withernsea is the seaside resort without parallel. The posters below on Whitefriargate last year gave only the merest hint of the pleasures that await you on the sunny Yorkshire coast. Just half an hour's driving on delightful roads due east of the city of culture will bring you to this very special place.

OK it's a bit of dead end, run down resort that used to have a lot of visitors until the railway was removed. Now there's still a beach, a handful of shops and a lighthouse that was carefully placed so far inland that the eroding waves could never reach it. I went there once, it rained.

From the top, one more time

Here's the law courts building once again, this time from the top of the bus heading out to Holderness Road.

The Best Remedy

Quite right! Nothing like putting your feet up with a large G&T (a pint might be pushing it but who's gonna know?) and letting some cool jazz fill the room ... This sign, part of the Larkin Trail, is on the White Hart one of his jaunts for listening to jazz and getting absolutely rat arsed. 

Maritime Buildings

Maritime buildings are on Alfred Gelder Street close by the Guildhall and were actually designed by our old friends Gelder & Kitchen in 1900. The doorway is impressive but could do with some tlc and a good coat of paint. A nearby blue plaque informs us that a goodly portion of Finland's huddled masses went through Hull on their way to the land of the free and the home of the whatever ...

Why not try teaching?

Alfred Gelder Street, Hull

This colourful bicycle advert is for teacher training in Hull (School Centred Initial Teacher Training!) and was one of several around town while the student degrees were being doled out the other week. I suppose if you can make it in Hull then you can make it anywhere. Teaching is not for everyone, and my experience, admittedly many years ago, is that really good teachers are rarer than hen's teeth. I know I couldn't do it, at least not without facing manslaughter charges after each lesson! Now I come to look at that bike again it does look a bit bloody ...

Tre Kronor

Guildhall, Hull

It's a little known fact the Hull was once a Swedish city and that there was much trade with that Baltic country in medieval times that continues to this day. This explains the accent of native born Hull folk and also how Hull's coat of arms has three crowns on it exactly like the Swedish coat of arms and the ever so similar the three crowns over the stadshus of Stockholm. Sweden's ice hockey team wear three crowns on their shirts as do Hull's two Rugby League sides. It's all very sub rosa and embarrassing as the English like to think the king in Kingston upon Hull was an English King when in fact it was one of the Gustavs or maybe a Magnus I forget for the moment. Sadly, or more likely stupidly, wars have been fought over these three damned crowns. Hull's three crowns are even protected by an Act of Parliament. All this hidden history is so little appreciated that you could say I just made it all up. It's the heat, Carruthers, the damned heat....

The weekend in black and white is here.

Real history people have little or no idea about these three crowns either as you can find out here.

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. 

Council Waste

In days of yore when town councils could raise their own taxes without interference from a very fat man in Whitehall it was considered essential that every last detail of the council's main building, the Guildhall, should reflect the greater glory of the city of Hull. So it came about that even the very drain pipes had a cast iron triple crowned putto to show the world what a true city of culture it once thought it was. 

The weekend in black and white is here.

The old gas works

This is an early example of developing a brown field site, re-using a former industrial area. In this case the Broadley Street gas works, close by Queen's dock, were removed, the Guildhall and law courts built over them and the street renamed Alfred Gelder Street. The old Kingston Gaslight Company, using an inefficient and wasteful process, supplied a poisonous product that gave very poor illumination so not much has really changed over the years.

100 Alfred Gelder Street

Next door to Essex House is a completely different building, turn-of-the-century Queen Anne revivalish offices with art nouveau trimmings. Did I mention eclectic? 

The upper dormer windows are described , somewhere or other, as a tasteful addition. Hmmm.

Essex House

Essex House is a late sixties/early seventies addition to Hull's eclectic architecture, a substantial office block squeezed into the corner of Manor Street and Alfred Gelder Street that, as you pass gives little sense of its height due to the narrowness of the streets. It houses a range of businesses, solicitors, a call-centre, local government departments and last but not least the Coroner's Office. At one time it used to be the place where countless thousands signed on for their unemployment benefit but that's all been moved elsewhere.

Kardomah Set V2.0

I get you might want to make a buck or two out of the fortunate surroundings you find yourself in, and I'm not going to knock any artistic venture that pops up here and there. But this is Hull 2014 and well, pretending that the City of Culture thing doesn't hang around the neck of everything that happens here, why the allusion to Dylan Thomas and the Kardomah set? Did the estate agent who owns this building and clearly can't sell it on to any commercial concern and who once offered to buy the Humber Bridge, think he could get away with this sleight of hand? And those 'artists' who frequent this place; are they getting a cut of the profits? Thought not.

County Court

I've never really looked at this entrance before. It's on Alfred Gelder Street and is part of the Guildhall. It's no longer in use as the County Court has moved on to pastures new. What intrigued me is the little pile of Edwardian baroque nonsense above the door (you might like to click on the image to enlarge it). Amongst the usual symbols of power, a lion head, sword, axe, keys, royal sceptre and the scrolls of law there are numerous overflowing cornucopias of poppy heads. Now, aren't poppies symbols of sleep and death? Is this some ironic comment on the process of civil litigation? Or could it be that whoever paid for this was in the opium trade? Your guess is as good as mine.

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.

A Piece of Advice

I got a bit of a shock when I saw this place closed. Surely, I thought, they can't have abolished Citizens Advice along with the rest of public services but a small notice by the door informs me that the Citizens Advice Bureau has moved from Charlotte Street Mews to the Wilson Building on Alfred Gelder Street. So at least for the time being we still have this small mercy.

Alfred Gelder Street

So here's the Guildhall, on the right, stretching all the way down Alfred Gelder Street. It's a large piece of Edwardian civic preening, seemingly big was beautiful in those days. At the far end there used to be a magistrates' court where petty crooks and poor unfortunates got tried for breaking the law (just being poor was, of course, a crime, still is it seems) whilst at this end the big time crooks were running the council for their own benefit. Of course those days are long gone, the small time crooks and the poor now have their own specially built high tech court buildings (there's money to be made out of the crime business) and the councillors have no powers other than to sack council workers and rip off folk with extortionate fees and stupid regulations. And the big time boys? Well, they seem to be running the country ...

There's more monochrome merriment at the Weekend in Black and White here.

Civic Statuary

High above the entrance to the old County Court sits this statue that I assume is meant to represent justice since it has a set of scales in its hands. Sitting on top of this is another monumental sculpture part of a group representing The Daughters of Neptune  which appeared in an earlier post. These are by A H Hodge who did lots of monumental stuff at the turn of the last century.

The Guildhall, Hull

 

When Hull became a city in 1897 obviously it would have a new town hall, so the old one was pulled down and this cathedral to municipal might was erected in 1913 or thereabouts. It's a massive edifice stretching all the way down Alfred Gelder street (see below). The law courts used to be at the far end with Council business being carried out at the front. Now there's two new courts and the Council has little to do except collect the bins and do what central government tells it to do. Local democratic control simply doesn't exist in this country anymore.

You can tell what a busy place it is by the milling crowds thronging its doors.