Derelict Doodles

At some time in the down days of this year someone with way too much time on their hands found a way to brighten up the walls of this empty old bank on Beverley Road. Well done them.

Gaudy, Maudlin and Twee

On Beverley Road a woman went missing just about a year ago. Her body was found in the Humber some weeks later, a man has been charged and is awaiting trial. The is apparently the last place she was seen and so, as is the style these days, it has been appropriated for what is now a slightly gaudy, somewhat maudlin and, dare one say, twee shrine. I can't see what purpose this serves but I suppose it does little harm.

I wonder when we'll get the seat back.

The Money Pit

At some point after the stinking little port of Hull was granted the right to exist those who lived in the ancient town of Beverley grew tired of having to sail/row slowly down the twisting, meandering mud stream that was (and remains) the river Hull and decided they needed a road to get to the place that was going to take away their trade and their preeminence as a leading town in England. And so the Hull Road came about, straight as can be through the hamlets of Woodmansey, Dunswell and on through the largest village in England Cottingham across the swampy mires of Wyke until running into the Beverley Gate and the delights of what is now Whitefriargate. Down this road came King Charles I and his mates looking for a bed for the night before being told to go sling his hook. Later on to maintain the road, toll booths were put in place on the Beverley-Hull turnpike.

But times changed, the stinking little port grew and grew and became the stinking big town spreading ever outwards and reaching up and swallowing large chunks of Cottingham (its appetite is still not sated and it would swallow the whole and other villages besides if it had its druthers)  and the road is no longer Hull Road but Beverley Road and despite its historical significance no kings would come down here if they'd any sense.
The stretch of Beverley Road running from the town centre up to Cottingham Road is, now how shall I put this without appearing too blunt, a dump. In the thirty eight years I've been here it has always been a dump, a grey depressing dump. Behind it old slum housing with attendant social problems has been cleared and replaced by new slum, sorry social, housing with attendant social problems but the late Georgian/Victorian buildings put up by the expansion of the mid 19th century remain on the road itself. The condition of these buildings varies from maintained to totally neglected as in bombed out by the Germans and still not demolished nearly eighty years later, another building had all its internal walls  taken out (don't ask why) and is in danger of collapse. To add to its woes the area has somehow become a Conservation Area, so nothing can be done without jumping through the extra hoops of planning permission and cost. None of which would matter much if this wasn't one the main roads into the town, a gateway to use Council planning parlance, and it's hardly a delight but in its defense I would say that other roads into the town also produce the urge to turn around, leave and never come back. I know other cities have similar dreary roads, I recall Liverpool's long and winding roads even after more than forty years,  but that is their problem.

Now this has not gone unnoticed by those who claim to run the place. It has been spotted that the place has had economic decline in recent years (recent years? how recent is well over half a century of decline?). The cash strapped Council fresh from putting millions of pounds of paving in parts of the empty town centre put in for some cash from whatever source has the stuff and managed to bag a couple of million to do up the place. They have a plan, and (God help us all) the plan has a name: the Townscape Heritage Scheme. Well they've had this plan for a few years now but nothing visible has shown itself. The plan is to give grants for part of the cost of renovating buildings, put in new railings and boundary walls, remove a few street signs, install heritage lighting and no doubt polish the dog turds on the pavement and so on. I'm sure none of this will do any harm but honestly it's a drop in the vast ocean. And as any fool knows a couple of million can soon be eaten up in a council plan, especially as extra staffing will be needed to get the plan off the ground (ça va sans dire!), and approving the grants is "proving slower than anyone anticipated" (of course it is, this is Parkinson's Law in action). Clearly there is little reason why a private individual would sink good money into this place and even with grants it's becoming difficult to get any progress. So why waste any more public money? Simply knock the crumbly edifices down (it wouldn't take much; one simply fell down just the other year!), scrub it clean and start again with acres of prime development land or greenery if you wish right in the heart of town ... and as this will take an absolute age to do you could invite the king to come have a look.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Everything comes to him who waits.

Have I mentioned that in this one-horse town there are two bus companies? Well the other day we had all-day-tickets-to-ride from one company, let's call them the red company. So  we sat down and waited the arrival of one of their nice red buses. After fifteen or more minutes I'd taken the above picture, we'd talked about the drunks and drop-outs that used to hang around this bus stop and the church opposite, about the guy who jumped off the roof of the building on the right and then we twiddled our thumbs and peered up the road to see where our bus could be ... but  nothing but blue buses arrived. I mean five blue buses arrived, like they were having some kind of blue bus joke. I was all for giving up and walking. We weren't going far, just four stops down the road but we had tickets, it was the principle of the thing ... So, anyway, we set off to walk and, well you know what comes next .... not fifty yards on a big red bus goes sailing by. 

The weekend in black and white will come if you wait long enough.

Smithy's

Next door to the Bull on Beverley Road this supplier of deep fried battered savoury mashed potato  is apparently the Best in Hull and that, I suppose, is something to be. Hullophiles often claim Hull to be the home of this greasy carbohydrate rich delicacy but I can tell you patties were on sale in my home town Hartlepool and I suspect many other places have a similar concoction.  Pattie and chips is apparently a thing in these parts; the poor man's fish and chips ... I had them as a kid and quite honestly they're nowt special.

Underperforming

“Literacy is a fundamental human right and the foundation for lifelong learning. It is fully essential to social and human development in its ability to transform lives.”

... so says  a statement from UNESCO and it's pretty hard to disagree. So, let us say that in the City of Culture, the place where hundreds of thousands if not millions (if you swallow the Kool Aid stats) came to visit and gawp in amazement at the torch lit parades, the fancy dress parades, the installation of  a wind turbine blade, the simply ridiculous Turner Prize, the art-and-fart, here-today-and-pissed-off-tomorrow, paid-for-by-the-taxpayer steaming garbage that oozed through the newly paved streets of this town ... well, in this benighted place far too many adults (42% in some wards) can barely read or write above the level of an eight year old and nearly 40% of their children leave primary schools not able to read properly. To put this into some sort of historical context back in the early 19^th century it was reckoned nearly two thirds of working men could read after a fashion though fewer could write (teaching writing was frowned upon as working folk might start writing their own stories and tales of woe and so on and that most definitely would not do). In parts of this town there seems to have been little progress in two centuries... 

There's no glamour in functional illiteracy, no awards for being unable to write, no visitors from Primrose Hill and Hampstead, no sponsored rainbow coloured celebration in the heart of town, it is most definitely not liberating  ... just a daily struggle to get by as  the better informed, better paid world races on ahead.

You might think that libraries like the one above on Beverley Road could help; it is, after all, right in the heart of one of the most deprived areas in the town ... but some time back (10 or 15 years) this place (along with several others) was closed. "Underperforming" was the accounting term used. It became part of a brand new expensive school, called  "Endeavour". That school lasted but a few years and is no more, it too "underperformed" ... along with all the other underperfoming schools in the town.

So the Council's plan to deal with adult under education as I understood it was to expand the Central library, bring in Learning Zones ... with fewer books and more computers and that essential aid to learning, a modern ambience (think how well Oxbridge would do with a modern ambience!). The result is that Hull is not the worst place in the country for literacy problems; no, no ... it's just the eleventh worst place.

The Northern Library, as it was known, was built in 1895 to the standard pattern of public libraries back in the day. It is now seems to be a Grade 2 listed empty place that is clearly no longer underperforming ...

Lots Of Love

Someone clearly needed to write a quick memo to remind themselves of the meaning of this ubiquitous acronym and I think we can admire the almost Chaucerian spelling. It may, for all we know, have been the former Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, who thought LOL meant Lots of Love, no seriously he did ...

May Day brings a new theme: "Laugh" to the City Daily Photo folk why not go on over there and crack your face...

More Bull

I've shown this place before a long while back so I thought it would be an idea to show some more details. This is the Bull on Beverley Road, built in 1903 ( and not Victorian as I thought ) in the renaissance revival style. The bull statue is thought to come from an older building on this site, there's been a Bull inn or Bull hotel here for quite some time.

Margot took this.

The weekend in Black and White is here.

"Amazing murals adding colour to Beverley Road ..."

So ran the headline in the local supplier of hyperbole aka the Hull Daily Mail a few months back and as it's Monday I can't be bothered to argue. This one depicts the courageous struggle of a yellow coffee cup with sword and shield against an army of red ones ... like I say it's Monday just go with the flow. There's another equally "amazing" mural up the road.... maybe some other time.

There are more Monday murals here.

Now with even less

As I was passing down Beverley Road I thought  I may as well mention (again) the ongoing, seemingly eternal, saga of this derelict building. For those who are new to Hull (& where have you been all our lives?) this is the remains of the National Picture Theatre destroyed by a bomb in WW2, seventy six years ago and allowed to stand (and slowly fall) in this state ever since; it claims to be the last blitz damaged civilian building in the country. Is there an award for long term neglect? Hull has no shame and would win that one, no worries.

In the near five years since I posted about it the Council have been led a merry dance by the owner who wants to use it for some purpose that was clearly unsuitable (to the Council and other busybodies, I couldn't care less). The building on the left, the old Swan pub, is owned by the same person and started to be renovated as an Indian restaurant but that stopped after a few weeks (I suspect that was some sort of ploy to hold off the Council). The last rumour I heard was  the Council has finally agreed to compulsory purchase it but whether that has actually happened I don't know. The feeling that nobody has a clue what is going on in this place has been with me for decades.

I'm guessing in five or so years time, if I'm still doing this nonsense, I'll pass by and nothing much will have changed, even the ghost cars will be the same ...

Margot took this; she likes old wrecked things ...

4 Octavia X

Now I maintain this is meant to be a dog but Margot insists it's feline and looks a lot like our dear departed old cat Lulu (a ginger tom and a lot better looking than this old brute). Whatever it is it's on a wall on Beverley Road near Kingston Youth Centre. I hope Octavia was impressed.

A little trompe-l'oeil

You'll remember that scaffolding I told you about on Beverley Road, the stuff that was thrown up back in 2011 to stop a building falling down after its owner took out all the internal walls and how the council was paying £150 a week just to check it's still safe ... No, of course you don't, never mind, you have a life, I appreciate that. Well somebody, probably the selfsame council but I can be bothered to find out for sure,  has decided to cover all that up with this impressive illusion. It sure works for me, I can't see any more problems, can you?

Weeping Window

Here on Beverley Road the latest installation exposes the  close dependency between the various layers in the culture business each clinging on to the coat tails of the next one up and how rubbish flows from the top to the bottom to be transformed into a neat little heap of acceptable art. The piece has had a highly favourable reception in the press and TV. The locals simply can't get enough of this and queue up to take their selfies in front of the gushing red flow of culture. It's only here until May before it goes off to tour the country so get your skates on.

Aftermath

A fire in a house last Friday morning resulted in an explosion which blew out the front windows of this house on Beverley Road. A man later died of his injuries and two firemen were also injured. Despite appearances the house is said to be structurally sound as are the neighbouring properties.

The E.U International

Hard boiled Brexit or the soft runny kind may affect these little supermarkets selling delicacies from the Baltic and other exotic places but I rather think they'll still be here long after we've all forgotten about the EU, Mrs Merkel (Wer sie?) and the single market or whatever. The current stupid little falling out is a mere blip, a historical hiccup. It'll all blow over and the dust will settle and we'll say what was all the fuss about. What kind of madness was that? We''ll get back to doing what we've been doing for two thousand years or more, trading goods and carrying people across the North Sea and the Channel, to and from Europe and beyond. What else can we or Europe do?

What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

Here's a familiar sight on a Friday evening on Beverley Road, traffic tailing back to the town centre and not moving much faster than a horse and cart did two centuries ago. But this is bliss compared to the predicted Carmageddon to come on Monday and Tuesday when a section of Ferensway is to be completely closed to allow the completion of some road improvement. A three mile diversion (!) has been put in place involving crossing the river twice. Now even at the best of times those river crossings are bottlenecks and with all the extra traffic it's going to be so much fun. The official advice is to take a bus instead of your car but being stuck on a bus in giant gridlock wont improve things much. My advice: stay in bed.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The Sign of the Dancing Goat

This oddly named coffee house is on Beverley Road between Dinos pizza and burger place( "a Healthier alternative" yeah right) and the Newland Christian Centre (doubtless a holier alternative). It is an excellent establishment, so I've read, but as you know I don't touch coffee.

Road Works

For the past few months the orange bollards and safety fencing have been up at one of the busiest junctions in town where Beverley Road and Spring Bank meet Ferensway and Freetown Way. The plan is to widen the junction, renew the traffic lights and make bigger islands for pedestrians to cross over. They'll also throw in some so-called pedestrians light controlled push buttons but as these won't actually do anything until the traffic has been stopped by the traffic lights they are really just for show. As with all road works in this town delays are inevitable; last Thursday, for example, I was on the bus into town and got caught in a jam so slow that we made 50 whole yards in ten minutes. In the end I got off and walked. (If you zoom in real close to the centre of the picture my bus is the red and cream one still stuck on Beverley Road ten minutes after I got off it!) The rumour is that this work will be completed ahead of schedule, that'll be a relief and we'll be back to the natural background rate of delays. I expect, though, that the junction will look pretty much the same as it did before which is to say not very pretty at all..

The Wellington Assembly Rooms as was

The Welly Club, Beverley Road, Hull

It's come to this, I'm taking advice from a cartoon rabbit: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all"  ... 

The things you used to see

It's a shame that the old local custom of placing a large pig in your window for good luck and prosperity is no longer as commonly observed as it once was. It's been a while since I've seen an example of this and this photo dates back a good five years or so. Perhaps the city of culture will see a revival of this quaint practice.