The Guildhall, King's Lynn

I posted the Guildhall on the Saturday Market before, here, but I don't think I came close to showing its full splendour. This stitch-up is, I think, a bit better. It's a little gem, no strike that, it's a big gem, a Koh-i-Noor of building. It dates from the 1420s with later bits and bobs. There's a dry as dust architectural description here but you can skip that and just stand back, let your eyes feast on its beauty.

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.

"Hemos pasado"

Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost

                                                 L. Cohen

Close by yesterday's statue of Mankind Under Threat stands this new memorial to those few (very few indeed) who took it upon themselves to go off from Hull to Spain with the International Brigade while that country was tearing itself apart in a bloody civil war. I suppose they thought they were helping in some way, it's difficult to see how.  The slogan on the top is that old cliché of the Left (and other lost causes) "They shall not pass". The plain truth is not only did the buggers pass they hung around for nigh on forty years ...
I'm not sure that this memorial with its Communist era references (I'm seeing a star, a bulging Stakhanovite arm, a hint of a sickle, it could just be me) is really apt given the well documented bloody betrayals and murders of socialists and anarchists by Stalin's Soviets. The plinth with "Freedom" and "Democracy" inscribed  is, unfortunately,  so white as to be illegible in bright sunlight so the names of the few (Was it eight or nine? Who knows? Who at this distance cares much?) who went off to fight Franco cannot be discerned nor can the little etched scenes. Still there's long been a plaque in the Guildhall with the names of those involved should you have any interest ... and now I'm set to wondering did any go off to fight for Franco? And where is their memorial?

 

Under Threat

 

Ah so there's our old friend Mankind Under Threat squatting in the belated May sunshine all safe and sound now betwixt the City Treasury and the Guildhall. I wondered where he'd gone to. I suppose, technically, he's on public display but so far off any beaten track no visitor to Hull would come across him by accident. Unlike the old place in Queen's Gardens this site is hardly conducive to the contemplation of mankind being under threat. The threat to our friend here is clear: pointlessness and obscurity. He has already become a mere decoration. There are plans to secure this area with gates (the slim to non-existent terrorist threat to Councillors and council staff must be taken seriously ... and a quarter million pounds is the serious money that must be spent to take it seriously). Anyhow once the gates are built our caged friend will be even more secure and even more out of reach.

Saturday Market Place

If you feel a little cheated, let down perhaps, by all the build up of yesterday's post then the feeling is mutual. Saturday Market Place is, as they say, nowt much to look at. These were taken on a Saturday and, well, it's just a car park; the market having suffered as have many others from the progress of the online shopping. Still and all the surroundings are pretty spectacular I think you'll agree. On the one side St Margaret's church and on t'other the splendid town hall, Trinity Guildhall and old prison or gaol house ...ça vaut le détour, n'est ce pas?

Entrance to the old prison

A sign advertising the delights inside the Guildhall. We didn't have time to see these. Another time perhaps.

Guildhall ball dropping exercise

Peer closely at the top of the Guildhall tower and you might just make out  a ball with pole sticking out of it. Yup not an impressive sight I agree but this is, or rather was, a time signal for ships on the river and in the nearby docks. The ball would be raised up and then dropped at noon, much like the more famous Greenwich ball dropping thing down south. It hasn't worked for donkey's years and indeed I didn't even know it was there until an article in the local rag drew my attention to it. There's been a few attempts to get it going again but all have failed due no doubt to the fact that £50,000 to drop a ball at noon seems a bit of a waste of money given that there's no ships and no dock. But these are mere piffling details; with the City of Culture coming up balls will drop I have no doubt.

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.

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.

Looking for business, mistah?

County Hall or Guildhall? Meh!

It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all. (1984, G. Orwell)

Many years ago I lived near Paddington Station, an area well known for prostitutes. One of their enticements, indeed the only one I ever heard, was "Are you looking for business, mistah?". It was brief and to the point and there was absolutely no mistaking what the business was.

I mention this because we, that is to say the residents of East Yorkshire who have the misfortune to live near to neighbouring Hull are being solicited for our favours by two sadly, very unattractive ladies of the night. The one playing the role of mater familias urges us not let our eyes stray upon the dubious delights of the younger, pushy tart who has a new German pimp and is eager to swallow us up whole. This second, flashes her eyelashes in a most seductive way and tells us it would be good for business, honey, ah but what kind of business is far from clear. And when you look closely, if you dare, at both these suppurating cankered madames they reveal nothing but cavernous blackness. So we are asked to be like some latter day Paris with a worm riddled apple and like poor Winston we go ahead and do it just the same.

Referendum papers for ERYC's £60,000 farce are being sent out today.

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.

Chimney

This is the chimney of the Guildhall's boiler house used to keep the Council Chambers warm. Nowadays the need for economies has led to efforts to capture and recycle the vast quantities of  hot air produced by Councillors but as with every project from this place it cost a lot of money in planning and consultations before the appropriate palms could be crossed with silver. Needless to say we are still waiting to see any results, delays have been blamed on the there being the wrong sort of cold in the building.

Enough of this nonsense. The Weekend in Black and White is on the other end of this link.

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.

Alignment

Around the corner from the Charterhouse is Bourne Street which has nothing much to boast about other than a view of  this alignment of columns and towers. From left to right: the Wilberforce monument, the spire of St Mary, Lowgate, the old Records Office and finally the Guildhall.

Where there's brass there's muck ...

...or so it seems. I doubt any amount of elbow grease will polish up the image of this place.

Mr Hull

The latest statue to appear in Hull is this larger-than-life-size imitation of  Chairman Mao, oops, sorry, no; that's Sir Leo Schultz. The statue stands in a niche on the Guildhall where Sir Leo was a councillor for 50 years or so and leader of the council from 1945 to 1979. Not surprisingly he was known as Mr Hull. Many people in Hull owe their lives to his urging the building of public air-raid shelters before the last war. A school was named after him but that has recently closed. I have taken the liberty of shifting the hue slightly to reflect Sir Leo's political views.

There's more about the making of this statue and the life of this man here.

Museum reflections

The Guildhall and Law Courts reflected in the Transport Museum's specially darkened windows. One day I might actually go inside.

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.