Autumn Cemetery

By Margot K Juby

 This angel is in Spring Bank cemetery, a wonderful place to wander through especially in Autumn.

The Great Visitation of Cholera

 Lost in the wonderfully overgrown Spring Bank cemetery is this slightly leaning monument to a disastrous cholera outbreak in Hull in 1849. The plaque below gives the chilling numbers of dead; we can only imagine the horrors of those days. Nowadays with our clean drinking water and improved sanitation cholera is practically unknown in the UK but it stills kills over 100,000 mainly in the developing world.

Level Crossing

Waiting for the train to pass this little crowd gathered at the crossing on Spring Bank in October during Hull Fair week. I've noticed that there aren't many people in my photos so I'm making up for that with a whole bagful. 

Sarcophagus

The General Cemetery on Spring Bank was started in the 1840s and was a well laid and ordered place with well kept paths and cleared spaces. Now its filled with matured trees and it's just a place to walk the dog and for other less salubrious activities. You can still come across stunning examples of the Victorian near obsession with mourning and funerary monuments. It is difficult now to see quite what the purpose of this massive marble sarcophagus might be. Here it stands slowly eroding and being swallowed up by ivy.

Fourny père et fils

Here's another piece of classic Victorian cemetery furnishing, the broken column. In this grave lie Jules and Hector Fourny, ship surveyors in Hull during the early nineteenth century. Jules Fourny came to Hull from Boulogne to make his fortune. They must have been successful as graves like this don't come cheap.

Memento mori

The Victorians seemed to have far grander funereal monuments than is the style these days. This fine angel stands in Spring Bank cemetery and is one of only a few to have survived the ravages of vandals and the Council's strange desire to flatten grave stones on grounds of "health and safety".