The best seat in town

Tourists are flocking to see the latest city of culture installation on Trinity House Lane. The work, sponsored by a local public house, is constantly added to and occasionally subtracted from but will remain a feature in the city through out the year. I think it's a strong statement of the conflict between high ideals and base reality. I highly recommend it.

The Public House

Next door to our greasy fingered barber is the Star of the West or rather the reinvented Star of the West. The original watering hole was on West Street (geddit!) and looked a lot like this. 

As I recall I went into the old place on my first Saturday afternoon in Hull some thirty five or more years ago and had a pint of uninspired beer and a memorably soggy and execrable steak pie. A fine welcome! The place remained a sleazy dive, frequented by Saturday night pub crawlers and reporters from the nearby Hull Daily Mail. I never went in again and can't really say I missed it when the old place was knocked down to make way for this. However in my assiduous research for this post I did come across a song about the Star of West, it's in the 'folk' style and clearly the writer was more impressed than I was.

The Barber Shop

It's a barber's shop on Trinity House Lane. OK it's a rock 'n' roll barber's shop. So why Greasy Fingers? Something to do with hair product apparently.

I post this but I haven't been in a barber's for over thirty years and my hair, what there is of it, is over my shoulders like some ageing hippy. 

Nothing rhymes with ...

...orange.

The local rag, unable to come up with anything newsworthy, pretended to send a reporter out to count the barriers in town. I forget the total, it was something like 3,600 of the little orange darlings. I guess we'll just have to put up with them, they won't be here for ever and when they're gone I bet we'll miss them. Strange old world ...

Another piece of pie?

Trinity House Lane, Hull

Did I mention pie shops were taking over the world? I think I did.

Streets paved with gold

Trinity House Lane

Evening

I seem to be in a monochrome mood for some reason. It could be the near three days of rain and cloud and/or the earlier sunsets. Above Trinity House Lane and below Posterngate both of which I've shown before in more colourful mode.

Weekend Reflections are here.

Manhattan Salad

I noticed this enticing sign on Trinity House Lane yesterday. A quick search in Google tells me the salad bar opened in May 2010 sadly the same search also showed the company appears to have been dissolved in 2012. Maybe Hull isn't big on salad (there's no maybe about it). Now you can't fail with a patty in a breadcake!

If only they had listened to Bart Simpson....

Giving York a hug

This plaque is high up on what used to be Barclay's bank at the corner of Silver Street and Trinity House Lane. It probably goes unnoticed by the vast majority of folks. If they did notice it and were familiar with heraldic coats of arms they  might wonder why some misty eyed maid was hugging the shield of the city of York. The bank, as is the way of things these days, is now a public house named after a member of one of Hull's old banking families William Wilberforce.

Out for a duck

Sometimes it gets eerily empty in the old town; just me and a duck have the place to ourselves.

Trinity House Lane, Hull

 Trinity House Lane runs from Trinity Square to Whitefriargate. The building on the left is Trinity House, the organisation runs the lighthouses around Britain's shores as well as other nautical affairs. In Hull there is a Trinity House School associated with this building. The pub in the centre is the Kingston, here showing the flags of England's less than exciting World Cup effort. The tower on the left is the indoor market, quite why it needed a tower I don't know. The market is becoming more run down as stallholders can't make a living. This picture was taken from what used to be Hull's open market place, sadly Hull no longer has an open market. The development of Princes Quay and more recently the St Stephen's Mall means that fewer people come to this older part of town, you can see it's hardly crowded out.