The Old Grey Mare

What can I say about this pub that's right outside the entrance to the university? Well first off, when I came to Hull it was not a pub at all but a hotel, the Newland Park Hotel, indeed I spent one night there before being interviewed for a job at the Uni. There was bar then, the size of a small front parlour with three or four armchairs, all very cosy. Margot informs me that members of staff at the Uni would go there to hide from students ... Now the bar or bars extend across the whole ground floor.

Anyway I got the job and worked there (if that is the word) for a few months. One morning on my way in I witnessed a nasty accident on Cottingham Road close by this spot, a young woman was hit by a speeding van ... all very nasty. 

So then some years later I read a really badly written book by Peter James, I think it was called Possession or some such, about well, ghostly possession if you will. Thankfully I've forgotten most of the ridiculous plot, what there was of it, except the part where someone gets run over right outside this building by a speeding lorry if I'm not being too fanciful. 

So nowadays, I'm always very careful when crossing Cottingham Road ...

Here's a quite gratuitous photo of Cottingham Road, looks kind of innocuous don't it?

The Globe Hotel

Seemingly not shrugging at all old Atlas is still carrying the world on his shoulders. Like the witch's heart Atlas is one of those little things to look out for in King's Lynn. He adorns the Globe Hotel at the junction of King Street and Ferry Street forming a corner of Tuesday Market Place. This is yet another merchant's town house from the early 18th century turned into a hotel. As with the Duke's Head it has been much altered and extended. It is also another of the wannabe designs of Henry Bell though many doubt it. And like the DH the Globe is also haunted, this time with a 'Chill' associated with a murder in the stables many years ago ... or maybe they should just fix the windows.

The Duke's Head Hotel in Blue

Here's the Duke's Head also on Tuesday Market Place. Now memory is a funny old thing but I distinctly remember this place being pink so a rummage through the dusty depths of Google brought forth a confirmation that back in the late 1970s this was indeed a hideous pink confection, you can see for yourself here. I'm not so sure that the blue is much of an improvement; but as I don't live here I don't have to look at it. The building was the house of a local merchant and MP and built in 1683 supposedly to a design by Henry Bell, he of the Customs House (but the Grade 2 listing doubts this attribution). It has been much altered and added to since then having been a bank at one stage. Being built on the site of a much older hotel and being in King's Lynn it is of course reputedly haunted by spectres from its long past.

Going up fast

I last posted about the new "swanky" hotel on Ferensway back in April when it looked like this. Since then the rooms, which consist of prefabricated boxes, have been slotted in and now the exterior cladding is going up. At this rate it should be ready just in time to miss the end of the year of culture.

The Hull Daily Mail has redesigned its website and so doing seems to have made unobtainable pages from the old site. As a consequence the many links on this blog to the HDM will probably not work. I don't know why they've done this, I'll ask them what's going on but do not have high hopes.

Swanky

I mentioned last year plans to build a new hotel on the site of a former dance hall/disco/nightclub/knocking shop on Ferensway. Well it's up and growing. This picture was taken at the end of March but it's going up so fast that it's probably open and taking its first visitors by now ... I'm told it will look like this when it really is finished. The local paper calls it "swanky"; I think that's sounds pretty close to what I would call it.

A Seaside Terrace

Hard now to imagine the thousands who came to Bridlington for their annual holiday but the evidence of their visitations lies in these typical seaside lodging houses and hotels. This one has six storeys and all were no doubt priced accordingly. I'll take a wild guess that it was built in 1878. In those days holidays were unpaid and in the north of England whole towns would take a week off at one time, the Wakes Week,  and all would descend by train on the seaside; there was nowhere else to go. Nowadays everyone goes off on their own little adventure to the Med or Bali or California or where ever a plane can fetch up and these old places have become rented apartments not necessarily to the highest calibre of clientèle. Some seaside towns, not Bridlington especially,  have attracted the unemployed, and possibly unemployable, the homeless, folks with mental health problems, former prisoners and so on. I say 'attracted' some might say these people have been deliberately dumped on these places, cheap and out of the way. Naturally this is  bringing attendant social, drug and criminal problems. So though the sky is still blue and sea and the sand are just the same we've come a long way from the days of the bucket and spade holiday makers with their kiss-me-quick hats and sticks of rock.

More Larkin about

Another sign on the via dolorosa that is the Larkin Trail, this on the doorway of the Royal Station Hotel. 

You are dying to read the poem he composed to the Royal Station Hotel aren't you? Oh yes you are ...

Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high

Clusters of lights over empty chairs

That face each other, coloured differently.

Through open doors, the dining-room declares

A larger loneliness of knives and glass

And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads

An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,

And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,

Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How

Isolated, like a fort, it is -

The headed paper, made for writing home

(If home existed) letters of exile: Now

Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

New plans for an old site

Over on North Church Side plans are afoot for a boutique hotel no less, in or on the site of these fairly plain shop units. A local property developer by the name of Allenby (such a fine name, if I may say so myself!) wants to make 30 or so short stay apartments. 

As the top picture indicates this development to this quiet backwater comes with close up views of Holy Trinity's fine medieval brickwork.

Weekend reflections are here.

Who will stop me?

“Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?"

"Yes."

"My dear fellow, who will let you?"

"That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?” 

― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Here, at the junction of Ferensway and Freetown Way, is a fitting testament to the supremacy of man, the ferro-concrete box. 

Faded Glory

There's a lot of what is politely called 'faded glory' abounding in Bridlington. Here, for example, is a classic seaside hotel, five floors including basement bar and so on and nobody wants it, at least not at the offering price. So here it sits, with expired planning permission for conversion to flats, quietly falling apart until the next auction. I posted about this block some three years ago; very little has changed since then apart from the new coffee bar and even that could still do with a splash of paint on the upper reaches.

Looking good

My what a difference a coat of paint makes (along with hours and hours of hard work). Here is what was the Dorchester Hotel on Beverley Road. It closed a few years ago and was subjected to the now usual attacks from vandals and metal thieves (for a peek inside click here) and was left for long enough boarded up and looking pretty grim as you can see from a pic taken two years ago. (Would it be churlish to mention at this point that there is a police station directly opposite this building and still the destruction went on? Humberside Police "Protect, Help, Reassure", yeah right!)

The building is actually three Victorian villas built in the 1860's after Pearson Park opened just behind them. They were cobbled together to make what at one time was a 58 bedroom hotel later reduced to 25 after renovation in 2002. Even adding a nightclub couldn't save it. I think its position on the run down slummed down end of Beverley Road couldn't have helped. This year, however, it has been taken in hand and is looking good. I not quite sure what the plans are for it but I suspect it is returning to private accommodation. 

Portland Hotel: "one of Hull's most iconic buildings"

It's almost always fatal to be described by the local press as iconic. So it was with the Portland Hotel which went into administration last year and was sold to a 'developer' who has announced plans to turn it into student accommodation. It's on Paragon Street, a street which must hold some kind of record for business failures. As for the building itself it has few redeeming features being a seven storey brick and glass block, it's not ugly it's just boring and certainly not iconic. I've shown you the best bit here. So Hull loses a hotel but never mind there's plans for an eighteen (or was it twenty, I forget) storey monster elsewhere in town when the Council can be 'persuaded' and when pigs learn to fly.

Just by the by I saw the first swifts of Summer today, a bit late but then everything is late this year. Good to know the globe's still working.

Permission denied

Well I've got say I'm surprised. That 18 storey hotel that was planned for High Street has just been refused planning permission by Hull City Council. One councillor even went so far as to forget the rules about stating the obvious and described the proposed building as looking like a "fag packet". The developer is needless to say less than happy having had an even bigger and uglier building granted permission earlier. I reckon my prediction for something much, much smaller is looking good.

Here's the site complete with rubble heap and crow.

Some kind soul handily removed a fence panel for me to take these photos.

High hopes on High Street

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a plot of land standing idle must be in want of a hotel. So this site between High Street and the river has been earmarked for an "iconic" 22 storey hotel and conference centre [ 1 ].  Well in the intervening six months 22 has become 18 and no doubt by the time it ever gets built it'll be 5 or 6. Here's an impression of the latest scheme, it's a wonderful box shape don't you think, so original and so in keeping with the area. Readers with long memories may recall a proposal I mentioned to build a hotel complex a little further up the river at Clarence Mill two years ago almost to the day [ 2 ]; well nothing has come of that little plan either.

Cornmi ...

For reasons that need not detain you I ended up walking around the wilds of East Hull the other day. It seemed the place was either in the business of closing down or had already achieved that state of economic death. One particular cadaver stood out. At the junction of Mount (un)Pleasant and Holderness Road squats the rotting remains of the Cornmill Hotel. It's neatly embalmed and ready for sale, well good luck with that. 

Never mind the quality feel the width

Diagonally opposite the New Theatre on Kingston Square this hotel was built in the early 1800s restored in the 1980s and claims to be Hull's leading independent hotel. It's abuts the New Clarence that I posted about a few months back. In my search to find something (ok, anything) interesting to say about in this post I found that this was once the workshop of a Madam Clapham, described in the hotel's rather badly written website  as "Dressmaker and courtier to Royalty and nobility" (sic). I think they meant couturier but who can tell? Emily Clapham made glad rags for the rich and royal from the late 1800's 'til  she died in 1952. She's described as "Hull's Celebrated Dressmaker" though as dressmaking in Hull is something with which I'm  not overly familiar I feel unqualified to comment and will shut up right now ...

What's in a name

I have said before that pubs really shouldn't change their names. This might now be called Original Keys but you can be sure that locals still call  it the Cross Keys. It's on Driffield's Market Place opposite a hotel whose sign is below, I'll let you guess the name.

Premier

This is the first building of the redevelopment of Hull's riverside, the so-called Boom development. It's a hotel standing all by itself in a wasteland. I took this picture in October last year and have only just noticed that it's actually multi-story carpark with a hotel stuck on top. I think it's a fairly ugly thing, big and blue; and quite what those poles sticking out of the side are for I cannot even begin to guess.