Sheer bloody madness

 “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

So, at last, the Government decides to close the pubs and clubs along with the schools. Monday will see legislation put before Parliament that could take away our civil liberties for a period of two years. It will only be a matter of time before they lock us all up in our homes like Italy, France and Spain. This is all for our own good you understand, it always is. Two years!!! We're sleepwalking into a trap, gliding peacefully down the slope that inevitably leads to  tyranny; with the decoy of a supposed pandemic (the annual flu has killed more this winter and does so every winter and no-one said a thing) and a willfully crashed economy (the Government is giving away money like they stole it which they have, I suppose) small businesses closing and shops that cannot cope with panic demand (shortages of staples bread, meat and milk, I can, however, still buy the newspapers it is not total barbarity out there, yet). In all this there seems no voice defending reason, no voice saying this is completely wrong, nobody questioning or doubting the official line, nobody at all ... It is collective insanity, sheer bloody madness. It will not end well.

Yet More Driffield Amusements

Driffield, let's be honest, is not a big place. A visitor would be stretched to say it had more than one street, named rather sweetly as Middle Street. Now Middle Street is not to be mocked; it is long enough to have two halves: Middle Street North and Middle Street South. But the visitor need not worry about such quaintness, Driff has one street and most everything is on it. So let us just say that we are at the southern end of the strip and here's the Butcher's Dog, which I assume is a public house of some sort. I post only because I think the sign writing is superb ... I don't go in pubs these days, haven't for years. I'm told that now you can't smoke in them they reek of farts, sweat and stale beer ... delightful!

But what is that piano keyboard peeking out on the left? Why it's nothing less than a singing barber ...

Now this has three of my pet hates all in one window: Hallowe'en (boring commercialised Yankee reimport of a Scottish export), the Beatles (vastly overrated crud) and Elvis (just plain emetic yuck from the get go!). So well done  them! Barbers, with or without singers,  I also haven't been in since even longer than pubs. 

The Railway

This pub  in Cottingham has been closed since January and was only open for a few weeks over Xmas before that, the seasonal decorations are still up... Basically it's on its uppers and whoever owns it has decided enough is enough and has put in plans to erect "10 dwellings with associated access, parking, landscaping and infrastructure following demolition of hotel". You last saw this place way back in 2012 when it was positively blooming.

Small & Red

Claims to be the smallest bar in this small town and who is going to argue? I think it could also be the reddest one as well. As I recall this place used to be a solicitor's office until a few years back. Manor Street is the place to seek out this delight and if it's full you can always go to the one on the corner...

The Golden Eagle

I've shown the Eagle on the corner of Coltman Street and Anlaby Road a couple of times before (here and here). The place has long ago given up on being a pub like it once was and had fallen on hard times as they say. Well now it has been converted into flats, though I did hear a story that a small pub (with micro brewery?) might open on the ground floor. Whatever happens the place now looks a million dollars, with new windows and all painted up with the eagle (that they really couldn't remove, now could they?) given a fresh golden coating. It all looks really good. 

An Englishman's Home ...

“It could be an almost heavenly development,giving scope for infinite variety and the opportunity to create a real community.”  Herbert Walford Anderson, Lord Mayor of Hull, 1967

In 1352 a certain John of Sutton was given permission to crenellate his building, Le hermitage, in a place called Braunceholm near the village of Swine in Holderness. This was after he'd been brought up by the justices for having built a castle without permission. The justices, from the nearby upstart new city of Kingston upon Hull had taken a dim view of castles being built in the neighbourhood and grassed the said John of Sutton up to the King, Edward III. John prayed pardon for the trespass and palmed the King 20 shillings for his troubles and King granted his pardon and the all important licence. (That was the way business was in those days and probably still is ...) Now John must have had a good reason to want protect himself and maybe he'd had a vision of what was to befall his lands in the centuries to come ... 

Fast forward, as they say in the movies, a few hundred years and John's castle is but a grassy mound beside a disused rail line but his precious Braunceholm is now home to thousands in one of the biggest housing estates in the country, behold, I give you Bransholme...

After the last war with half the population homeless and most of Hull's housing damaged and in need of knocking down (the slums that is) the Council and others had a wizard idea, why not build a new town, a model community, well outside of Hull to rehouse all these poor folk (and no-doubt pass what ever problems they might have on to the new town's council) ... well the new town idea didn't come off but land was bought to the north east of town and by the mid sixties everything was ready to rock (I know some twenty years after the end of the war, this is Hull everything takes time (and a little greasing of parts that needed greasing no doubt)) and in a decade Bransholme was built with ~20-30,000 inhabitants (I've read varying figures) a handful of schools, a shopping centre (that closes at 5.30-6.00 and then they throw you out!) and a few pubs. The place was and remains a vast, sprawling warren of meandering pointless roads that lead nowhere but back upon another meandering road. The houses, being built so quickly and so cheaply were as you might expect and within a decade or so demolition of some of the worst was under way, most notorious were the so called misery maisonettes or "alcatraz", a concrete man-made hell hole. The estate  is described as being a place of multiple deprivation with social problems that are common these days (drugs, petty crime, anti-social behaviour and so on) ....and still and yet folk who live there seem to love it ... or so some of them say in the local paper.
So what was I doing in this place? I was on my way home from the delightful Kingswood Shopping Centre on the 11a Simplibus service (simple fares, simple routes, simple times, simple numbers!) that takes what is possibly the most circuitous route from A to B;  it's basically the scenic route taking in the delights of Bransholme, Sutton and Holderness Road, just don't be in a hurry.

"Little boxes made of ticky-tacky ..."

"... little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same ..."

This odd looking building is a pub called the Nightjar and not, as we both thought, the Nightmare.


The weekend in black and white is here.

Sweet Williams

Picture by Margot K Juby

Round the corner from the Duke of Cumberland sits this quietly unassuming public house named officially as the  King William the Fourth; a mouthful for anyone so known universally as the King Billy. Now I've only just found that the William referred to here was the fourth, no-body remembers Billy IV. Everyone knows Will I (the Conqueror or Billy the Bastard, 1066 and all that, a good thing), Willy II (aka Rufus, died (murdered?) while hunting in the New Forest) and then our Glorious King William the Third ( the King Billy; the great deliverer, who gave us our freedom, religion and laws) but William the Fourth who he, when all the dust is settled? As Margot succinctly put it  "He's the Gordon Brown of Kings"; poor sod, forgotten by all save the sots of Cottingham. 

... and the fading flowers are, of course, Sweet Williams, not, as some north of the imaginary border, call them Stinking Billies (ragwort actually) and besides the Stinking Billy in that case was William, Duke of Cumberland (Butcher Cumberland to some who knew him well enough to suffer) and, as I say, he lives round the corner.

William is such a sweet name, dontcha think?

The Duke of Cumberland

Margot was saying, just the other day, that the sign on the Duke of Cumberland in Cottingham was looking a bit faded and unreadable. Well that is no longer the case with this fine sign letting the world know what's what. A few other things like a new doorway and a fresh coat of paint, have seen the old place transformed after a brief closure. The place is due to re-open today with new management, (actually old management returning) so good luck to them.

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 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.

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.

The Masters Bar

At the junction of Jameson Street and South Street stands this little gem of Edwardian baroque revival. It was built in 1903 and is, of course, protected by a Grade 2 listing.

I'll mention  here (without comment) an odd little poster that you may have noticed in the top photo. It's for that Larkin exhibition at the University which I posted about a few weeks ago.

Dairycoates, Hessle Road

This pub was built in the mid 1870's to cater for the thirsts of railway workers at the engine sheds of the Hull and Selby Railway. The railway arrived in the 1830s and transformed what was an agricultural hamlet with a population of just three in 1823 into one of the largest  engine shops in the north east. To this then add the arrival of St Andrew's Dock for the fishing fleet in 1883 and you can see how Dairycoates, a veritable boom town, might be spreading eastwards to meet the westward surge of Hull just two miles down the road. By the turn of the 20th century the union was complete with all signs of agriculture long gone and Dairycoates just another busy and overcrowded area of the city as Hull continued to surge out westward towards Hessle and Anlaby. 

Today no one with an ounce of sense uses steam engines so the engine sheds are long gone. The former rail track is now the busy A63 dual carriage way of ill repute. Iceland's decision to extend its fishing limits and other factors including the EU saw off the fishing fleet. St Andrew's Dock is now a silted up mess with dereliction and vandalism a real problem The area is given over to supermarkets like ASDA and Lidl and to small industrial firms. I doubt if even three people now live in the area of the original hamlet. All that seems to remain is this colourful pub, a nearby Dairycoates Avenue and a flyover known as the Dairycoates Flyover.

The Half Way, Hessle Road

That's half way between Hessle and Hull. As a crow flies it's about four and a half miles from the centre of old town Hull to Hessle's bustling heart so maybe it's five or so miles on the ground.  A fair walk but hardly exhausting. Nevertheless you'd need some refreshment if going to either destination, and if overcome by dread or fatigue you could rest up at the Half Way Hotel.  This place, by the look of it built in the first half of the 19^th century when Hessle Road was a turnpike and ran through open fields, is no longer a hotel but still refreshes so I'm told. The large mural I showed the other day is on the far side.

Albert

Albert has had to wait six years for his appearance in this blog due to a slight aversion on my part to anything batrachian. It's been three years since my last toady post so allow me a small indulgence while I clear these old photos out of the waiting list. This fine fellow squats (he may have hopped off by now; it's been a while!) by the entrance to the Pearson pub on Princes Avenue. If you have no idea what Hull's Toad fixation was consider yourself lucky and count your blessings.

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.

That old triangle

I started the month off with an abandoned street but did not have the space to include this empty pub also on that street. This is the Dram Shop that I posted before in happier times. There are more, many more, unoccupied buildings on this and other streets but to post them all would give the impression that Hull is the least prosperous place in the country and that would be a poor show, old sport ...

The Polar Bear

The Polar Bear on Spring Bank has gotten itself a pretty new sign, well it's new to me. The place seems to have the decorators in at the moment so maybe it'll reopen soon.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Wave goodbye to the purple pig

The oddly named Purple Pig restaurant on Trinity Square went  belly up last October when the company that owned it put itself into liquidation. A nearby planning sign indicates that it is to reopen as a pub and further research tells me that the pub will be called "The Head of Steam" (*sigh* Pubs used to have such quaint names as the King's Head, the Red Lion or even the Drunken Duck; now all pubs in a chain have the same name). The new owners are Cameron's Brewery from my old home town, Hartlepool, so it's bound to be a great place. I just hope access is restored to these premises as, at the moment, it's just a bit tricky ....

A movable feast

This Sunday being the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox means that it is Easter Sunday, a day for eating chocolate eggs and chocolate rabbits and, well, chocolate basically. (I know it has some other significance but we'll leave the increasingly irrelevant, not to say bizarre, Christian sects and crazed neo-pagans to their own private grief. ) This, of course, means that today is Good Friday; a day for eating hot cross buns, traditionally just lightly toasted and eaten with a smidgeon of melting butter, very yummy. But what's all this then? Here, from a distant antipodean place (where no doubt be dragons), comes this meaty, cholesterol laden concoction; the hot cross burger! I love it! It offends on so many levels that I'm almost tempted to wander down the road and try one.