Nature's Playground

In a bid to interest the youth of Hull in nature the Council built a small nature playground in a local park. It has logs that you can play on or crawl through and fake toadstools that you can do, well, whatever you do on a toadstool and this charming piece of welding. I guess it represents some kind of creepy crawly and is meant to appeal to the younger mindset. Well I have to say when went past the other day the nature playground was empty and the unnatural playground with skateboarding facilities and swings and good old fashioned tyres on ropes was full of happy screaming brats with not a care for nature or her ways. Epic fail, I believe is the current term for this ...

Firestation

You know how jealousy goes; well the police get a nice new station so the firemen want one too. Here's the Clough Road fire station which funnily enough is directly opposite the spanking new police HQ. It's been found to be no longer fit for purpose (quelle surprise!) and so a new one will be built on this site for a shade under £4 million, chickenfeed compared to the £60 million being sploshed out across the road. Again this spending comes against a background of budget cuts to the service and loss of 70 or so staff with the same number threatened. We are promised that no lives will lost and that response times will be the same. We shall see.

At The Carwash

I guess you have be of an age to recall a song of that name. Well this place is a miles away from that; you're unlikely ever to meet a  movie star or may be even an Indian Chief. This wash is on the edge of the badlands between Clough Road and Bankside and with millions of cars on the road is doing a fair trade. 

"Well those cars never seem to stop comin'.
  Keep those rags and machines hummin'"

Tangent

This is the gasholder I showed before ( here ) only now it's empty. I've just realised that  it is a totally different design to the gasholder I showed yesterday and that's after thirty years of going to and fro past these things. Something new everyday ...

Form ever follows function

This view on Clough Road put me in mind of this little quote.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

Louis Sullivan

So many numbers

Here's a welding shop on Clough Road and a fine collection of plates presumably from vehicles that didn't make it out of surgery.

This month's City Daily Photo theme is numbers. You can see what numbers others have added  at the Facebook page or here.

St Mary's Cemetery, Air Street, Sculcoates

Many years before the city of Hull was built the village of Sculcoates huddled by the muddy flooded banks of the river Hull. The name, Sculcoates, comes, I've  been told, from Skuli's Cottages; Skuli being a Viking who settled in these parts. Anyhow time passed and a church was built, St Mary's, with its attendant graveyard, is first mentioned in 1232  but it could be much older. The church was rebuilt in 1760 and done up again in 1875 at the cost of a £1000. A description of it reads "An arcade of four bays separates the nave from the aisles. The east window is filled ,with stained glass, representing the Crucifixion. In the chancel is a fine old brass chandelier of 16 lights, of the Queen Anne period."  This  church  ran the old school I showed the other day. So why, you might ask, am I telling you all this instead of showing you a photo of it in all its glory? Well, sadly, the church was pulled down in 1916 and rebuilt somewhere else. So there's only the  old graveyard left, stuck between the RE:group tanks and Bankside's passing traffic. 

The magnificent  tomb must be at least 10 feet tall, unfortunately I couldn't find any inscription on it but it shows the wealth that must have been around in what is now an uninhabited area.

Lovers of graveyards and tombs should head over to Taphophile Tragics.