Astonished brickwork

Ella Street (or at least its residents' association) has a thing about birds, there are bird tables along the length and little model birds attached to street furniture, I've posted about this a while back (here). What I didn't know then but have found since is that this avian fix has extended to putting up little quotes from literature with a birdy theme. Various authors from Wordsworth to Poe were chosen. Anyhow this being Hull and reason being what it is I suppose they could not escape the Larkin effect. At least this is one of his more cheery verses, yes I know it's difficult to believe. 

And while I'm on about old baldy, some of you may recall the fibre glass toads that decorated the town a while back on the celebration (there is no better word for it) of his death some 25 years earlier, well wait five years and suddenly it's thirty years since his death and a reunion of toads is planned this year along with a very large inflatable toad to hang over the town centre. You know a dead Larkin is the gift that keeps on giving ... It's a culcher thing, innit!

This is on the wall of the Jewish cemetery at the far end of Ella Street and close by that delight of modern architecture that I posted the other day .

You want the whole picture and the whole poem? Surely you do, it's really not that long, honest.

Coming 

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon—
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin

A stylish exit

Living near the large cemetery and crematorium on Chanterlands Avenue means funeral cortèges are a common sight in these parts. Most involve black limousines but I've noticed a worrying trend lately for grey hearses (!); this will never do. A few, very few, involve the old style horse drawn hearse like this one that clip-clopped slowly along Cottingham Road yesterday; a fine if, as I suspect, expensive send off.

Four walls and a roof

Here's another of the modern architectural delights on Saint Ninian's Walk.  I've shown it in black and white but you are not missing much colour since it is a pale blueish white, somewhat akin to a cyanotic corpse, in reality. I like the little sun hole in the roof which looks like an afterthought, the rest is just dire.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

"Bag it and bin it; that way we'll win it ..."

Bricknell Avenue, Hull

Mobile refuse containers or wheelie bins as everyone calls them are surely the bane of modern life. Designed to save the planet by aiding recycling they have multiplied so that now each household in the land has at least two sometimes three, four or even five depending on how eco-stupid the council is feeling. Naturally a population of 70-80 million bins cannot be contained and so it spreads along the streets like a plague. As for the trash collected I'm told most of it gets put on to big ships and sent to China where no doubt it gets converted into wheelie bins and exported back to dear old Blighty....

And if you think leaving a bin on the street is a harmless pastime think again ...

From the Criminal Justice Act 1982

"137 Penalty for wilful obstruction.

(1)If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence and liable to a fine not exceeding [F1level 3 on the standard scale]."

F1level 3 is £1,000!

So that's where it went

You expect large tanks and boilers in an industrial site. But I bet you don't usually find them right up on the the top floor. I'm trying to imagine how they got it up there in the first place. Never mind, it must be worth a bob or two in scrap once they figure out how to get it out of there.

This is the old Clarence mill being brought down to earth slowly but surely. The plan is for a hotel to rise from this. Well that's the plan ...

Yet another Council cock-up

I've posted about Prince Street before, it's probably one of the most photographed spots in the old town. A Georgian archway leading to a pleasant little row of houses. Naturally it's all listed buildings; grade 2 protected. So in a well ordered society a Council would never, ever install five gas meters with plastic covers right slap bang in the middle of a tourist attraction. But you have never come across an organisation quite like Hull City Council. And to add insult to injury once the Council realised that what they had done required planning permission it set about applying to itself for retrospective permission to vandalise the neighbourhood. Well this was too much for anybody to take lying down, even one long serving Councillor who can normally be relied on to back up any silly move from HCC said it was 'stupid'. Outrage was being shown, words like 'crass' and 'deplorable' were being bandied about in the local paper. One objector described the meters as looking like a men's urinal ...
The Council realising the jig was up have now decided to remove these meters admitting that this should not have happened as "the gas meter boxes are not in keeping with the surrounding listed buildings". (You don't say!) Which is all well and good if this were such a rare occurrence but such acts of gross stupidity seem to be the modus operandi of HCC; well it's only public money so they just don't care.

No Council officers were injured in the making of this post nor have any lost their jobs unfortunately

Stylish nonsense

As the winner of several design awards the Scale Lane bridge has many of the attributes of stylishness. It was hideously expensive, looks like someone's doodling made real and serves no useful purpose other than to amuse Hull's hardy tourists.

I noticed after I had taken this that the demolition of the Clarence flour mill in the background has begun, I was guilty of looking at the clouds and not at what was in front of my nose.

City Daily Photo's monthly theme is 'Stylish'