Ye Olde White Harte, Silver Street, Hull

I mentioned before that King Charles tried to enter Hull in 1642 and was told go away. As with most things English a pub has to be involved somewhere and this is no exception. Apparently the men  involved met beforehand in "ye plotting parlour" of this fair establishment before deciding to deny the king his munitions and so putting Parliament and monarch at odds. This is a seriously fine old building and well worth hunting down; it's lies down an alley off Silver Street, watch out for the skull in the saloon bar!

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.

Fracture lines

It's really not fair, some might say, to juxtapose a broken window with Orchard Park. Orchard Park, the very name conjures up a rural idyll, a place of bucolic bliss. But in reality Orchard Park is home to packs of feral, anti-social, uneducated, despicable untermensch who roam around destroying any last vestige of civilisation...and that's just the children.

Oh I know other cities have far worse places and OP is not even the worst place in Hull but when they witter on about 'City of Culture this' and 'City of Culture that' just bear in mind how utterly irrelevant it all is to Orchard Park and the kindred hell holes that surround this place.

Margot took this picture while we waited for a bus to leafy Cottingham, where the snobs live, if we are to believe some Hull Councillors.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Let's take a pew

Sometimes, don't you think,  it's nice to just sit and reminisce and get away from the stupidity of the day... Now let me see ...the one on the left resembles a former Labour MP who, whilst elected and sitting in the Commons, had part-time jobs as correspondent for the Guardian and the Spectator, a weekly column of gossip and tales in what he no doubt considered a humorous vein, all with that nauseating patronising flat Yorkshire working class "common sense" voicing. The guy as I recall went to Hull University, his dog, notoriously, chased and caught and killed a goose in a park. Anyhow this fine example of how grammar schools elevate folk spent his whole political life in a party that wanted to abolish grammar schools. (For the record and to show my bias I too went to a grammar school which was abolished, abolishing grammar schools ruined the education of thousands, improved the education of none and sank our standards down to medieval times, there; is that clear enough for you? To be fair though it was Mrs Thatcher and not Labour who abolished Grammar schools perhaps history should be spelled IRONY, you do know that Labour PM Wilson closed more coal mines than Thatcher but that's old irony and water under the bridge...). where was I? Yes back to our cherub cheeked friend, I recall he had a tendency to dribble as elderly folk sometimes do (or did, since no dribbler would be allowed on the media these days). I suppose he imagined he was doing good works, they always do, his sort. He was Old Labour, a schemer in the days of smoke filled rooms and deals done behind people's back between over powerful and undemocratic (dare I say corrupt?) Trades Unions and scared Governments. In his days he was considered right wing by those who considered themselves on the left; in reality the chicken had no wings and couldn't fly, was plucked and heading for the oven. When Blair came along he moaned from the left as Blair, well Blair was in different playground altogether (and playing a different game) ... He also said that he would never take a peerage (that, for those from foreign parts, is appointment to our unelected second legislative chamber, the Lords) but you know how the tide turns and inevitably he took the ermine and became a baron (Don't you love how progressive this country is: from snotty kid in Sheffield to a baron of somewhere in Birmingham, you see the system works!) I just can't remember his name what was it now ? Let me look him up ... Oh Yes, I remember now; Roy Hattersley (Lord Roy of Sparkbrook, that's it) and Buster was his dog. Strange how the memory brings up a complete nobody from the past ... is that the smell of madeleines? Time for some tea and cake I think, shall I pour dear, one lump or two? Do you think it will rain?

Here's two figures carved onto the seating of Holy Trinity in Hull, their appearance, though somewhat grotesque, is nowhere near as twisted as today's reality or indeed the fading memory of our youth.

Blocks of colour

At some stage in the early 1960s council house strategy changed from building estates of houses to putting one house on top of another in a tower. Central government subsidised tower blocks, the higher the block the bigger the grant. So it's no surprise to find inner cities filled with high rise accommodation. Hull has a fair few of these buildings; the ones on the outer estates are destined for demolition soon. This pair on Great Thornton Street are relative small and seem to have been painted in gaudy colours, perhaps the contractor had a job lot of cheap paint.

But what's all this in East Park?

As if the good folks of Hull haven't just had a whole week of fun fairs another mini-fair springs up on my favourite tree lined avenue. Something to do with Hallowe'en and all that jazz no doubt. Well it was only a tiny part of the park used up so I suppose I mustn't grumble much.

The word tacky seems the most accurate description of  fun fairs.

I thought this land train was particularly tasteful.

City Centre Ironmonger

That nice red staircase on yesterday's post belongs to Scott's ironmongers. A Hull institution since 1943 serving the building trade and public with everything from nuts and bolts to locks, fasteners and tools and a whole lot more. The service is excellent and if Scott's haven't got it in stock it's a fair bet it doesn't exist. Their website is here.

Chutzpah and a bit more

Chutzpah, I think that's the word to describe taking your money then giving you some of it back and saying that it's being spent for your own good. No doubt there will still be recalcitrant remain minders, keepers of the dying flame (meeting in darkened rooms and secretly drinking to the bureaucratic kings over the water) who will point to this, wag the compulsory finger at us and say "look what you will be missing" come October 31st, Big Boris Day, le grand jour de départ (should it ever happen). But the EU simply gives us back some of our own money and, what's more, tells us how to spend it ... why any self-respecting people would put up with this crap I cannot imagine ... plus it's proposed new leaders (like the old lot before them) are  unelected, unaccountable failed despicable politicians and crooks. 

But ... taking your money and spending on projects that are supposed to be for your benefit is the nature of all government, I suppose. So you'll see a wee sign for "Northern Powerhouse". This is a quango more spoken of than existing in actuality. It seems to have mythic qualities in that it will regenerate the whole north of England without being a real entity. By merely repeating it three times it comes into being and renovates those parts that generations of neglect and disinvestment have ruined.

The Humberside Local Enterprise Partnership, another quango,  was recently criticised for failing to deliver any jobs boost despite receiving millions of central government (ie taxpayers') money.

Hull City Council we have met many times over the years; it is led by simple folk with simple ideas, as in simply ridiculous ideas. One of the latest is to take over empty shops in Whitefriargate and give them to young entrepreneurs to start up businesses. This is so self-evidently bonkers it could only come from folk with no business sense: so, off the top of my head, for example, what about the existing shops that will have to compete with non-rent paying businesses? Hardly fair, is it? I'm sure the EU would have something to say about it (see, I can do irony ...) But then fairness is not something HCC is noted for. So then let us ask who gets the money, why it'll be the greedy landlords who would otherwise be sitting on empty units demanding too high rents for the market until the simpletons of HCC come along with an open cheque book and an account filled with taxpayers' money ... the party of labour subsidising the landlords is an irony seemingly too rich for the simple folk of city hall ... and why help only young entrepreneurs? why can't grey bearded loons drink at the deep well of municipal benefice? 

Time limitations and good manners preclude me from expanding on the Environment Agency ... and Bmmjv are the recipients of all our money in case you wondered where it all went.

Simply Buses

I always strive, as you are aware, to be upbeat and positive in my postings about this fair town. So it gives me immense pleasure to inform you that half of Hull's buses, those blue ones run by Stagecoach, have undergone an overhaul. Not the actual buses themselves, no that would be too much, no the routes they run on. Routes have been combined, adjusted and played around with so that now there are just fifteen routes, numbered 1 to 16. For some reason there is no number 15. Mirabile dictu there's now even a service that runs from the west unto the east (and back again) and it runs right past my front door every ten minutes. The old buses were labeled Pronto now in a masterpiece of PR they are to be known as Simplibus. We tried out that new service on Monday and sure enough it went all the way across to Holderness Road; pretty straight forward except when the driver forgot the new route in town and took us on an impromptu tourist ride round the houses to get back on track. Still, early days ...

Weekend Reflections are here.

The Fair Maid of Goole

I've been though Goole many times by train but never set foot in the place or, to be honest, given it much thought. So what can I tell you about Goole that you don't already know? You'll know that  a Dutchman, one Cornelius Vermuyden,  diverted the river Don (~1629) into a navigable cutting known to this day as the Dutch River which met the Ouse just above the confluence with the Trent. Where the Dutch River met the Ouse up grew or rather developed the village of Goole. (Goole is first mentioned in 1362 as Gulle, a word meaning channel or drain outlet.) The village of Goole was used then for shipping coal from the south Yorkshire coalfields in barges. It developed into a large inland port with the arrival of the Aire and Calder canal. This led to building a town proper, known then as New Goole. The railways arrived in 1848, it's on the Hull to Doncaster line, the motorway, M62, is close by. It now has light industries, Siemens are building a train factory there and the port is thriving and some 18,000 souls inhabit the place.

Now as to landmarks Goole I'm told has a church (below) and two water towers (above) known as Salt and Pepper. There's apparently  a fancy crane or hoist in the docks but I couldn't see that from the train...

... and as our train is departing so we must bid this place adieu...

A road by any other name ...

You know how towns like to honour folk by naming streets after them: so this town has a Larkin Close; an appropriately dull cul-de-sac, Alfred Gelder Street, Jameson Street, and Ferensway , of course; that local turncoat John Hotham from the civil war times gets a road along with Sir Thomas, Lord Fairfax who gets an avenue; there must be dozens more: Raich Carter Way, Blundell's Corner spring to mind as I write... just outside Hull, across the road from me, there's a short avenue named after a guy who wanted to be Lord Glencoe but somehow the connotations of bloody massacre made him change to Lord Strathcona ... so, anyway,  the other year they decided to rename Garrison Road as Roger Millward Way. I'm not sure that this is any kind of honour since Garrison Road as was is really just an extension of the dreaded A63/Castle Street, the bane of motorists' lives and a right pain in the nethers to cross at times... and I wonder how many even know about this or whether the name will catch on ... when they finally get home, will the motorists of this fair town put their feet up, wrap their hands round a well deserved hot brew and say "oh that *beeeep* traffic on Roger Millward Way was such a *beeeep* disgrace" ... nah not going to happen, ever.
I won't pretend to know anything about who or what Roger Millward was, some sporty bloke, so I've heard,  rugby league, really, really not my scene ...

I mentioned today and several times before that this road is  a pain to cross and that young men have been seen to turn into grey beard loons waiting, funeral directors have been spotted lurking for falling stock ... well some concerned person has put up a plaque to let the world know that those who wait may be gone but are not forgotten, not lost just gone before ...

Where it all went

I wonder how many places have to reassure themselves that they are a good place to be. Does ontological insecurity strike in the heart of London, Blackpool (hah! some chance!), York, or even fairest of the fair Portnablagh?  So why this reassuring message on Pier Street? I ask merely to be informed ... Let us pass on to other matters touristy.

Every now and then in this virtual scrapbook I get to show how things turned out. In this case some five or more years ago the place below was just an empty building awaiting rescue with an enigmatic message on the door that I never saw open. Later that year the edifice was covered  in scaffolding and shrouded in green. Now it's become The Store on Pier Street (there is only one store in case you might be wondering, indeed, with a good wind behind you, you could spit from one end of Pier Street to the other) and part of that Old Town/Humber Street renovation scene of  arty eateries, arty galleries and plain silly shops designed to attract those who like arty eateries, arty galleries and silly shops.  I believe folk of that nature come under the generic term of tourist. Please don't get  me wrong, I have in my time been a tourist, I know that may be difficult to believe but I have traipsed footsore and gawped manically and wearily around the tourist traps in London, Dublin, Paris, York and so many other "places of interest" and yes, Blackpool (don't knock it 'til you've tried it) and come away poorer and none the wiser like so many before and since. Tourists to Hull are most welcome and they are more than welcome to Humber Street; in fact if they really like it they can take it away when they leave.