To Let: One City of Culture

I read a report in the esteemed local newspaper that, according to the equally esteemed Sunday Times, Hull is to be included for the first time in the "Best Places to Live in the UK" list. Being the ST it is aimed at readers who would not dream of taking the bus (yes a bus dear! you pay a fare and sit with 'other people' and they may even talk to you) to the human battery farms of Orchard Park and Bransholme or the ruins of Preston Road or, God forbid, a leisurely stroll along Beverley Road with its ambience of traffic pollution, cannabis and the glorious delights urban and human decay. No these blinkered snowflakes only appreciate how the tree-lined Avenues have become desirable with lots of eating places and how "everyone in Hull has got involved" (in the C of C, darling, do keep up). It's delusional BS for the aspirant middle classes.

The list is in no particular order of merit and has no fewer than 143 places on it (as the list takes into account "the personal experiences of the authors" I'm thinking that's a hell of a lot of baksheesh!).  I suppose by the same criteria of making a big enough list Abu Ghraib might have been one of the best prisons in the world.

The other day I was accused of moaning (yes, moaning, me!, as if I would!) by some anonymous commentator, may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

The Bingo Hall

The advertising on this building attempts to convince that it is so much more than bingo but that's advertising for you; a manifest denial of the truth. This place, on Clough Road, looks like and is the same size as a large warehouse and has a large car park to cope with demand. It replaced the much smaller hall on Beverley Road. I can think of at least two other similarly large bingo clubs in Hull so there must be plenty of people wanting to get their "eyes down for a full house". In the UK 45 million visits a year were made to bingo clubs which was more than went to professional football in England so it's no small business but personally I cannot see the attraction of housey-housey.

The moving plod plods; and, having plodded, plods on.

In the  glad confident years of the end of the last century Humberside Police spent well if not too wisely and opened little stations at various places throughout the town and outer regions. One such was this in Pearson Park, next door to the mosque since you ask. There was another built on Beverley Road not four hundred yards from this... Total waste of money. Although it was a station it never seemed to have anyone in it and the couple of times I needed to contact the old Bill I had to use a phone installed in the doorway which put me through to some distant operator who took a message and promised to "see to my query" (meaning get lost and don't bother us we're having our tea break). 

Well you probably know where this is heading ... 2008, the political choice to impose austerity and so on meant that Humberside Police had to close these places in the name of efficiency (an admission if one were needed that these places weren't an efficient use of resources) and they also rashly sacked hundreds of officers. I must just mention in passing that Hull now has the highest burglary rate outside of London (hoorah!) ... maybe it's unconnected and really due to all that culture, who can say?.

So, anyhow,  if you want a big Victorian villa in Pearson Park with nice quiet neighbours apply to the Humberside Police...

What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

Here's a familiar sight on a Friday evening on Beverley Road, traffic tailing back to the town centre and not moving much faster than a horse and cart did two centuries ago. But this is bliss compared to the predicted Carmageddon to come on Monday and Tuesday when a section of Ferensway is to be completely closed to allow the completion of some road improvement. A three mile diversion (!) has been put in place involving crossing the river twice. Now even at the best of times those river crossings are bottlenecks and with all the extra traffic it's going to be so much fun. The official advice is to take a bus instead of your car but being stuck on a bus in giant gridlock wont improve things much. My advice: stay in bed.

The weekend in black and white is here.

The Sign of the Dancing Goat

This oddly named coffee house is on Beverley Road between Dinos pizza and burger place( "a Healthier alternative" yeah right) and the Newland Christian Centre (doubtless a holier alternative). It is an excellent establishment, so I've read, but as you know I don't touch coffee.

Propping up the facade

Oh dear the scaffolding has gone up on the recently fire-damaged Lambert Street Chapel. The side walls have been knocked down by half and I hear the rear wall will have to come down too. Scaffolding means the facade might be saved, it could also mean a long, long wait. On Beverley Road scaffolding has been up on one building since 2011 . Hopefully the facade can be incorporated into whatever new building arises in much the same way as the old Cooperative Institutes facade which stood for decades in splendid isolation was eventually incorporated into a new apartment block on Kingston Square.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

The Grasshopper Store

Although there quite a few Polish and Eastern European stores dotted around the outskirts of town especially on Beverley Road and Newland Avenue there are very few in the town centre itself. This one named Pasikonik or Grasshopper is on Carr Lane. It's a welcome addition to Hull's shops and provides an alternative to the uniform fare offered by the the chain stores Sainsbury's, Tesco and so on. I hope we see more like this. If only so I can get my Polskie piwa when in town!

Road Works

For the past few months the orange bollards and safety fencing have been up at one of the busiest junctions in town where Beverley Road and Spring Bank meet Ferensway and Freetown Way. The plan is to widen the junction, renew the traffic lights and make bigger islands for pedestrians to cross over. They'll also throw in some so-called pedestrians light controlled push buttons but as these won't actually do anything until the traffic has been stopped by the traffic lights they are really just for show. As with all road works in this town delays are inevitable; last Thursday, for example, I was on the bus into town and got caught in a jam so slow that we made 50 whole yards in ten minutes. In the end I got off and walked. (If you zoom in real close to the centre of the picture my bus is the red and cream one still stuck on Beverley Road ten minutes after I got off it!) The rumour is that this work will be completed ahead of schedule, that'll be a relief and we'll be back to the natural background rate of delays. I expect, though, that the junction will look pretty much the same as it did before which is to say not very pretty at all..

Signs of ageing

 

Lichenometry, a way of telling the age of exposed rocks by studying the size of lichens, is, I'm told, particularly useful on specimens under 500 years old. However I think I can accurately date this stone to sometime in or about March 1859 this being the date inscribed on the grave of one John Oxtoby late of Hull Bank¹ who, we are informed, departed this life aged 55 on the 21^st of that month.

The new month's theme for City Daily Photo is ageing or aging depending which part of the world you come from. You can see how well others have aged or agd here.

¹ Hull Bank I have found was a " a hamlet in the township and parish of Cottingham; the seat of Benjamin Blades Haworth, Esq. (which explains the Haworth Arms right on the corner of this estate) 3 miles from Hull". Hull Bank was mentioned in the Domesday Book and was part of the Manor of Cottingham, roughly bounded by Clough Road, Beverley Road, the River Hull and Dunswell. The area became part of Hull with the boundary extension of 1882.

Barmy Drain

When applying for planning permission to build anything new  nowadays you have to supply a flood risk assessment, a surveyor, at no small cost, looks at the plot and decides how likely it is to flood and what if anything should be taken into account when drawing up plans. Good job then that such niceties did not prevail in the middle ages else nothing would be standing in these parts. The whole Hull river valley until the middle ages used to be one big marshy malarial infested lake stretching up as far as Driffield with occasional interventions from the Humber to add to the gaiety of nations. But bit by bit and without any help from the Environment Agency river banks were raised and drains put in. The late 18^th and early 19^th century saw really large investment in drying out the land and bringing it into cultivation. And so here's the Barmston (Barmy) Drain as seen from Clough Road doing what it has been doing since the passage of the Beverley and Barmston Drainage Act of 1798 taking the wet stuff from East Yorkshire's marshy carrs and putting it into the river Hull in a neat controllable fashion. Despite the rubbish piling up on the banks these drains provide a rich habitat for wildlife though it has to be said I only saw two wrens and a depressed looking duck while I was here.

I've posted about this waterway before here.
If you are into the history of drainage (and be honest who isn't?) here's an old pamphlet about draining the Hull Valley.
The weekend in black and white lurks here.
And weekend reflections are hiding here.

The Wellington Assembly Rooms as was

The Welly Club, Beverley Road, Hull

It's come to this, I'm taking advice from a cartoon rabbit: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all"  ... 

and the winner is ....

As you might guess I'm not big on competing and the whole business of finding the so-called best  by this distasteful method leaves me asking why bother. But it seems some folks like a little competition even in the most obscure categories, so here, should you ever want to know, is the Beverley Bun champeen. It's on Lairgate, just down the road from the chippy, but the winner of this prestigious award is surely destined for bigger things.

Lairgate

Looks peaceful and quiet in this picture but in reality Lairgate is one of the busiest streets in this medieval town. It forms part of the main route from the Humber Bridge in the south to Driffield in the north, the A164. Heavy traffic winds and grinds its way through the town, through narrow streets, such as Hengate, that are plainly not up to the task. So Beverley is to get a relief road, a southern by-pass which will cut across the green belt between Cottingham and Beverley. It will, of course, only be a matter of time before Beverley expands outwards to this pass-by, but that's what passes for progress these days and if people want to build their homes on a flood plain who is to stop them?

Dove House

A common sight on many shopping streets in this area is the Dove House charity shop collecting funds for the hospice for people with "a life limiting illness". When I say common there are over thirty of them spread across Hull and other East Riding towns providing 20% of the income for this charity. This one in Beverley Road specialises in furniture but it's right next to a more general shop selling the usual mix of clothing, books and toys. They also run a lottery. Hospices receive just a third of their funding from central Government so need all the help they can get.

The Local Rag

These are the offices of the Hull Daily Mail, a sprawling block at Blundell's Corner, the junction of Beverley Road and Spring Bank, that used to house a much bigger operation than at present. The paper is no longer printed here, that being done somewhere outside of Hull and then the papers trucked back for sale in the city. Don't ask how much it costs, I haven't bought a copy since Margaret Thatcher resigned! It claims a readership of 170,000 and is the largest regional newspaper in Yorkshire.

Now it has to be said that though it is called a newspaper much of what is reported by this institution is far from being new or even newsworthy. It is often wrong on facts, its standards of grammar are quite lamentable, it is not above copying stories from other sources without attribution. (I know plagiarism is the basis of all culture but when I found a senior HDM employee Tweeting my photo as if he owned the image it was a bit too much too far! Still waiting for some sort of apology for that.) Its reporters, if we may call them that, seem to have scant local knowledge and often misname places and streets. I could go on but you get the gist.

You can check out its web site here, but be warned, I'm told that the mobile site is a jumble of popup adverts that make it unusable, it often gives request timeouts and is generally poor. The only good thing on the site is the comments from readers which run the full gamut of sceptical denial of just about everything to rallying positively behind everything Hullish. I should just add here that I do not read the sports bits so that might be quite superb but somehow I doubt it.

Now having said all that, it came as no little surprise to hear that HDM has won awards for being the best regional newspaper. The judges said it was "delivering a newspaper completely in tune with the communities it served"; well quite! Makes you wonder how bad the other papers are.

Brunswick Avenue

Brunswick Avenue runs off Beverley Road and was built around 1880-1890 as Hull sprawled outwards. It was once a tree lined avenue with elm trees every ten or twelve feet. When I used to live round here about the mid 1980's there were just a dozen or so left, what demolition and rebuilding hadn't destroyed Dutch Elm disease was killing off one by one until now there are just four left outside the PDSA building on the left. 

I never really liked living in this place. The area around here is almost entirely council housing with attendant social (should that be anti-social?) problems and though an old neighbour who I met told me it was quiet and peaceful she added "You must never leave your windows open for fear of burglars sneaking in". The yellow skip disappearing into the distance is carrying off tons of fly-tipped rubbish dumped into a garden on the right that I have just had the pleasure of removing. Why, I ask myself, lift sofas and armchairs over a five foot fence when you could just leave them at the back with no trouble?

After a bit of searching around I found a drawing of Brunswick Avenue by Frederick Smith dated 1888, thanks to Hull City Museums.

Westwood Road

I mentioned in passing many months ago that Westwood Road, Beverley had the most expensive houses in this area. Personally I can't see the attraction of these Victorian terraced mansions nor even the grand villas opposite (that's not to say I wouldn't take one if offered). I suppose once you've made your pile you must find a suitable place to flaunt it.

Trafalgar Street Church

Oh those Victorians! How they did like their churches, scattering them around the town with nary a thought to what the future would bring, like the market in Christianity collapsing post 1914-18. So now we have to deal with what might called post-Christian blight. This situation is made worse by a sentimental attachment to all things 'old' even if 'old' is only a hundred years and also conservation laws that defy stylistic and economic reason. Here's Trafalgar Street church on Beverley Road, built by the Baptists in 1906 in a mock Gothic brick flint-clad style (no doubt the builders' enthusiasm or funds did not run to paying out for stone) that you either love or detest (personally, it's as ugly a prayer factory as I've seen for quite some time). It was abandoned by them in 2002 then used by an even smaller sect for a while; it has been standing empty for nearly a decade. The rear church hall is now apartments, so far so good; but what on earth to you do with an empty church? Well they tried selling it for £160,000 but had to settle for a mere £80,000. That was over a year ago and still it sits there behind security fencing. I'm told it has been weatherproofed.  

Well now it seems to be a law that where ever there's an 'old' building falling into disrepair because there is no use for it there springs up a 'support' group to 'save' it and this is no exception. They want National Lottery money as well as donations for their rescue scheme. And their plan for this former house of God? A community gym! Because you must treat your body as a temple I suppose.

Did I mention it's a Grade 2 listed building in a conservation area? No? But then you'd probably guessed that's why it hasn't been knocked down a long time ago. More on this conservation nonsense tomorrow.

Passing off as Pizza Parlours

Upper Holderness Road; Lower Beverley Road

I suspect that neither Mr Brando, Mr Pacino nor yet Mr Coppola are aware of these establishments and if Mr Puzo ever found out he'd have to make them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Dunswell Road and Creyke Beck

Dunswell Road runs north of Cottingham, there's little of interest on this road, some new housing and a caravan factory that may have closed down for all I know and a few ducks on horseback. The beck also has little going for it except that it gives its name to the Creyke Beck electricity substation whose pylons dominate the land between Cottingham and Beverley. In urban Hull becks and drains like this have been culverted and covered in grass and the only sign of what was there are the ground down stubs of the concrete posts at regular intervals. In rural East Riding they seem to like a more natural approach which, while it may be prettier, is probably an insurance nightmare.