Lexington Avenue is no more

On this cleared site sometime in the late fifties or sixties was built the Mecca Ballroom known rather romantically as the Locarno, a place for stately ballroom dancing. I'm told the Kinks once played there and looked totally out of place. As times moved on it became Tiffany's, a nightclub, a place to go after the pubs had closed to 'dance' (in reality to keep on drinking). I recall nightclubs of the seventies with their glitter balls and extra loud disco noise and groups of young women standing or jiffling around their handbags on the dance floor. Ye gods! What dreadful places! As the seventies slid ecstatically into the Thatcher years Tiffany's became Lexington Avenue (LA's to the cognoscenti), and I'm afraid by then I was too old to be allowed in (I think I've been too old for most things in this life but we pass along on that). Reports of drug taking (No, really?), drunkenness (who ever would have thought?) and antisocial behaviour (well those were the days) drifted past my eyes in those days but I didn't care and I guess neither did anyone else. The place used to be absolutely heaving on weekends ... and then well, autre temps as they say. It closed several years ago and stood empty as is the well known style in this town. Now with la culture approaching and an alleged shortage of hotel rooms in steps Hilton Inc. to pop in a 167 bed hotel. They'd better get a move on.

The man with the golden scroll

There was idle talk sometime back of moving this column back to its original place by Monument Bridge but, surprisingly, wise heads prevailed and it's staying where it is. However this being the year of culture the scroll, held for so many years in old William Wilberforce's right hand, has been given a coating of gold leaf. So if your click on the picture to enlarge it and peer, possibly with the help of a magnifying glass, you might just about make out the most useless adornment to a statue in many a long year.

Demolished

It would be remiss of me to allow you to gain the impression that it is all abandonment and decay in the City of Culture, by no means is that the case, oh no sirree! Here the old ambulance station is  being gently pulled apart. The car park, too, is coming down if it doesn't fall down first. Roper Street, parts of Osborne Street  and much of Waterhouse Lane [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ] are also if not already down then soon to be levelled. Since there was no plan to use these old buildings then by all means knock them down and build afresh. But what to build? The fallout from 2008 put an end to Princes Quay's planned expansion. So what to do? "Hmmm I know", says a bright spark at the Council (I'm in a generous mood, we all know there's very little brightness in that place), "let's borrow, oh I don't know, about £36 million and build an arena for "bands" to perform and businesses to hold conferences and such like, (other cities have them so why not Hull?) ... and lets put it where access will cause maximum disruption to traffic, and let's make it too small, and let's make look like a giant yellow slug erupting from the ground and let's force it through planning after it's been rejected and and and ... let's call it, oh I don't know, something like, erm, Hull Venue; how about that for an idea?" See I told you it's not at all doom and gloom.

These delightful images "borrowed" from the Hull Daily Mail.

Highway Robbery

Suppose, just suppose you wanted to stand by the Humber at this point for whatever reason. Maybe you like to wander aimlessly wherever your feet take you or perhaps you like to watch the ships go by or you want one last peek at your enemy as she/he floats by. All perfectly good and valid reasons. And on any day you could freely do just what you wanted. However in this stinking backwater (or City of Culture if you will) the Council colludes with a little known group of scallies who run an annual thing called the Humber Street Sesh; an exhibition of hundreds of desperately untalented noise makers, sorry that should read fabulously gifted musicians from all over the place... (I keep forgetting to type in PC speak). Fine; a 'festival', I'm all in favour ... But (there's always a but) to facilitate this shindig the Council not only blocks off the roads to traffic but allows the organisers to set up tolls and charge pedestrians to walk the streets. So for today you will have to pay someone up to £15 for the right walk on your own streets that lead to the riverside and also to the public conveniences on Nelson Street (pay to pee indeed!). This is why I call it highway robbery, they have stolen our streets and are charging us to use them, the noisy bastards!

“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.”

 

I admit I haven't been paying attention to the news, the local news, any news, or Twitter or such like for a week or so, so when I wandered across to the local rag's site and was informed that this town had the highest number of "cases" in the country ... "by along way" was the sub-headline... my reaction was not one of great despond but more "Gosh and golly the old city of culture finally caught up with the nonsense that has been going on around parts of the world". This backwater has always lagged behind fashions by a year or so so this was pretty quick catching up, also the somewhat cynical thought passed through my mind that maybe there's Government money to be had from being so infected... "Oh save us and forgive us, Fat Controller, for we have sinned!"

Still, I wonder, how do they know this fascinating snippet? Why by testing, dear boy. 

But where are folk being tested? In places like this on Inglemire Lane, do try to keep up... 

So with so many new "cases", and new "cases" being but a small percentage of those tested, there must be lots and lots of folk being tested, then?

So how come, there is never anybody either going in or coming out of this place when I go past? Erm, no comment ...

I ask only to be informed.

You think I'm making this up, that I have some agenda ... frankly I don't give a damn, it's your game and I am most definitely not playing.

Government figures are for, I think, half a million tests per day, and I read this comes out at 150 tests per hour per testing station assuming a twelve hour working day, over two a minute... it's just not happening here or at many other testing stations. 

There has always been a Big Lie at the heart of this year's stupidity and it spawns smaller lies along the way to keep it afloat.

Oh then I read there are plans for "mass testing" of the stupid folk of Hull (what was the testing before then? ) anyhow this is with a brand new test, quicker and easier, and can be (and probably will be) administered by a squaddy on his day off ... the reward for going through this is 14 days house arrest if you get a "positive" result. So why would anyone with any sense put themselves through this? It's madness.  

Did I mention that we are supposed to be under yet another lockdown, the first having worked so well a second was the obvious choice ... naturally I am ignoring it, this time many others seems to be doing likewise. It's supposed to end December 2 but you watch it will be back next year, complete with new models of new plagues and the hope of a vaccine for the totally insane...

Anyhow the whole thing is boring and as someone once said even Gods struggle in vain against boredom.

.... and I seem to have forgotten that wise maxim of never believe anything you read in the papers... catch you later... possibly much later.

Even the drains have beauty ...

...in the City of Culture. Barmston drain again with the onset of Autumn

Margot took the second one, and quite possibly the first; one camera, two idiots.

Weekend Reflections are lurking here.

A Scheduled Monument

Catching up with other news from this charming little town and you'll be delighted to learn that, after an exercise in public consultation hitherto unknown in these parts, the local hole has been saved for future generations and is to be extended with seating and a few hedges and so on. This represents a reversal for the Council which wanted to fill it in but had not reckoned without the power of digital petitions and news articles describing that decision as idiotic. (Quite why that particular decision any more idiotic than all the rest is a mystery). So now the litter will have more space to gather in and the youths will have more space to hang around and be disaffected. But history has been saved ...

The few medieval bricks, tucked away in the corner down there, that make up what was once Beverley Gate have now been made a Scheduled Monument by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (I assume it costs the Government nothing to do this) which means that...., well I don't know what it means, but it sounds good doesn't it.

I've also heard that regarding the dreadful Word Gate proposed for nearby the Council are looking for other sites. They didn't respond to my suggestion that two miles east of Spurn Point was an excellent site.

A folly or two

I don't know if I've shown this before but it doesn't matter if I repeat myself (a sure sign of creeping old age ...). Anyhow this is or was the top cupola from the old town hall built in 1866 and knocked down to make way for the Guildhall. Clearly there was no shortage of money for public buildings in those days. It now sits among the ducks and geese of Pearson Park.

For those of you who long to see a short film about Hull  the city of culture people have produced a four and half minute encomion. You can see it here and judge for yourself. I suspect Larkin, whose words (taken from an introduction to anthology that appeared over thirty years ago) are used at the beginning, would be laughing his head off  if he could see how much pretentious tosh has been made out of his scribblings.

Save our hole!

The perennial question of what to do with the remains of Hull's Beverley Gate has once again failed to be answered. The Council flush with money (£25 million found behind the back of the sofa) had planned to fill in the hole and then grass it over. So far so good, it has to be the least spectacular historic monument on the planet but nothing is ever so simple in this place.... Having thus erased the past it was planned to put up a humungous piece of pretentious twaddle called Word Gate. To give you a flavour of the nonsense there's this from the Council web site: "Word Gate conjures up a place at a moment in the past. The place was a gate that said no and stayed closed, a place now beckoning you to come close. Hull speaks through Word gate, a gate between land and sea, between Hull's heritage and Hull's future, the City of Culture". Cutting through this rhubarb what is proposed is a thirty or forty foot high piece of steel with words scratched on it, this will completely dominate the area, block the view down Princes Dock and after a few years will be pulled down after it becomes tarnished, dulled and covered in graffiti. You think I exaggerate take a peek at the nauseating blob in the artist's drawing below.

Well as I was saying that was the Council's plan until a petition to save the monument to the start of the English civil war (the English Fort Sumter if you will) gathered a few thousand signatures. The guy in charge now says other plans will be considered. Well when you're in a hole it's best to stop digging.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Vacated

This month's theme of 'abandoned' could have been designed for Hull. It's like shooting fish in a barrel (did anybody ever do that?). Staples had been in this store on Ferensway for donkeys years, the place was always empty and almost never had what I needed and if it did it was way too expensive. Anyhow Staples has moved to a slightly smaller, slightly more out-of-town site on Clough Road (along with the Police, the Fire Brigade and old Uncle Tom Cobley and all ...). This building joins on to the empty computer store I posted a while back making a seriously large vacant ex-retailing space in the centre of town. Maybe it can be filled with 'culture' of some sort for next year's bean feast...

Luxury Flats

Buildings with enormous windows are no new fad [ 1 ] as this pair of Victorian villas on Westbourne Avenue show. When the moneyed middle classes left for the delights of Swanland, Anlaby and such places these buildings and others like them were split into unfurnished flats. The cheap regulated rents attracted a certain quality of tenant, artists, poets, layabouts and so on. Many of the Hull poets, in those days a smaller, more select band than the those who have since climbed on the Hull poets' City of Culture bandwagon (Roger McGough, Tom Paulin, Uncle Tom Cobley and all), either lived in or visited 4 Westbourne Ave. Back in the very early 1980's I lived with Margot Juby in the ground floor flat of number 4, second large window on the left. Some memories I recall include  a perpetual state of war with the upstairs soi-disant artist (of the often pissed variety I may add) who seemed to wear lead boots and do a lot of hammering, the bathroom ceiling falling in due to actions of said artist. Another resident, now a well known poet and winner of many prestigious awards, found, after cooking some rashers of bacon, he had also grilled a large slug. The mouse seen on the step which grew and grew until it turned into a rat. Moonshine, a grey cat with good judge of character throwing up over the rent collector's shoes. The young amorous couple next door who did not realise the walls were not very soundproof and ... well I draw a discreet veil over that.
Looking back it was basically squalor but when you're young and daft they say it doesn't seem too bad, let me tell you they lie.

Note there is no garret for the servants, they lived in a freezing cold outhouse at the back with two pokey rooms downstairs and two even smaller upstairs. Ah luxury! And in 1982/3  available for rent at £6 per week with no central heating, no gas fire, in fact no heating at all. The ice made pretty patterns on the windows.
I see there's a flat available at Number 2 with a rent a mere ten times higher than back then, I wonder if that includes slugs ...

The Hull plinth

In the manner of Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth I offer you the scaled down, rough and ready Hull version which features that aid to modern living, without which no public space would be complete, the damaged runaway shopping trolley... oh, have we got culture for you! Anyhow Queen's garden's trees are nicely doing that thing they do at this time of year.

Alone, alone, all, all alone

 

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I. 

 

Cheery greetings from the grey-bearded loon lost in the deserted city of culture with only Coleridge for company.

Classical Beauties

The Royal Hotel on Ferensway has joined the jamboree with these pieces of pseudomarmoreal pulchritude. Nothing says 'culture' better than a scantily clad lady with a jug.

King Cod

Right, let's get these monsters out of the way. Hull has recently put up several memorials to trawlermen lost at sea and there's something of fishing heritage thing developing on Hessle Road. As there's no money in fishing any more maybe there's a bob to made out of tourism ... So for whatever reason money from the City of Culture paid for these murals on Hessle Road. Local artists worked with the guys from Northern Ireland who did Big Lil to produce what are monumental images. ("Cor ain't it big" says I, "It's the size of  houses" says Margot, who notices these things.) Being about fishing there's a King Cod motif which is clear on the triptych below but you have to peer at the fisherman's hand to see his tattoo is the self same Cod. I think what they lack in artistic merit they more than make up with imposing size and they are clearly much loved by the folks around here; one of whom was walking along and found his granny was on the wall, must have been a nice surprise.

More murals are planned I suspect this little fellow will reappear.

Mural Monday is here.

Are you aware of Hull?

Does a creeping, cold sensation grab you by the sensitive parts as you gradually realise that you are being seized with the gruesome realisation that you are 'aware of Hull: UK City of Culture'? Fear not; you are not alone. According to the tiny Leader, some 53% of people have struggled to cope with this awareness problem, with even more suffering in the badlands of the "North". There is only one cure but it is drastic and may be fatal. Go, get you to the godforsaken hole and disabuse yourself of all that nonsense, once and for all. Then let us never mention it again...

Kaleidoscopic vacuity

Here from the height of last year's summer is the terminally dull and unoriginal mural that appeared on a gable end on Spring Bank. There are, in the wind, plans to turn this Victorian thoroughfare, a place of many cultures from the Middle East to eastern European, a place that has a vibrancy all of its own, not all together legal, not all together understood by those powers that want to be; in short a place that may not be to everyone's taste but certainly does not need any interfering busybody coming in to "improve" things... to turn this into a pitiful, pastiche of Tobermory or that unique neighbourhood in Bristol with painted houses. Yes, as you might have guessed, there is public money in the form of arts grants washing about and that means people will have the c(lapt)rap, sorry Art, thrust upon them volens nolens by talentless, parasitic oiks who, seemingly, could not get gainful employment other than through the public purse. It is called a community art project, but communities do not make art, communities make sewage and litter and children that need educating and patients in hospitals and so on but never art. Artists make art and on this street artists leave few traces.

I believe this is a spin off of the City of Culture, a so-called 'legacy event' ... a legacy of peeling fading paint and second grade 1960s art school doodles with vacuous, archaic, pseudo-socialist, concepts such as Unity. Unity of what? With what? For what? Pshaw! Unity, that fabled imaginary strength of the multitudinous and disparate working classes, is much like God and religion; what little there was of it died and fell apart a long time ago and is not much missed.

Welcome to Dull

The above dull and uninspiring ticket office and waiting room at Paragon Station is to be removed to allow an even more dull and uninspiring set of buildings including shops and, wait for it, wait for it, ... a coffee bar! Yes, if permission is granted, all this blandness will be Hull's to enjoy by November in time for the you know what next year. I understand that the Edwardian wooden cafeteria below is a Grade 2 listed building (as is just about the whole station) but that won't stop anyone bolting on a "glass box" to it with the aim of making a fast buck out of 'culture' would it?

Here's a vision of the future brazenly stolen from the council's planning portal. It's just truly stunning and breathtaking isn't it? What a fantastic first and lasting impression of the mediocrity of Hull it will give visitors over the coming years. Where else can one see such sights and imbibe the thrilling ambience of commerce and coffee whilst rushing for the train or bus out of this place? "Just standing in the paradise that was Paragon Station concourse was enough for me" as no-one is ever likely to say ...

Dancing in the street

Not having TV or social media folk had to make their own entertainment in the old days. In Yorkshire and North East England they came up with this, it's called rapper sword dancing. It involves five dancers, five double handed steel blades and a guy on the pipes or maybe an accordion playing a catchy rhythm. They whirl around, leap over one another and weave to and fro never leaving go of the handles and trying not to decapitate themselves as they go. The dance ends with the blades intertwined in a star-like figure which is then held aloft as if the solution to all life's problems has been found. It is profoundly pointless and that I suppose is the point as, having made the star, they start all over again, always twirling, twirling, twirling ...

These guys were part of the three day Hull Folk and Maritime Festival which this year I managed to get to see part. There was folk singing on several stages. Not really my scene. I don't mind a bit of the Irish pipes, (Planxty and so on) but modern "folk songs" make me want to reach for the mute button. But then there were lots of folk dance groups doing their thing in various spots across town. Now somehow this appealed; the often bizarre costumes, the music: all good stuff. Below is a sample. 

And last but by no means least ...

Now this being Hull the city of culture as well as all these delights the BBC Proms was being broadcast from the stage in the dock and the UK Pride festival was being held in Queen's Gardens.  I could post about them now but I think I've gone on too long as it is...

Do as the Doukhobors Do ...

If you wanted to take off all your clothes, paint yourself tourquoise and strut around Queen's Gardens in the name of 'culture' then you should have gotten your applications in by yesterday. Mr Tunick may be an "internationally renowned New York based artist" (many dispute this) but his repetitious displays of flesh are tedious in the extreme. (Oh look there's another pile of boobs and bottoms neatly arranged on the sidewalk, bridge, city hall, park, mountainside, glacier ... you name it, he's done it) Thankfully I'm not in charge of the Ferens Trust and I don't have to justify spending (no doubt large) sums of money on commissioning this kind of non-Art sensationalist event that is otherwise known as boring crap.