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.

The street with the hall

Hmm maybe the signwriter who came up with this didn't understand that 'Hallgate' is not the gate of a hall but the street with the hall on it, in this case Cottingham castle, long gone. Or then maybe she/he did and could'nt give a monkey's either way; it's not important in the grand scheme of things I must admit. And don't be misled into thinking this is some ancient watering hole. I remember it was Hallgate bookshop not so many years ago; books to beer is progress of a sort...

After I'd written the above I realised I've posted this pub's sign before some five years ago, it was looking a tad tired then. I think I prefer the new one. The cameras are still there, keeping us safe from whatever.

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.

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.

...quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.

A new coffee hole on King Edward Street is a blessing, I was beginning to worry in case there weren't enough to satisfy the cravings of the poor in spirit. This one claims to be independent unlike the one next door. It has seating upstairs no doubt with the very Gods themselves. Oh and the view is as I posted just the other day. Heavenly, almost.

The weekend in black and white is sipping a latte over here.

Money Hole

Today there's news of an extra £250,000 top up for this place, on top of its annual increased grants from the Arts Council. That's £1.75 million in hand outs in the last four years. In February 2011 I wrote "No doubt there will be appeals for more public money to be spent on this place and no doubt more will be spent." Well I told you so ... Seems there's no-one with the balls to shut this place down, (it should never have been built in the first place!) especially not now there's the city of culture creeping closer.

Seating Arrangement

These seats on Corporation Pier seem to have survived the purge on public seating currently underway in this town. From here you can rest and admire or loathe if you will the view I posted yesterday. Not many customers though (OK none). Perhaps not surprising since there's still a big hole in the pier. Is it really over eight  months since this damage was done? How time flies ...

Thin red line

A few years back, when they were digging the Hull hole and generally tidying up the area around Princes Dock someone had the bright idea of outlining the old city walls (see the blog's title picture for an idea of what these looked like) in red bricks which explains these lines, squares and circular markings by the dockside.

Posterngate

A green thought in a green shade

As I'm sitting here it's been raining more or less continuously for a day with another day's worth waiting to come in off the North Sea. Still if it didn't rain ever this place would soon disappear. The land around Driffield is pretty leaky with lots of springs where the rain that's percolated through the chalky Yorkshire Wolds spurts out. The Keld (from the Scandinavian/Viking for spring) is one such water hole that used to be part of a water powered mill. The whole area is now protected as part of the Millennium Greens project and is well worth searching out (it's not well sign posted).

Driffield Beck

Hull hole revisited

If there's one thing that can be said about meetings between councils and conservation bodies it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is done with any degree of haste. So it was over a year ago that Hull Council entered into talks with English Heritage over the future of the oversized rubbish bin otherwise known as the Beverley Gate ruins and still there are no puffs of white smoke to indicate just what is going on. The plan, if you can call rumour a plan, is to fill it all in and build some new tourist attraction. Frankly the sooner the better, for despite its links to the English civil war, it is, when all said and done, just a large ugly hole in the ground.

Cod

After yesterday's mammoth posting here's something simpler. Here's another of those piscatorial pavement plaques, this one lies near to the Hull hole at the end of Whitefriargate. 

Road works on Chants Ave

I mentioned last year about a major road works scheme in west Hull that involved laying miles of electric cable through the busiest roads. The tailbacks became the stuff of legends. Well finally they finished and all seemed well until this cropped up on Chanterlands Avenue (or Chants Ave.). At least when I went past there were actual men doing actual work rather than just a hole in the ground and no sign of life. 

This bridge, which always has some interesting graffiti on it, was the scene of some dramatic flooding during the downpour of June 2007 with water well over the raised pavements. It was here that someone with a  sense of adventure greater than their sense of filth and sewage went surf boarding in what for me is the iconic image of those events. 

The Polar Bear

There is a legend on this ship
That taking down the head he keeps
Displayed above the fruit machine,
At times of need the Polar Bear
Will pass among us with a hat,
And taking the only course open, set sail
For the land of the takeout, that serves after time.
(From Those in Peril, Sean O'Brien The Indoor Park, Bloodaxe 1983)

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be or so the saying goes. The Polar Bear on Spring Bank used to be my watering hole. Five minutes walk from my rather dreadful bedsit I'd spend many hours in here supping the delicious Hull Brewery bitter, encountering, amid the smoke filled fug, some seriously daft people from Hull poets (Margot Virago, red hot from Chicago!) to delivery drivers, separatist feminists and a very strange man who departed for a commune in Angelsey... and not forgetting, as if I could, A.L the stereotypical Glaswegian drunk who would bore on loudly in the snug about Rabbie Burns and the meaning of 'Comin' Thro' the Rye' ("It's aall aboot feckin!") ...and when Martin Bormann (aka the landlord) called 'Time' there was often a bottle of cider to take out to keep the party going.

And then, well, then they had to go and 'do it up'. Take out all the old wooden panelling, remove the snug, rearrange the doors and, peccatum mortale, change the beer. They even sold off the polar bear head that used to be in the back room. They banned Staggering Ken, a man who would drink pints of Barley Wine and sway from side to side but never quite fall over while swearing and muttering abuse. No, it was never the same again. Now I've moved on and  I don't go into pubs any more I just take pictures of them.

You can, if you're interested, read the history of this pub which dates back to about 1850 here (scroll down a bit). Inside they've kept the ceramic semi-circular bar and the domed ceiling under which I played many a game of nine spot dominoes. Thanks to a campaign by CAMRA  the building is now Grade 2 listed.

Past and present

Or more properly present and past. Above we have the entrance to Princes Quay shopping mall viewed across the Hull hole. Below how it used to be many years back, well before I came to Hull and before pedestrianisation. Yep, that's a ship parked up against a shop.

I don't know who took this photograph, I 'borrowed' it from a Facebook group and where it came from before then is anyone's guess. Isn't sharing awesome?

Hull hole ... a history of sorts.

So what's all this then? A dirty big hole in the middle of town, surely it must mean something. Well, the something is explained by the plaque below; this is where the English Civil War got uptight and personal. The King, having done a runner from London, was on the look out for some munitions to help his cause. Kingston-upon-Hull had an armoury; so he turned up at the gates thinking to take the guns and what have you. He was told to go away and the gates of the town were slammed in his face. So poor old Charley had to turn round and trot all the way back to Beverley for his supper. After that, I'm afraid he rather lost his head. (Here endeth the lesson).

The hole contains the excavated foundations of the old entrance to Hull and part of the city walls, that's the brickwork you can see at the bottom of the hole. As is usual in Hull, what should be an attraction, indeed a national monument, has become a litter filled midden and an utter disgrace; it's gradually falling apart. In my capacity as an outraged citizen I wrote to the Council inquiring what they were going to do about it; I have had no reply as yet and I'm not holding my breath.