Windy weather

This old weather vane sits on top of what was once the British Rail Ferry terminus by Corporation Pier. The figure is of Father Time with his scythe and hourglass symbolising no doubt the hours spent waiting for the ferry to arrive, especially since they built a big bridge just up the road.

I'm told, (OK it's in the Daily Mirror so maybe not that reliable) that Summer is officially over and we shall be having nothing but windy cold weather and rain for the foreseeable future, suits me fine.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Annison Building

This building has had a few uses over the years, a livery stable, funeral directors, ex-catalogue and second hand goods store and now it's a pharmacy. It's a listed building, built around 1900 and it's unique selling point, as it were, is that the stables in the interior are upstairs reached by a ramp, it's thought that road widening restricting space necessitated the move upstairs. This survivor from a by-gone age is at the junction of Witham and Great Union Street near the North Bridge. 

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.

Keep Watching the Skies!

The old Corporation Pier, nowadays officially known as Victoria Pier, is a good place to check out the skies and the view over to Lincolnshire. If you're lucky and the tide is right then you might just catch a glimpse of something hunting in the shallows down below. 

Yup, that's a seal, okay not the best photo but definitely a seal. I've seen seals here twice so maybe they're not that rare but still an absolute bugger to photograph.

House eating machine

I mentioned recently that Wellington House was due to be demolished well it seems that they've brought in a monster piece of kit to do the job. The nearby street is closed to traffic just in case the building falls before it's pushed.

Plane old trees

Now I'm feeling a bit old. I remember when these plane trees were put in as young saplings barely half the height of the buildings when King Edward Street was paved over in the early 90's to make a pedestrian paradise. I imagine some planner in an office somewhere said something along the lines of "we must have a little bit of greenery here stick in a few of those cheap little old plane trees, they'll do." Well now those ickle trees are bigger than the buildings and still growing, I've read they can get to nearly 100 feet so still some way to go yet.

Le vélo jaune

Bonjour from sunny Hull. The Tour de France, which finished recently in Paris, this year for some reason or other had its Grand Départ in Yorkshire. Cue lots of Yorkshire tourism advertising, lots of God's own county claptrap and so on and so forth. There can be few things more boring than a professional Yorkshire person gassing on about Yorkshire. Anyhoo this cycling shop not wanting to be left at the back of the peleton and not having any maillots jaunes simply sprayed up an old bike yellow. It does, however, have a red spotted shirt of the 'king of the mountains' which is kind of ironic given that Hull is flatter than a flat thing that's been flattened.