More Around Popple Street – My walk on Monday 21st August 1989 continued up and down Popple Street. Popple Street still remains, but the area to the south had been changed by the building in 1979 of the Myton Swing Bridge over the River Hull and the building of the A63 Roger Millward Way which left it as a dead end. Formerly it had led to De La Pole Street and on to Great Union Street – and there is still a footpath leading to a pedestrian crossing at the roundabout on the junction with that street and the A63.
Popple Street is a short street leading south-east from Hedon Road and around a hundred yards down it turns at right angles toward A63 – and there are steps up to the pavement but no vehicle access. This picture is on the right-angle bend and the sheds at right are still there, the premises of Arronbrook Leisure Homes Ltd. Astablished in 1987 this company still makes static caravans and holiday homes on the site.
Almost all of the rest of the picutre has changed, except for a large shed which just peeps up above the brick wall, still there on the opposite side of Hedon Road. C B North’s saw mill has long gone, though the company remains as a timber merchants and manufacturer of root trusses on the Hedon Road, but the other sheds there were demolished around 2020.
There was another photograph of C M Railton & Sons building in my previous post, I think taken from the footpath which replaced De La Pole St, but here I show it actually a little further down Popple Street looking towards Hedon Road. As I noted in the the previous post the site is now occupied by a medical supplies company, but this rather attractive building has been demolished and replaced by a larger but bland warehouse of First Aid Supplies
Walking towards Hedon Road I made this picture of the buildings at the left of the previous view which are still on the street as Selles Medical Goods Inwards. They have lost those pulleys for lifting goods in to the upper floor and the doorways there are now large windows, while the large ground floor window and wall below is now a wide metal-shuttered entrance to the building. The door at right is still there but also with a metal shutter.
Robbies Pub was Grade II listed five years after I made this photograph, and the listing text begins “Formerly known as: Victoria Hotel HEDON ROAD. Public house. c1850, altered c1875 and later C19.” A fairly lengthy description follows. This picture shows some of the fine detail which justifies its listing.
This used to be a popular pub for Hull’s dockers and was known by them as the ‘Monkey House’. Probably the name came from J. F. Mitchell’s “That’s The Way To The Zoo” written in 1883 which includes the verse:
‘That’s the way to the zoo!
That’s the way to the zoo!
The monkey house is nearly full
But there’s room enough for you.’
This became both a skipping rhyme for girls and a popular insult.
The picture also shows the view down Popple Street with the former building of N R Burnett Ltd, still a Hull timber merchant but now in West Carr Lane. I’d photographed this view from the opposite side of the road in 1985, and the caption to that photograph has more about the company: “N R Burnett is a timber company founded in Hull in 1935 by Norman Rutherford Burnett and became a private limited company in 1941. During the war it was based in York, but returned to Hull in 1945, and was based at the Albert Mill here in Popple St until 1960 when it moved to larger premises in Great Union St. It was one of the first suppliers for caravan builders. They still operate from sites in Sutton Fields Industrial Estate, Hull and Ossett as an importer and merchant of panel products, softwood and hardwood timbers.”
On Hedon Road I photographed the offices for C B North as well as the end of the yard stretching from Popple Street of Arronbrook Lt, Mobile Home Manufacturers. The C B North building, across the road from their saw mill, became home to Paragon Joinery and Soper Plastics who relocated and the building was demolished around 2013. I rather liked the two rows of glass bricks inserted in the side wall, one at an angle presumably lighting a stairway. The building was on the corner of the what was I think the entrance to a saw mill (and earlier also a coal wharf) and is now one of the entrances to the South Orbital Trading Park.
More from Hedon Road in a later post.
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