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Yorkshire Interlude – Hornsea – 2008

Yorkshire Interlude – Hornsea: On Saturday 12th July 2008 when we were staying for a few days in Hull with an old friend we took a bus to the Yorkshire coast at Hornsea for the day.

I’d first visited Hornsea, a small coastal resort, back in 1965 when I made my first visit to the Hull home of my future parents-in-law, but my wife’s memories of it go back further.

Until Beeching swung his axe there were trains from Hull to two seaside towns, Hornsea and Withernsea which stopped at her local station, Botanic Gardens, a quarter of an hour’s walk from her home. People would often go to them for an outing, for a day or even an evening, and many who lived in these towns would commute to work in Hull.

My wife’s family took their annual holiday most years with a week in Hornsea, staying in a cottage that one of her great-aunts had bought for £25 after it had been condemned for demolition in the near future. I think it was more than 25 years later that it actually came down – and the site is now just a small garden on the main street, a few minutes walk from the seafront.

Most times when we go to Hull now – not as often as we used to as most of those we knew there are now dead or have moved away – we take a bus to Hornsea. What used to be around 40 minutes on the train now takes around twice as long on the buses, though at least it is now free for those of us with bus passes. And the old railway line is now part of a long-distance footpath. Perhaps we will visit again this summer.

We’ve also stayed there, in a holiday cottage in the town centre and a couple of times for a few days at a hotel on the seafront there, where we’ve enjoyed some remarkable sunrises over the wide expanse of the North Sea – as well as some battering storms.

But in 2008 we were staying in one of the finest houses in Hull, West Garth, (more here) then owned by an old friend – an ‘Arts & Crafts’ house which gets a short mention in the guide to Hull’s architecture. It had been one of our friend’s childhood homes and after some years of retirement he bought the property. Various ‘improvements’ had been made which meant it had been denied listing and he spent considerable time and money in restoring it to its original state but sadly died before he completed the job.

The weather wasn’t too good, with some heavy showers, but this did mean that we had the town almost to ourselves, as most of those who would normally have come for a day out at the seaside in July stayed home.

We visited Hornsea Mere, a large freshwater lake at the centre of the town, and a shower gave us a good reason to go into its café before we walked down to the seafront. The sea looked cold and uninviting and for once Linda didn’t paddle.

Then along to another café at the Floral Hall where the sun came out briefly after we had taken shelter there and on the the large park, Hall Garth before it was time to get the bus back into Hull.

This time we took the slower route back via Beverley, getting off in Hull on Beverley Road where I took a picture of Bethnal Green, here just a short terrace of houses, before returning to our friends house to cook dinner.

Despite the weather we had enjoyed a good day.

But it wasn’t a good day to have afternoon tea on the south-facing loggia. You can see many more pictures and some captions from our day at Hornsea on My London Diary.

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Hull – More Than The Deep: 2017

Hull – More Than The Deep: I haven’t often posted about Hull on here, but it was the city where I first carried out a serious photographic project which was shown at the city’s art gallery in 1983, and one I have continued to photograph over the years, though rather less regularly since 2000.

I didn’t really choose to photograph Hull, but I did chose to marry a woman who had grown up in the city and whose family home was still there, and it was a place where I found myself with time on my hands when visiting her parents usually for a couple of weeks most summers and often for shorter periods at Christmas or Easter.

We still have a few friends in the city, although most have now died, and our visits are less frequent. Back in 2017 Hull was enjoying its year as UK City of Culture and we were visiting partly to enjoy some of that but also to meet a few friends. I was also trying to generate some interest in my pictures of the city from the 1970s and 1980s, but plans for a show fell through.

Sunday 19th February 2017 was also a day when we met with some of our family who had come to Hull both to meet us and to visit Hull’s major tourist attraction, The Deep and we met them for lunch there and I took a few pictures from its viewing platform.

I’d gone out immediately after breakfast for a long walk around some of my favourite areas of the city which I had photographed in earlier years. Then I had been working mainly with black and white film, interested in the changes taking place in the city and surprised at the way it seemed to be disregarding much of its heritage, and recording aspects that seemed unlikely to survive. I’d also taken some colour pictures and had included some in my show there, but they perhaps more reflected my interest in colour than my interest in the city.

But in 2017 I was working only on digital, so everything was colour and I was also making some panoramic colour images – again digital.

It was late afternoon by the time we said goodbye to our family, and Linda decided she would like to go for a walk around Beverley, a town seven miles away. The bus service to there is slow and infrequent, but as I wrote “it has the advantage of setting you down at the bus station immediately next door to Nellie’s.”

Beverley is an old market town, well known for its Minster and full of old buildings. It was too late for us to visit the Minster, but not for a visit to one of its Grade II* listed buildings, The White Horse Inn, generally known as Nellies, taken over by Samuel Smith’s brewery in 1976. And although they have modernised the pub in some ways, much remains as it was – and my pictures were taken using its rather dim gas lighting. It’s a place people come from around the world to see, though fortunately not in such large numbers to swamp it.

Afterwards we still had some time before the last bus back to Hull left and went for a walk around the town including Beverley Bar, the Minster and the Monk’s Walk and I made a few pictures, all hand-held.

Back in Hull we had a walk through the town, mainly deserted at night to the house where we were staying in Victoria Dock Village, and there was time for a few more pictures.

There are many more pictures from the day on My London Diary, and many have captions too:
Beverley and Nellie’s
Around the Town
The Deep
More Hull Panoramic
Wincolmlee and Lime St

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Hull City of Culture 2017

Hull City of Culture 2017. I spent a few days in Hull in February 2017, while the city was celebrating its year as UK City of Culture.

Hull was important to me in my early years as a photographer, and was also where my wife grew up, and we made our trip partly to celebrate her birthday in the city, as well as for a little promotion of my photographs from the 1970s and 80s and also to work on a new photographic project.

I had my first – and still my largest – one person show in Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery in 1983, and much later self-published a book, Still Occupied: A View of Hull 1977-85. It’s still available, but at a silly price – and for some reason the hardcover imagewrap version is now cheaper than the paperback version. I’d always suggest getting the PDF version at £4.50, as the images are at just a tad better quality than in print and good enough to make a print should you wish (and I’ll pardon any small breaches of copyright.) The book has around 270 black and white photographs, some reproduced rather small, on its 120 pages. First published in 2011 it was republished with minor corrections to captions for the 2017 Hull UK City of Culture.

Two rather more reasonably priced 36 page black and white booklets were later published by Cafe Royal Books, one on the River Hull, and the second, The Streets of Hull. I promised another on the docks but have not yet got around to it.

I also set up a new web site on Hull for its year as City of Culture, finding much to my surprise that the domain hullphotos.co.uk was still available. I began this with a couple of hundred pictures at the end of 2016 and then added one every day through the whole of 2017. There are now over 600 black and white images on the site. A search of my images on Flickr reveals rather more than twice as many, including a large number in colour.

I had some disappointments during the 5 days I was in Hull in February 2017, and I found many other photographers and others in Hull who were also upset at the lack of opportunities the year had provided for local artists, instead concentrating on buying in talent from elsewhere. There is no shortage of talent in Hull and it would have been good for more of it to be showcased during the year. Plans for a small exhibition of my own work unfortunately fell through.

Self-portrait by gas light in Nellie’s in Beverley

But it was a good 5 days, with plenty to do and to seem and I was pleased with some of the panoramas I was able to make, though I’ve not yet got around to creating a show of these together with my old black and whites from the same locations. We also enjoyed a family celebration of Linda’s birthday,

The pictures in this post were all taken on Sunday 19th February 2017, where I got up fairly early for a long walk in the area close to the River Hull before meeting family for lunch, then took a bus to Beverley, where we walked around the town before having a drink in Nellie’s, one of the country’s more remarkable pubs and then catching the bus back to Hull, and then walking back through an empty city to the house we were staying in on the Victoria Dock estate.

Here’s the full list of links to our five days in Hull:
Hull 2017 City of Culture
    Sculcoates & River Hull
    City Centre & Beverley Rd
    Ropery St & St Mark’s Square
    St Andrew’s Dock
    Hessle Rd
    Gipsyville
    Beverley and Nellie’s
    Around the Town
    The Deep
    More Hull Panoramic
    Wincolmlee and Lime St
    Evening in the City
    Old Town
    A ride on Scale Lane Bridge
    Around the City Centre
    Hullywood Opening
    East Hull & Garden Village
    Albert Dock
    Old Town & City Centre
    River Hull
    Night in the Old Town
    Victoria Dock Promenade