Posts Tagged ‘Hull’

Hull General Cemetery and Princes Avenue 1989

Monday, March 18th, 2024

More pictures from Hull General Cemetery and Princes Avenue that I took on walks in the area in August 1989. You can see more pictures of the cemetery in 1989 at Hull General Cemetery – 1989.

Quaker Burial Ground, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-42
Quaker Burial Ground, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-42

According to the article by Chris Coulson on the Friends Of Hull General Cemetery web site, the Quakers bought a 999 years lease on a 0.23 acre plot, about 55 yards by 20 yards and burials took place there from 1855 until 1974.

The graves in this plot, still there, include those of many of Hull’s leading Quaker families and include some whose family names gained international recognition for there products including members of the Reckitt family and engineer William Priestman.

The graves in the foreground of my picture have stones recording seven members of the Reckitt family and there are some others in those behind. All except one of the burials and some whose ashes were scattered here have the same simple design for their memorials.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-41
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-41

Back in 1989 the cemetery was home to a number of feral cats who I think scrounged for food in the bins and at the back doors of some nearby houses, though I did see (but not photograph) old women bringing scraps into the cemetery for them. The cats generally scrambled away when I approached, but I caught one clinging to the trunk of a tree.

In the background you can see a grassed largely cleared area of the cemetery, then kept mown short by the council.

Fallen Angel, Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-55
Fallen Angel, Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-55

I don’t know what happened to the many headstones that the council removed from the cemetery, though when the work was taking place there were quite a few piles of them and many had been broken as much of the work was done by unskilled and poorly supervised youth labour.

Vandalism continued in the cemetery after the council had done their worst, and many of the more ornate memorials were damaged and some completely destroyed by youths who roamed at night in the unfenced cemetery.

Dr William Atkin Thompson, Ely House, 149, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-52
Dr William Atkin Thompson, Ely House, 149, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-52

Princes Avenue was only a country lane at the start of the nineteenth century and the first significant development on it were the ornate gates of Hull General Cemetery close to Spring Bank West. A few years later the railway branch to the Hornsea and Withernsea lines was constructed with a level crossing across Spring Bank and a station, Cemetery Gates, later called Botanic, opened in 1864. Further down the road, Pearson Park, Hull’s first public park, was opened in 1862.

Dr William Atkin Thompson (1978-1961) qualified at Owens College, Manchester in 1899 and became a GP in Hull in 1907. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1914, and after the war continued in service in the army and later the Territorial Army while also practising in Hull. There is a profile of him on the RAMC in the Great War site. He was one of Hull’s most distinguished doctors, continuing to practice well past normal retirement age.

Houses, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-65
Houses, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-65

Princes Avenue was laid out to lead to the Westbourne Park Estate, now known as The Avenues, and opened in 1875, with the houses facing the Park at its north some of the first built on it.

Shops, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-64
Shops, Princes Avenue, Hull, 1989 89-8d-64

Further south on Princes Avenue most of the development took place between 1890 and 1910, but the cemetery entrance was still on the west side at the southern end. I think these shops are on the long parade south of Welbeck Street which probably dates from around 1900, but those on the corner with Spring Bank West, which later housed one of Hull’s most internationally famous shops, Gwenap, were only added after the cemetery gates were moved to Spring Bank West.

Gwenap is said to have opened in 1903, though it was rather a different business back then and I think may have been in other premises as I think the shop the business occupied until 2013 was probably only built in the 1920s. The windows where it used to be are now of no interest.

More from Hull in August 1989 in later posts.


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Hull General Cemetery – 1989

Monday, March 11th, 2024

Hull General Cemetery – I’ve long been fascinated by cemeteries and London certainly has some fine examples, though I’ve tried hard not to devote too much time to photographing them. But in many cities they provide places where you can get away from busy streets and they act as nature reserves in which you can sit and have a short rest and enjoy the variety of architecture and art in the memorials.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-35
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-35

Hull has its share of cemeteries, at least 26, though some are long out of use and some in various ways desecrated. Those still open for burial are large and lacking in much interest though I sometimes visit particular graves there, but a number of older ones have survived at least in part, though one of those I liked to walk through, Trinity Burial Ground, was recently completely dug up.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-33
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-33

Hull General Cemetery on Spring Bank West was opened for burials in 1847 and was described by Philip Larkin as “the most beautiful spot in Hull” and you can read more about it on the website of The Friends of Hull General Cemetery, a group only founded in 2018 and now a registered charity.

In the lengthy history of the cemetery on their site it mentions the cholera epidemic across the world which which reached Hull in 1849 which killed 3% of Hull’s population. Most of their bodies were buried in a plague pit in this cemetery and later a large obelisk was erected in their memory.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-31
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-31

It also mentions that before the opening of Hull’s first park in 1861 “it was the only place where people could promenade without paying a fee.” For some years it was also the only place in Hull open for burials and some large and ostentatious monuments were erected in memory of the wealthier inhabitants.

Hull General Cemetery was established by a private company and later in 1862 the local authority was enabled to set up a Burial Board and create municipal cemeteries, the first of which, now the Western Cemetery, was established on land adjoining the General Cemetery to the west.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-25
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-25

Competition with the municipal cemeteries meant the General Cemetery went into a long period of gradual decline with the company being finally wound up in 1972 and the cemetery sold to Hull City Council for £1 in 1974.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-12
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-12

The council then set in place a controversial scheme to redevelop the cemetery by removing most of the headstones and grass the area to make it easy to maintain. Much of the work was carried out with little care by youth labour projects and it aroused considerable and widespread opposition, “including such names as Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, was overruled and the wholesale destruction of irreparable historical artefacts took place.”

A small section was kept in its previous state and those headstones which were identified as being for more notable persons were allowed to remain. Over five years the council largely turned the cemetery into a park with a few monuments and small areas of the previous cemetery, including the Friends Burial Ground.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-15
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-15

With cuts in local authority funding the council stopped the maintenance of the area and according to the web site “The dumping of rubbish began to happen more regularly, paths became quagmires; sycamore saplings began to destroy the remaining stones whilst ivy swamped them. The entire cemetery was quickly becoming a place to avoid rather than to visit.”

As well as on the web site you can also read about the cemetery in the the book ‘Hull General Cemetery 1847 – 1972, A Short Introduction‘ also by Pete Lowden and Bill Longbone.

Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-13
Hull General Cemetery, Spring Bank West, Hull, 1989 89-8d-13

On most of my visits to Hull from 1966 until 2018 I walked through the cemetery and the Western Cemetery from Sping Bank West close to the corner with Princes Ave to Chanterlands Ave, occasionally stopping to take a picture or two. The ones here are all from August 1989. One records the long story of John Gravill, Master Mariner which you can read above.

More to come from Hull in August 1999.


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Hull – Spurn Lightship & Spring Bank – August 1989

Sunday, March 10th, 2024

Hull – Spurn Lightship & Spring Bank – In August 1989 I went with my family for a week with friends in Scotland and we spent a few days staying at my wife’s family home in Hull on our way there and again on our way home.

Spurn Lightship, Humber Dock, Hull, 1989 89-8c-35
Spurn Lightship, Humber Dock, Hull, 1989 89-8c-35

In the 70s and early 80s I’d photographed the city extensively and had exhibited some of this work at the Ferens Art Gallery in the city. I think most of the over 140 pictures in that show are among those I posted online during 2017 when Hull was UK City of Culture – and I added a picture each day throughout that year to my website ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull‘ – the same title as my show and my self-published book – still available but ridiculously expensive except as a pdf.

Spurn Lightship, Warehouses, Castle St, Humber Dock, Hull, 1989 89-8c-36
Spurn Lightship, Warehouses, Castle St, Humber Dock, Hull, 1989 89-8c-36

Going back to Hull again in 1989 I was still drawn to many of the same places I had photographed in previous years, particularly the docks, the River Hull and the Old Town, and it was sometimes difficult to find anything new to say.

Shop window, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-11
Shop window, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-11

All of these pictures – and many more – are in my Flickr album Hull Black and White.

Phoenix Fitness Centre, Oderma House, 101, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-12
Phoenix Fitness Centre, Oderma House, 101, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-12

I had taken a bus into the city centre with my family and we had gone to visit the Spurn Lightship which was moored in what was by then Humber Dock Marina. The lightship was opened here as a floating museum by Hull Council in 1983 and has recently been restored and returned to the Marina to a new berth close to the end of the Murdoch’s Connection footbridge, just a few yards west from where it was in 1989. In the top picture in this post one of my sons is looking out of the ship and to his left you can see the tower of Holy Trinity Church, now Hull Minster.

Sunnybank Antiques, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-14
Sunnybank Antiques, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8c-14

The second picture taken from the lightship is looking towards the City Centre and at Warehouse 6 on the north side of Castle Street at the end of Princes Dock Street. This warehouse survived the demolitions of the 1970s and is now home to an Italian restaurant chain. I found the place excessively noisy when I ate there.

We walked back from the City centre and along Spring Bank. A shop window included the book Batman:The Killing Joke a DC Comics graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland with the Joker using, a Witz camera with a 50mm f1.8 lens – Witz is German for ‘Joke’ . There was also a poster for American rock band Kiss, who were to perform at Donington Park, Castle Donington, Derby in ten days time. They had released their fourteenth studio album Crazy Nights in September 1987.

Houses, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-61
Houses, Spring Bank, Hull, 1989 89-8d-61

The Phoenix Fitness Centre at 101 Spring Bank is now Victory Socialcare Enterprise providing accommodation for adults requiring nursing or personal care.

Sunnybank Antiques and the St John Ambulance were in Georgian houses dating from around 1820. The St John’s HQ and its attached railings were Grade II listed in 1994.

Even the drainpipes on Eastfield House/Eastfield Villas at 226-8 on the corner with Louis Street are ornate, though you cannot see these in my picture.

As these houses show Spring Bank was once one of Hull’s ‘best’ addresses, but that was long ago, and much has been lost, both by wartime bombing and later developments.

More from Hull in a later post.


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Hull – More Than The Deep: 2017

Monday, February 19th, 2024

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.

Hull - More Than The Deep

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.

Hull - More Than The Deep

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.

Hull - More Than The Deep

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.

Hull - More Than The Deep

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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Christmas Greetings From My Flickr Albums

Monday, December 25th, 2023

Christmas Greetings From My Flickr Albums – There are only 17 pictures out of the roughly 30,000 on my Flickr account which have the tag ‘Christmas‘, and some of those are only because I’ve mentioned the festival in my description rather than for anything in the picture. Although I’ve taken many pictures of Santas on the streets of London, almost all of these have been in the last 25 years, and so far I’ve mainly put pictures from earlier times onto Flickr – mostly from 1970-1994 and mainly of London. Wishing you all a happy Christmas. But if you get too fed up with the nonsense on TV or even with family and friends there are plenty of pictures on-line to look at!


Former Cobblers, Hackney Road, Cambridge Heath, Tower Hamlets. 1983 36u-62
Former Cobblers, Hackney Road, Cambridge Heath, Tower Hamlets, 1983 36u-62

I took this in 1983, looking through the window of a cobblers shop which had recently closed but still had posters with the message ‘It wouldn’t be Christmas without Pirelli’. Santa Claus wasn’t entirely the invention of Coca-Cola though his popularity and appearance owes much to their Christmas advertising from the 1930s. The article on the link to Wikipedia above has more about Santa than you will ever want to know. This year I produced a short run of poorly printed versions of this picture as Christmas cards for selected personal friends, mainly photographers. This picture is in my album London 1983 and also appears in Tower Hamlets – Black and White.

Auto-Sparks Ltd, Electric Harness Manufacturers, Wincolmlee, Hull, 1982 33g21
Auto-Sparks Ltd, Electric Harness Manufacturers, Wincolmlee, Hull, 1982 33g21

In my Hull Black and White album you can find this picture and the long description below:

An unprepossessing 20th century industrial building on or close to Wincolmlee where electrical harnesses – bundles of cables and connectors – for various makes of cars and other vehicles were made. Apparently Auto-Sparks Ltd Hull dates back to an electrical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb on Beverley Rd in the 1920s. Auto-Sparks Ltd was incorporated in April 1942 and a history page on the web site of its successor company, Autosparks reproduces the original company logo from 1954 when it was registered as a trade mark.

After the original owner and manager retired in the 1980s Auto-Sparks got into difficulties and collapsed in 1991. It was bought and moved to Sandiacre Nottingham by R D Components who were specialists in classic motorbike and car harnesses and they took over the name as Autosparks, and in 2005 became Autosparks Ltd.

This picture was taken in December, and my attention was drawn to the building by the Christmas decorations drawn on its first-floor windows. And by wondering whatever an electric harness was.

Hull Black and White

The SI unit of electric charge is of course the Coulomb, named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, so this electical business founded by Mr Henry Colomb would appear to be a remarkable example of nominative determinism.

Father Christmas, High Rd, Willesden, Brent, 1990, 90-12c-55
Father Christmas, High Rd, Willesden, Brent, 1990, 90-12c-55

In 1990 in Brent I took two Christmas pictures in 1990, one in black and white in the album 1990 London Photos of a Santa holding a number of figures and with a Harrods tag ‘£22’ standing on a box containing a caravan TV aerial kit.

Café, Christmas, Harlesden, Brent, 1990, 90c12-01b-41
Café, Christmas, Harlesden, Brent, 1990, 90c12-01b-41

The second picture from 1990 Brent was a café window in colour with Christmas decorations and an advert posted in it for flats to let in Station Road. Also in the window is a poster for Sickle Cell Awareness Day, 15th December 1990, to the left of which you can see part of me reflected as I made the image, along with reflections of a parked van and the shops and flats on the opposite side of the road. This is one of many pictures in my album 1990 London Colour.

Christmas, Car Sales, High St, Norwood, Croydon, 1991, 91-1b-22
Christmas, Car Sales, High St, Norwood, Croydon, 1991, 91-1b-22

From a South London used car showroom in the album 1991 London Photos is a 1987 car with its features and price described in notices on the windscreen complete with Christmas decorations. Usually when photographing interiors through windows I tried to work close to the glass and eliminate reflections so far as possible, but here I deliberately moved the black glove I was wearing to include the church across the road.

Christmas Lights, West End, Westminster, London, 1986, 86c123-32
Christmas Lights, West End, Westminster, London, 1986, 86c123-32

In 1986 I took a few colour photographs at night around Piccadilly Circus just before Christmas which are in both 1986 Colour – London & the Thames and in Westminster – Colour 1985-92.

Pictures at night are so much easier now with digital cameras as you can work with much shorter exposures – this was probably taken on ISO400 film, while now at night I often work and get better results at 4 stops faster – the ISO6400 setting on my camera. Also being able to see what you have taken immediately makes it much easier than having to wait until the film was processed and printed.

Eros, Christmas, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster, 1986, 86c123-43
Eros, Christmas, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster, 1986, 86c123-43

In the same albums and taken within a minute or two of the previous picture was this picture of Eros and the advertising display. The clock tells us that I made this at 16.06, around 15 minutes after sunset. Of course Eros isn’t really Eros, but Anteros, designed by Sir Alfred Gilbert to commemorate the philanthropic work of Lord Shaftesbury and called by him ‘The God of Selfless Love‘ – “as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant.”

But Piccadilly is a place at Christmas where some like to come and celebrate drunkenly and Anteros needs boarding up for protection and instead of seeing the fountain we see the hoardings with vintage Christmas images and greetings from The London Standard which featured Eros on its masthead.

Christmas, Shop window, Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith & Fulham, 1988, 88c1-01-61
Christmas, Shop window, Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith & Fulham, 1988, 88c1-01-61

Finally in 1988 in Shepherds Bush and now the first image in my album 1988 London Colour. This shop was a pet shop and the window is full of Christmas Stockings for cats and dogs and boxes of ‘Good Boy’ treats. Even the scratching post has some green ribbon attached. Along with some rather horrible artificial tree-like objects complete with blue and silver hanging balls. It seemed a particularly bleak image of the capitalist commercialisation of a religious festival.


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Hull Revisited December 2005

Tuesday, December 19th, 2023

Hull Revisited December 2005: Usually I sit down to write these posts and tell some kind of story about the events or places that I photographed on a particular day or walk or project. And the pictures in this article were all taken on 17-19th December during a short visit to Hull.

Hull Revisited December 2005

But when I looked at them they didn’t look as you see them now, and my first thought was about the colour and quality of the 49 images that I’d posted to the web back in 2005, and rather than writing about them I decided to try and improve them a little. Going back to the original RAW images taken on a Nikon D200 would have been the best way to do this, but would have been very time-consuming and instead I simply worked on the 600×400 pixel jpeg images that I’d put on-line.

Hull Revisited December 2005

Back in 2005 the RAW conversion software available was pretty much in its infancy and often required considerable judgement to get anything like the most from the images. Using the current version of Lightroom would have enabled me to improve the images considerably.

Hull Revisited December 2005

But time was short, and instead I spent perhaps 30 seconds on each image, bringing them into Photoshop in batches and then using its auto-color and and auto curve correction on each. On a few I had to modify the auto settings, fading the correction or tweaking the curve a little, but most were done fully automatically, and the improvements in some cases were dramatic.

We’d gone to Hull mainly to celebrate the 60th birthday of an old friend, and stayed at the large and architecturally interesting home of another friend, as well as to visit my mother-in-law in her nursing home. But I found some time to get out and photograph parts of the city I’d first photographed in the 1970s and 1980s as well as find some new scenes to photograph. Here I’ll post a few of them, but you can see more on My London Diary.

More on My London Diary



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A Visit To Hull – 2018

Wednesday, July 26th, 2023

A Visit To Hull: On Thursday 26th July 2018 I took the train to Hull with my wife. She had been born there and I had visited the city many times over the years, at first staying at her family home and since that was sold around 2000 at first with a friend and more recently in hotels.

A Visit To Hull
From the train – somewhere in Lincolnshire

Hull was the place where I really cut my photographic teeth, producing my first extended photographic project which was exhibited at the Ferens Art Gallery there in 1983. You can see many of the pictures from the project on my web site Still Occupied… a View of Hull which I produced to celebrate Hull’s 2017 year as UK City of Culture, as well as in my earlier book of the same name, still available on Blurb where there is an extensive preview.

A Visit To Hull
Hull from our hotel window

Rather more of my pictures are also in a couple of albums on Flickr, one of black and white and a second of colour images and there is also some more recent work, including from the 2018 visit on My London Diary.

A Visit To Hull
Heaven & Hell Club (closed down) Anne St

After booking in to our city centre hotel we had time for a walk before dinner around the city centre and into the Old Town.

A Visit To Hull

Hull claims to have England’s smallest window – the crack between the two stones was a lookout for coaches, and of course the Land of Green Ginger, where there is also the Second Star on the Right and Straight on ’til morning.

Hull used to mean fish, but the Cod Wars put paid to that, though there are still some reminders of the past, and still former docks in the city, though this one is now a marina. And out to the east are more modern docks, with Hull remaining a major port though now much eclipsed by Immingham and Grimsby.

Fruitful Harvest III was moored in the marina, but was built for fishing from Peterhead and later moved to Buckie. By 2018 the ship was registered in Grimsby but no longer registered for fishing, now a just a pleasure craft.

Hull has changed radically since I first visited in 1965, and this area, now called Humber Quays, was then a derelict dockland area and lorry park. Now it has modern office blocks and a memorial to the many emigrants who landed in Hull from Europe and were then mostly entrained to Liverpool to continue their journey to the USA.

Across the mouth of the River Hull is Hull’s biggest tourist attraction, the Deep, opened in 2022. It was built on Sammy’s Point which in my pictures from the 1980s was a storage area for navigation buoys, but had much earlier been a shipbuilding site. In the foreground is a recent footpath bridging across a dry dock, now full of water, still in use until fairly recently.

Our walk had been vaguely following the Larkin Trail, based around the life and work of Hull’s most famous poet – though born in Coventry he became Librarian at the University of Hull in 1955 and remained in the city until his death in 1985, writing most of his best-known poems there. After dinner in a city pub we took a bus to rejoin the trail at Pearson Park when he lived in a flat from 1956-74 – the blue plaque is just visible in the picture.

From the park we walked back into the city centre towards our hotel as light was beginning to fall along Beverley Road, passing several closed pubs, including The Rose and the Bull Hotels.

You can see more pictures from this walk and from the next few days before we left for a a short stay at one of Hull’s seaside resorts, Hornsea, in the Hull Supplement to July 2018’s My London Diary.


Hull City of Culture 2017

Saturday, February 19th, 2022

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.

Hull from The Deep

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.

The Blade in front of City Hall

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,

Scale Lane footbridge

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


A Hull Walk – June 1988

Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
'Os Wash', Nelson St, Hull, 1988 88-6e-14-positive_2400

Although my main project on Hull had really been completed with a show in the Ferens Art Gallery in 1983 I continued to make at least annual visits to the city, staying with my family at the home of my in-laws in north Hull just off Chants and Bricknell Ave.

Old Harbour, River Hull, Hull, 1988 88-6f-56-positive_2400

While there I would go out for long walks around the city, often with my two sons and occasionally with other family members or on my own, but always with a camera (or two.) Mostly, as in June 1988, I was re-visiting areas already familiar to me but sometimes finding new things to photograph.

Lime St, Hull, 1988 88-6f-32-positive_2400

Our visit in 1988 was a short one, I think for the wedding of a god-daughter, and most or all of these pictures were taken on a long walk which began with a bus journey to the city centre and the Old Town and then went north along the streets close to the River Hull to Sculcoates, before returning, possibly on another day or by bus, to the city centre and Paragon Station.

Chapman St Bridge, River Hull, 1988 88-6g-42-positive_2400

Both my sons, then aged 7 and 9 were with me on the walk, and appear in photographs that I took, but only one is I think present in the pictures on line, hiding at the side of a bridge. I seldom photographed people on my walks at the time, prefering to concentrate on the buildings and cityscape, but there is one rare example in these pictures of a man leaning on a fence on the pavement in Carr Lane. Almost certainly he had watched me taking photographs and had asked me to take his picture.

Man on street corner, Anne St, Carr St, Hull, 1988 88-6h-66-positive_2400

I think I have managed to put the pictures more or less in the order in which they were taken, so those familiar with Hull can follow my wlak, although they will find some buildings have since been demolished.

To see all the pictures I’ve posted from June 1988, start here on Alfred Gelder St.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.


Hull Colour – 9

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

Time for the last post on my series of colour pictures from Hull in my Flickr album which covers the period up to 1985. I didn’t stop photographing Hull then, but I did stop using slide film around the middle of that year, and some of the pictures in the album from 1985 were made using colour negative film. Although this made it easier to get good prints and allowed me to work with a wider range of subjects, it does make the images harder to digitise. I’ll write more about this at a later date. The first few images here are from slides and later ones from negatives.

Barge moored in River Hull, Hull 83-Hull-1-2-Edit_2400
Barge moored in River Hull, Hull 1983

As well as the colour I was attracted by the seemingly random numbers on the building and the ordered line of them on the prow of the barge, indicating the draught – the distance from the waterline to the lowest part of the hull. This barge, R38, is more or less empty and I think floating, its draught below the lowest mark of 4 (I think in feet), but when fully loaded would be at 9 or a little above. The slide mount crops the image rather more than I intended when making this picture.

83-Hull-8-Edit_2400
Factory, River Hull, 1983

There are new industries on land adjoining the River Hull, particularly on the northern outskirts of the city, around Stockholm Rd, Malmo Rd and Bergen Way, names reflecting the traditional trade, still continuing across the North Sea into the port of Hull. I think this picture was probably made just to the north of Sutton Road bridge.

For me the bank of reeds expressed that these new industries have turned their backs to the river, while traditionally Hull’s industries had been on wharves and dependent on the River Hull for the transport in of raw materials – whale oil, agricultural products and later petroleum products and sometimes the export of bulk products such as edible oils. Now everything moves by lorry.

Lee Shore, River Hull, Hull 83hull159_2400

It is just possible still to recognise this as the view looking upstream from Chapman St Bridge, as the low sheds at left are still standing (or at least were in 2019) but I think most of the rest of the buildings in this view have disappeared and ships such as the Lee Shore and the other vessel upstream on the left bank no longer moor here.

The cocoa works on the right bank was razed to the ground around 10 years ago, and is now Energy Works, a renewable energy site built with the aid of a grant of almost £20 million from the European Regional Development Fund which will power 43,000 homes from waste and develop innovative technologies together with the University of Hull.

S Low, Laundry, Spring Bank, Hull 85-10c1-43_2400

S Low’s laundry had long amused me as I regularly travelled along Spring Bank either on foot or more often on the top deck of a Hull Corporation Bus, and I photographed it a number of times. This was the first I had taken on colour negative film and I’m not sure that the colour is as accurate as on the two different versions on slide film you can also see in the album.

This building is still there on Spring Bank, now painted very drably grey and no longer a shop.

Blanket Row, Hull 85-10c3-61_2400
Humber Dock Side/Blanket Row, Hull 1985

I apologise for the green cast in this image which I should really correct, but it is perhaps appropriate given that this location, now the Humber Dock Bar and Grill overlooking the marina, describes itself as “Formerly the Green Bricks”.

The picture shows that before becoming a pub and restaurant the area was home to Charles Batte and the Kingston Fruit Co and along the street a number of other businesses, and the green glazed bricks of the pub, opened in 1806 as the New Dock Tavern and around 1838 renamed as the Humber Dock Tavern, taller than the rest of the row, are only just visible above the parked blue van. The green bricks by the Leeds Fireclay Co. Ltd probably date from 1907 and the pub was locally listed in 2006.

This was the final picture from Hull in the album Hull Colour 1972-85 (though I may add more later) which ends with some pictures from Goole.


All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.