Tag: Minerva

Victoria Dock & the Old Town – Hull 2017

Victoria Dock & the Old Town: We arrived in Hull for a visit during the the city’s Year of Culture on Thursday 16th February 2017, 8 years ago.

Victoria Dock & the Old Town - Hull 2017

We had come partly because I was hoping to have a show in the city – it would have been my first there since 1983 when ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull‘ was in the Ferens Gallery. This one would have been on a rather less grand scale and fell through when the bailiffs evicted the group who had been squatting another city centre property.

Victoria Dock & the Old Town - Hull 2017

But we had also come to celebrate Linda’s birthday in the city where she was born and grew up and for which we both have a particular affection, as well as to see some of the things that were happening for the special year.

Victoria Dock & the Old Town - Hull 2017
Victoria Dock Half Tide Basin. The black area in the distant dock wall was the entrance to Victoria Dock, now completly filled in.

And as always I had come to take photographs, in particular to revisit some of the many places around the city I had photographed back in the 1970s and 1980s. You can see many of those pictures on the Hull Photos web site where I posted a new photo every day throughout Hull’s year as City of Culture and beyond.

Victoria Dock & the Old Town - Hull 2017

I wasn’t bent on a “re-photography” project. These often seem to me a rather lazy way for people who haven’t any real photographic ideas of their own to capitalise on those of other people – or even their own earlier work. Parasitical. Though I do have to admire a few projects that have been really well carried out.

Victoria Dock & the Old Town - Hull 2017

For me photography has always been about my immediate response to the subject. If the scene has changed so too will I respond differently; and if it hasn’t why bother to photograph it again?

In particular I had moved over the years to seeing landscape and urban landscapes very much more in terms of panoramas. Forty or so years earlier had I worked almost entirely with tightly framed scenes using a 35mm shift lens. But now – with a few exceptions – I was working with the very different perspective of the wide sweeping view of a panorama. It forced me to think differently.

Victoria Dock, Hull’s timber dock had closed before I began making pictures there, although there were still a few small pockets of industry on and around the largely derelict site, as well as some remnants.

Now the dock has largely been filled in – the large timber ponds had already gone when I first visited. Much is now housing estates, leaving just the Outer Basin and Half Tide Basin and a slipway with water in them. And we were staying in a room of a house on one of the new estates. We arrived in early afternoon and after dumping our bags went out for a walk along the side of the Humber as the weather was fine for photography.

The mouth of the River Hull

I had walked along this footpath years before, going on past the still open Alexandra and King George V Docks more or less to the city boundary. Now the path is cut off by the Siemens wind turbine site on the former Alexandra Dock.

We turned around and walked back towards the Old Town where a new footbridge took us across the River Hull and on to a drink and an early dinner at the Minerva. After the dramatic skies earlier the sunset was rather disappointing.

After a long rest in the pub we decided to wander around the Old Town. In 2017 the area was still pretty empty on a Thursday night in winter, cut in half by the A63, the busy road to the docks (or rather dock), a reminder that Hull is still a significant port. But the footbridge I was then very sceptical about in my account on My London Diary was eventually built. Still something of a barrier, but far less frustrating.

We walked as far as the city centre to admire (and photograph) the turbine blade on display there before turning round to walk back over the River Hull – this time we took the now seldom-lifting North Bridge.

We walked south beside the river along the deserted riverside path to Drypool Bridge where the path was then closed off after the needless demolition of Rank’s Mill for a hotel that didn’t arrive and through the streets – another long wait to cross the A63 – and back to the house we were staying in.

You can read more details of the walk and see more of the panoramas I made on My London Diary.
Victoria Dock Promenade
Night in the Old Town

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A Goddess, Doors, a Dodo and a Lion

Minerva House, North Crescent, Chenies St, Camden, 1987 87-7f-21-positive_2400

Grade II listed Minerva House on the North Crescent of Chenies St , architect George Vernon, was built in 1912-3 for the Minerva Motor company which had begun in Belgium making bicylces before moving on to motorbikes and cars. One of its English dealers in 1903 was Charles Rolls, who the following year joined up with Henry Royce to sell his cars. In 1910 he became the first Briton to be killed in a crash by a powered aircraft when his Wright Flyer lost its tail during an air display in Bournemouth.

When I took this picture Minerva House was the Combined Training School for University College Hospital, training around 300 nurses a year. Since Minerva was the Roman Goddess of poetry, medicine, wisdom, strategic warfare, commerce, weaving, and the crafts this seems appropriate. She was also supposed to have created the olive tree and invented the flute and numbers. Minerva House is now the London home of global media agency OMD.

At right is the bleak Chenies Street concrete blockhouse entrance to the deep-level air raid shelter built in 1942, currently called ‘The Eisenhower Centre’ though it had no real wartime connection to the General. Before the war Minerva House looked out onto gardens.

Pembridge Gardens, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-7f-24-positive_2400

19 Pembridge Gardens was obviously in rather poor condition in 1987 when I took this picture, with peeling paint and trees growing up in odd places. The house was empty, its front door secured by two padlocks. It had been Grade II listed three years before I photographed it.

It looks in rather better condition now, and it should be as it appears to be home to a firm of “well-established Expert decorators.” Though I think it a shame not to have retained what is I think an illuminated house number above the door.

Pembridge Gardens, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-7f-25-positive_2400

It’s hard to count the number of bells at the left of the door to this house just a couple of doors up from the house in previous picture, but then obviously in rather better condition. There are 15 of them on the five floors of this house. Built in the mid 19th century (with a later top floor) it was also Grade II listed in 1974.

A Davey, Builder, ghost sign, Portobello Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-7f-52-positive_2400

A neatly aligned sign indented in the rendering on the wall of an end terrace house in Portobello road still informs us


A. DAVEY.
BUILDER.
M A N U F A C T U R E R O F
EVERY DESCRIPTION OF INSIDE
AND OUTSIDE WINDOW BLINDS.
UPHOLSTERER AND DECORATER
ESTABLISHED 1851.

though I’m sure he was well gone from the premises when I photographed them 136 years later.

Davey the builder was probably one of the original occupiers of this long purpose-built terrace of shops which were developed in 1848-9 by the Rev Brooke Edward Bridges and Thomas Pocock who had bought the land for ‘Portobello Terrace’ from Felix Ladbroke; they were built by various local builders to a similar plan, with a ground floor shop and two floors above for the shopkeeper and his family. More recently extra doors have been added and the upper floors are largely let as expensive flats.

Looking at the text of the sign I think the lettering was probably stamped out while the rendering was still damp rather than cut out. It has certainly lasted well and can hardly be called a ‘ghost sign’. Fitting in some of the longer text was obviously rather tricky and there are just a few places where the letter spacing seems not to be optimal. Though generally rather better than my crude attempt above.

Dodo, Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-7f-64-positive_2400

Dodo and this sign were at 185 Westbourne Grove, no longer something Antiques but now occupied by American Vintage, but Dodo is certainly no longer at 3 Denbigh Rd, a short distance to the west just off Westbourne Grove. You can see a picture of this row of shops with Dodo in place on the RBK Local Studies web site which takes a photographic stroll down Westbourn Grove and comments rather inaccurately “In the centre of the picture a shop called Dodo Designs, wholesalers of fancy goods.”

Dodo, set up by “London’s acknowledged queen of advertising ephemera” Liz Farrow has been “selling genuine vintage advertising posters since 1960” and is still doing so through the Dodo Posters web site.

Ledbury Rd, Notting Hill, Kensington & Chelsea, 1987 87-7f-65-positive_2400

Just around the corner in Ledbury Rd is this row of shops with an entry to Ledbury Mews North. This whole area had a large number of antique shops but now seems largely devoted to fashion.

No 38 to the right of the mews entrance is certainly an attractive building, but I think what particularly attracted me is the lion on the pavement in front of Lacy Gallery – which has of course gone with the Gallery, that shop now split back into two different businesses.

More from Page 5 of 1987 London Photos in another post.