Re-photo

Before the Humber Bridge was opened in 1981, ferries transported passengers and cars across the Humber from the pier in Hull to New Holland in Lincolnshire, where a train service took passengers on to Grimsby and other stations. For drivers it avoided the journey to Boothferry Bridge near Goole, 28 miles away up river – and a similar journey back on the opposite bank. By the mid-70s an alternative route for many journeys had been provided by the M62 viaduct a mile or so east of the Boothferry Bridge – which largely removed the necessity for the Humber Bridge.

The Lincoln Castle was a great improvement on the other paddle steamers when she came into service in 1941, and was much loved by the time she was replaced by a more economical diesel-powered ferry in 1978. For a short time she was grounded on the beach at Hessle as a restaurant – where I went for afternoon tea – and later in the same role in Grimsby. By 2009 her condition had deteriorated and after attempts to preserve the ship failed was scrapped in 2010.

I travelled across on the ferry a couple of times, took a few pictures in New Holland and took the ferry back. It was a good family outing, particularly for our two young boys as the ship had been constructed to give passengers a good view of the engine room and steam engine.

You can still walk beside the River Hull in the Old Town, and it remains an interesting walk, but back in the 1970s there was still some commercial activity, and at the right times of the tide vessels would pass up or down past these largely redundant barges, moored here three deep.

This was the original harbour of Hull, before the docks were built, though there were many wharves upstream both in Hull and further north to Beverley and beyond, and the river remains navigable. Although traffic had dropped markedly there were still a number of industrial sites still using the river in the 1970s and into the present century.

Wooden crates were being burnt in a bin down an alley and producing an almost comic book head of flame, a beacon in the shadow of the alley. Flames are always something of a challenge for photography, generally resulting in burned out highlights that have nothing to do with their temperature but simply their intensity. I was surprised that transparency film with its very limited exposure range handled this so well, more I think a matter of luck than expertise.

Widely publicised as a “fairytale wedding” and the “wedding of the century”, the marriage Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on Wednesday 29 July 1981 clearly caught the imagination of many in Hull, and I photographed some of the decorations painted on derelict buildings and here on a typical Hull “terrace’, though I cannot remember its location.

Many of Hull’s roads have these short pedestrian terraces at right angles to the main street to pack more houses into a small area. Not all have such neatly maintained fences and gardens, but almost all are too narrow for them to have been converted to take cars.

The black cat halfway down the street didn’t bring the unhappy couple much luck.

Wincolmlee runs roughly parallel to the River Hull, on the road side of the wharves along its west bank, from the north of the Old Town up to Air St, a little over a mile. Lime St, runs in the same way on the east side of the river a little less than half the distance.

Much of Hull’s industry involved agricultural oils and there were storage tanks on both sides of the river. I think these colour-coded pipes probably linked some of them, but what attracted me as well as their colours were the clouds of steam.

Hull’s unlisted riverside properties have largely been demolished with some notable losses. But John A Scott’s warehouse in Alfred Gelder St was converted to flats around 1980, the work going on while I took this picture involving making windows in what had been a largely or entirely blank wall.

It isn’t in itself a very exciting building, but it’s river frontage now fits better with the listed building immediately downstream than a new build.

Quite a few buildings in the industrial area around Wincolmlee which in areas of higher property values – such as London – would have been converted to luxury flats have simply been demolished or are still largely derelict. But the area has perhaps been given a boost by the ‘Bankside Gallery’ of graffiti which sprang up following the intervention by Banksy.

I’m unsure as the the actual location or date of this picture – one of the great majority of my slides which lack any captioning. But it is certainly one of Hull’s docks, almost certainly Humber Dock, Railway Dock or Humber Dock Basin. The reflections in the wet mud give some clues, but not enough for me to be sure.

These docks close to the centre of the city had been unused for some years and were all heavily silted with Humber mud. Considerable dredging was required to make Humber Dock usable as Hull Marina, which opened in 1983.

I deliberately cropped the message which I think was written on the wooden side of a dockside shed to give the rather enigmatic message ‘S NOT W’. Unfortunately I can no longer remember the entire text, though the letter after W is clearly E, and not as I hoped A for an anti-war slogan.

The saturated red which attracted me, at least in part because it matched the colour of the painted letters, was the roof of a car.

This former British Extracting Company silo on the side of the River Hull was built in 1919 and one of a number of similar buildings in Hull and elsewhere designed by Gelder & Kitchen of Hull. It has regularly been visited and photographed in recent years by urban explorers.

Sir Alfred Gelder (1855-1941) was born in North Cave and became a Hull councillor in 1895, serving five terms in a row as Mayor from 1898-1903 and overseeing the extensive redevelopment of the city after which he was knighted. He was Liberal MP for Brigg from 1910-1918. A Methodist, he founded his architectural practice in Hull in 1878 and designed a wide range of buildings including several Methodist chapels in the city and elsewhere as well as many flour and oilseed crushing mills, including the first roller mill for fellow Methodist Joseph Rank and other buildings for Ranks’s son, J Arthur Rank.

Llewellyn Kitchen, (1869-1948) from Manchester joined Gelder as chief assistant in 1892 after having worked for a number of architects elsewhere and soon became the junior partner in the practice, although he appears to have been the more interesting architect of the pair. Kitchen was also a leading freemason in the area.

Gelder and Kitchen LLP is still in business, the second oldest firm of architects in the UK today.

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