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Holy Trinity, Pigs & Brewery, Hull 1989

Holy Trinity, Pigs & Brewery: At the end of my walk in East Hull I spent a little time wandering around the Old Town and came back to the centre the following day before catching the train home.

*Holy Trinity, South Church Side, Hull, 1989 89-8p-42*

Grade I listed Holy Trinity (since 2017 Hull Minster) is a remarkable survival despite some later architectural vandalism large parts of its original building from 1285 to 1420 remain. It is said to be the largest parish church in England with a floor area of 20,056 square ft and has some of the finest medieval brick-work in the country. Wikpedia lists its vicars from Robert de Marton in 1326; Arthur Robinson was Vicar here when the infant William Wilberforce, Hull’s most famous son, was baptised here in 1759.

Surprisingly it escaped serious damage in the Second World War when much of central Hull was destroyed by bombing. This side of the church now looks rather different with recent building work although the church ant gates posts remain.

These Grade II listed buildings date from 1868 and 1874, designed by the architect to Trinity House William Foale in a Gothic Revival stye were the Department of Transport Marine Office in Hull.

A gated alley between the two blocks leads to Zebedee’s yard and has a label (not visible in my picture) SPACE FOR OFFICIAL CAR’. There is now a first floor bridge across the alley connecting the two buildings.

Somewhere in Hull I walked past these pig carcases hanging from hooks and took a picture. I think there are four of them. It was rather a gruesome sight, but has not yet put me off eating bacon.

*Hull Brewery, Silvester St, Hull, 1989 89-8p-45*

I think it was probably on the following day that I returned to the centre of Hull and photographed the Anchor Brewery Brewery on Silvester Street. I was standing close to Kingston House not far from the west end of the street. The former Hull Brewery site is Grade II listed and was largely built around 1867 to the designs of W Sissons. The extensive buildings were being converted to flats and offices as The Maltings when I made this picture.

Hull Brewery began in Dagger Lane in the Old Town as the John Ward Brewery in 1765 and in 1865 Ward’s grandson Robert Ward Gleadow joined with W T Dibb to form Gleadow Dibb & Co. They moved to the new brewery site in 1868, and in 1887 having taken over several other Hull brewers became The Hull Brewery Co. Ltd.

In 1972 having over the years taken over 13 smaller brewers and a bottlers in Hull, Cottingham, Beverley and elsewhere they were themselves taken over by Northern Dairies and became North Country Breweries. This was bought in 1985 by the Mansfield Brewery who closed down brewing in Hull.

New Garden Street runs from Sylvester Street and along the back of properties on George Street to Grimston Street. On George Street was one of Hull’s most famous stores, Carmichaels, now the Carmichael Hotel. The sign on the buildings at left is for Carmichael’s Goods Entrance.

Carmichaels was set up in 1902 as a small shop but was enlarged in 1914 and later extended to the premises now on George Street. It became Hull’s poshest (and priciest) store, sometimes called the ‘Harrods of the North’, paticularly known for the glass, china and jewelry it sold as well as its posh cafe. Apparently the family sold it to Woolworths in 1963, but was bought by its manager in 1989 who wanted to restore its high quality status, but it closed in 1991.

People who worked there say that behind the posh side that the public saw the place was something of a shambles. The actor Ian Carmichael was the son of one of the three brothers who founded the shop.

After this I returned to Holy Trinity to visit its interior, taking a couple of images I’ve not put online before taking the train back to London.

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Trinity House & High Street, Hull – 1989

Trinity House & High Street. On Monday 21st August 1989 I took a bus to Queen’s Gardens and then walked down Prince’s Dock Street and on to the High Street at the heart of the Old Town.

Hull Trinity House, Princes Dock Side, Hull, 1989 89-8n-56 — *Hull Trinity House, Princes Dock Street, Hull, 1989 89-8n-56*

This massive archway on Princes Dock Street led through to Trinity House Navigation School and other buildings of Hull’s Trinity House. The date 1842 above the entrance is for this building, erected a few years after Princes Dock was opened as Junction Dock in 1829 – and before it was renamed in honour of Prince Albert for the royal visit of 1854. Junction Dock joined the Old Dock (Queen’s Dock) to Humber Dock creating a string of docks joining the River Hull to the River Humber and making an island of the Old Town.

Hull’s Trinity House is of course far older, established in 1369 as the Guild of the Holy Trinity by Alderman Robert Marshall (I’m sure no relation of mine) and around 50 others as a sort of ‘Friendly Society’ for parishioners of Holy Trinity Church. It was only in 1457 when Edward IV granted it the right to charge duties for loading and unloading goods at Hull to fund an almshouse for seafarers that it got a maritime connection, and it acquired its premises from Carmelite friars, though the current Trinity House Lane building is a 1753 rebuild.

Later monarchs gave it the right to settle nautical disputes, to charge import taxes to maintain the harbour, set buoys and licence pilots for the Humber. In 1785 it set up a school which taught boys in reading, writing, accountancy, religion and navigation for three years before they began their apprenticeship. The school is now an academy and has moved to another site, and the archway now leads to a car park and events area which has been named Zebedee’s Yard after Zebedee Scaping (1803-1909) who served as Headmaster for 55 years.

*Doorway, Old Town, Hull, 1989 89-8n-41*

You can still see this doorway at 39, High Street, though it is currently not numbered, just to the north of the entrance to Bishop Lane Staith. The area below the semicircular window at top right has been opened up as a larger window, though the sill in my picture suggests it was earlier bricked up.

Transport Museum High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-44 — *Transport Museum, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-44*

The Transport Museum was set up by Thomas Sheppard and opened in 1925 as the Museum of Commerce and Transport and housed in the former Corn Exchange on High Street and had a very extensive display showing the evolution of transport and Hull’s principle industries, along with ten veteran cars bought from a private museum and horse-drawn vehicles from East Yorkshire.

Like much of Hull it suffered extensive wartime damage – Hull was the most severely damaged British city or town during the Second World War, with 95 percent of houses damaged and almost half of the population made homeless. But news reports except on rare occasions were only allowed to refer to it as a “north-east coast town” and even now many histories of the war ignore the incredible damage to the city.

The museum reopened in 1957 as the Transport and Archaeology Museum. But in 2002 the transport collection moved to the new Streetlife Museum and this building became the Hull and East Riding Museum

*Wilberforce House, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-46*

Thomas Sheppard became the first curator of the Hull Municipal Museum in 1901 and achieved a massive increase in its visitor numbers by refurbishing the display and making entry free. Sheppard went on to set up half a dozen other Hull museums, the first of which in 1906 was Wilberforce House, opened as a museum in 1906, dedicated to the slave trade and the work of abolitionists and a memorial to Hull’s best-known citizen, William Wilberforce MP.

*Wilberforce House, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-31*

William Wilberforce was born in this house on the High Street in 1759. The house is one of the oldest in Hull, built in 1660 but extended by the Wilberforce family in the 1730s and 1760s. In 1784 part of the premises became the the Wilberforce, Smith & Co Bank.

Wilberforce sold the house in 1830. After Hull Council brought in a rate to fund the preservation of historic buildings in 1891, a campaign began for the council to buy the house which they did in 1903, opening it as a public museum in 1906.

*Wilberforce House, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-32*

The display that many in Hull had grown up with was updated in 1983 to the dismay of many residents who felt it lacked the detail and impact of the original and that it represented a move towards entertainment rather than enlightenment.

The displays were again altered in 2006-7 with improvements to access and reopened in 2007, which was the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain.

*House, 23-4, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-33*

These houses dating from around 1760 and restored after wartime bombing according to the Grade II listing text were incorporated into the Wilberforce museum in 1956.

*House, 23-4, High St, Hull, 1989 89-8n-34*

Here you see the view south down High Street from the houses, past Wilberforce House

From High Street I walked on to Drypool Bridge where the next post in this series will begin.

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Stowage, Deptford

Stowage, Deptford – Stowage is the place were things were stored and Stowage was from 1600 until 1782 a storage area for the East India Company who also built ships here. The name was not just for the street but for a wider area including the site of Deptford Power Station, the world’s first commercial-scale high voltage power station by Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti in 1889.

The Hoy pub was open on the corner of Stowage at 193 Creek Road at least by 1840 but closed in 2008, becoming a café. Some reports say it lost its licence because of a large number of reports of drug use. It looked closed and unoccupied when I walked past a few months ago. Until the 1920s there were two pubs actually in Stowage, the Old George and the Fishing Smack, both open in the 1820s.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-35-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-36*

The General Steam navigation Co Ltd established its shipyard on Stowage at the mouth of Deptford Creek in 1825, using it to build and maintain its paddle steamers. The site became part of Deptford Power Station for the Deptford East HP station which opened in 1953.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-26-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-26*

The area has a long and interesting history. Stowage was the first base of Trinity House, who were close to St Nicholas’s Church at the west end of Stowage from 1511-1660 before moving to the City of London, and this was the location of the first Trinity House Almshouses. According to the entry in Pepys Diary for Friday 8 April 1664 he went with Sir William Batten, then the Master of Trinity House to see the new almshouses which were being built at Deptford. They were demolished around 1877.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-11-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-11*

The walk District 45 created by the Royal Geographical Society is a fine introduction to the area and one I recently followed (with a few of my own additions) with a couple of friends. It is based on Charles Booth’s walk around the area with the local police in 1899 and you can read Booth’s notebooks on the LSE’s Charles Booth’s London web site (his handwriting is occasionally a little difficult) which provide some further notes to those in the RGS walk.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-13-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-13*

In his notes, Booth described Stowage as “A stinking unpaved lane with wharves on north side until the bend is passed … occupied by a low rough waterside population. ” He went on to say “Most people living here work at one of the factories along the Creek. Besides the chemical works there are numerous business places employing a large number of ‘hands’. The Steam Navigation Company has a large yard in the Stowage.“

“All these works are busy and work is plentiful so that no man need be unemployed. Women work
in woodyard and laundry, girls in the tin factory or as ‘gut girls’ in the meat market cleaning the entrails of the slaughtered beasts. “

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-12-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10e-12*

I walked along the short street on various occasions in the 1980s and 90s, and it seems to me that relatively little had changed, except there were rather fewer houses and people living on the streets. It was a street were there were often small groups of men who looked shifty and where I didn’t always feel able to stop and take photographs and where much that went on was perhaps on the edge of the law. Often there were fires burning and foul smoke, perhaps getting rid of rubber and plastic from various scrap metal objects.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-64-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-64*

I wrote “It was also an area where anyone with a camera aroused suspicion, if not outright hostility. If you were lucky people just asked accusingly “You from the council?”, but there were others who made rather more direct threats. it was an area where there were dodgy deals, stolen cars and other things going on that it wasn’t healthy to poke your nose into. Most of the time I kept my Olympus OM1 under my jacket as I walked along.”

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-65-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-65*

Other photographers were less timid than me – and had rather different interests in the area. One I knew slightly was Jim Rice, and for his Deptford Creek project he got to know many of those in the area and made some striking portraits.

Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-51-Edit_2400 — *Stowage, Deptford, Greenwich, 1988 88-10f-51*