Hull hole ... a history of sorts.

So what's all this then? A dirty big hole in the middle of town, surely it must mean something. Well, the something is explained by the plaque below; this is where the English Civil War got uptight and personal. The King, having done a runner from London, was on the look out for some munitions to help his cause. Kingston-upon-Hull had an armoury; so he turned up at the gates thinking to take the guns and what have you. He was told to go away and the gates of the town were slammed in his face. So poor old Charley had to turn round and trot all the way back to Beverley for his supper. After that, I'm afraid he rather lost his head. (Here endeth the lesson).

The hole contains the excavated foundations of the old entrance to Hull and part of the city walls, that's the brickwork you can see at the bottom of the hole. As is usual in Hull, what should be an attraction, indeed a national monument, has become a litter filled midden and an utter disgrace; it's gradually falling apart. In my capacity as an outraged citizen I wrote to the Council inquiring what they were going to do about it; I have had no reply as yet and I'm not holding my breath.

Save our hole!

The perennial question of what to do with the remains of Hull's Beverley Gate has once again failed to be answered. The Council flush with money (£25 million found behind the back of the sofa) had planned to fill in the hole and then grass it over. So far so good, it has to be the least spectacular historic monument on the planet but nothing is ever so simple in this place.... Having thus erased the past it was planned to put up a humungous piece of pretentious twaddle called Word Gate. To give you a flavour of the nonsense there's this from the Council web site: "Word Gate conjures up a place at a moment in the past. The place was a gate that said no and stayed closed, a place now beckoning you to come close. Hull speaks through Word gate, a gate between land and sea, between Hull's heritage and Hull's future, the City of Culture". Cutting through this rhubarb what is proposed is a thirty or forty foot high piece of steel with words scratched on it, this will completely dominate the area, block the view down Princes Dock and after a few years will be pulled down after it becomes tarnished, dulled and covered in graffiti. You think I exaggerate take a peek at the nauseating blob in the artist's drawing below.

Well as I was saying that was the Council's plan until a petition to save the monument to the start of the English civil war (the English Fort Sumter if you will) gathered a few thousand signatures. The guy in charge now says other plans will be considered. Well when you're in a hole it's best to stop digging.

The weekend in black and white is here.

'Ole in the ground, so big and sort o' round it was

After a vote of residents on what they wanted for the remains of the Beverley Gate (aka the Hull Hole) the Council, in its wisdom, decided not to cover up the few old bricks but instead create an even bigger hole with seating and landscaping and so on. Quite how this bigger, better hole won't end up the haunt of disaffected young folks and who will pick up the litter that will inevitably fall in I don't know. Still I'd better not make too many adverse comments or I might end up like the poor chap in this cautionary tale; enjoy:

Look what they done to the hole, Ma ...

Now I know you should not judge something before it's finished but this is not looking good. Regular readers will recall the Hull hole otherwise known as the Beverley Gate ruins or remains or whatever. It had become an uncared for, litter strewn place where youths gathered to do whatever youths do (skate boarding, drinking, smoking, in short all the fun things). The options were to fill it in or re-jig in some way to make it more amenable. A public vote decided on the latter option and we are where we are with this; well it's about half as big as it used to be, the lining seems to be horrid brownish beige 1970's concrete tiles that clash with the ancient brickwork, the steps are just ugly, it looks awful. Oh sure there's a lot of planting behind where I'm standing and the taxi rank has been moved (much to the annoyance of taxi drivers) but I don't see this as anything other than worse than before. And where are our discontented youths to go now? And who will pick up the litter? Maybe filling it up was the better option ... it's never too late.

Hull hole revisited

If there's one thing that can be said about meetings between councils and conservation bodies it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is done with any degree of haste. So it was over a year ago that Hull Council entered into talks with English Heritage over the future of the oversized rubbish bin otherwise known as the Beverley Gate ruins and still there are no puffs of white smoke to indicate just what is going on. The plan, if you can call rumour a plan, is to fill it all in and build some new tourist attraction. Frankly the sooner the better, for despite its links to the English civil war, it is, when all said and done, just a large ugly hole in the ground.

Take up our quarrel with the foe

 

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close

      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,

Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws

      Around my bed its lulling charities.

                                              John Keats

As cultured folk you'll be aware how for millennia the poppy has signified sleep and forgetfulness in European culture. From the poppy we get opium, morphine and all those other lovely "ines" that make us fall through a hole in the carpet when life becomes too much... 

Whoah! whoah! stop all this liberal thinking right now! For the Royal (& sycophantic) British Legion, for hosts of hoopleheads and fellow travellers, for the whole UK indeed (or so it seems) and even for level headed Canada or at least those parts that love to dwell on the horrors of the last century the poppy has become The Symbol Of Remembrance. Well ha! So much for culture. This craze started in the 1920's as a merchandising scam to sell cloth poppies to help 'rebuild war torn France' (a likely story) or perhaps it was inspired by that really bad and militaristic poem  "Flanders Field" (which at least had the idea of poppies meaning sleep). Whatever, it's too late and the genie is out of the proverbial glass container and you can't tell anyone that this is cultural illiteracy else they look at you as if you have two heads (which I suppose is two more than they have). 

So it comes about that, two years after the celebration (no better word) of the start of WW1, Hull gets a teeny portion of the crazy poppy themed thing that took over the Tower of London.  It's an unimpressive, tawdry splash of  red down the side of the Maritime Museum. Puts me in mind of a slit throat or perhaps a some overly enthusiastic menstrual flux. Certainly does not inspire any thoughts of 'remembrance' despite it being blessed by vicars and cooed over by the hoi polloi ("Oh isn't it beautiful!" 'it', by the way, is supposed to represent the deaths of thousands of men from high explosives, bullets, poison gas and general military incompetence so ... well I just give up!) and idiots in WW1 uniforms standing in front of it like dorks!

Still it attracts folks to town to take piccies (guilty as charged) and of course selfies. Oh the name of this thing? ... Weeping Window

The Polar Bear

There is a legend on this ship
That taking down the head he keeps
Displayed above the fruit machine,
At times of need the Polar Bear
Will pass among us with a hat,
And taking the only course open, set sail
For the land of the takeout, that serves after time.
(From Those in Peril, Sean O'Brien The Indoor Park, Bloodaxe 1983)

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be or so the saying goes. The Polar Bear on Spring Bank used to be my watering hole. Five minutes walk from my rather dreadful bedsit I'd spend many hours in here supping the delicious Hull Brewery bitter, encountering, amid the smoke filled fug, some seriously daft people from Hull poets (Margot Virago, red hot from Chicago!) to delivery drivers, separatist feminists and a very strange man who departed for a commune in Angelsey... and not forgetting, as if I could, A.L the stereotypical Glaswegian drunk who would bore on loudly in the snug about Rabbie Burns and the meaning of 'Comin' Thro' the Rye' ("It's aall aboot feckin!") ...and when Martin Bormann (aka the landlord) called 'Time' there was often a bottle of cider to take out to keep the party going.

And then, well, then they had to go and 'do it up'. Take out all the old wooden panelling, remove the snug, rearrange the doors and, peccatum mortale, change the beer. They even sold off the polar bear head that used to be in the back room. They banned Staggering Ken, a man who would drink pints of Barley Wine and sway from side to side but never quite fall over while swearing and muttering abuse. No, it was never the same again. Now I've moved on and  I don't go into pubs any more I just take pictures of them.

You can, if you're interested, read the history of this pub which dates back to about 1850 here (scroll down a bit). Inside they've kept the ceramic semi-circular bar and the domed ceiling under which I played many a game of nine spot dominoes. Thanks to a campaign by CAMRA  the building is now Grade 2 listed.

Seating Arrangement

These seats on Corporation Pier seem to have survived the purge on public seating currently underway in this town. From here you can rest and admire or loathe if you will the view I posted yesterday. Not many customers though (OK none). Perhaps not surprising since there's still a big hole in the pier. Is it really over eight  months since this damage was done? How time flies ...

Four walls and a roof

Here's another of the modern architectural delights on Saint Ninian's Walk.  I've shown it in black and white but you are not missing much colour since it is a pale blueish white, somewhat akin to a cyanotic corpse, in reality. I like the little sun hole in the roof which looks like an afterthought, the rest is just dire.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

A green thought in a green shade

As I'm sitting here it's been raining more or less continuously for a day with another day's worth waiting to come in off the North Sea. Still if it didn't rain ever this place would soon disappear. The land around Driffield is pretty leaky with lots of springs where the rain that's percolated through the chalky Yorkshire Wolds spurts out. The Keld (from the Scandinavian/Viking for spring) is one such water hole that used to be part of a water powered mill. The whole area is now protected as part of the Millennium Greens project and is well worth searching out (it's not well sign posted).

Driffield Beck

A Scheduled Monument

Catching up with other news from this charming little town and you'll be delighted to learn that, after an exercise in public consultation hitherto unknown in these parts, the local hole has been saved for future generations and is to be extended with seating and a few hedges and so on. This represents a reversal for the Council which wanted to fill it in but had not reckoned without the power of digital petitions and news articles describing that decision as idiotic. (Quite why that particular decision any more idiotic than all the rest is a mystery). So now the litter will have more space to gather in and the youths will have more space to hang around and be disaffected. But history has been saved ...

The few medieval bricks, tucked away in the corner down there, that make up what was once Beverley Gate have now been made a Scheduled Monument by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (I assume it costs the Government nothing to do this) which means that...., well I don't know what it means, but it sounds good doesn't it.

I've also heard that regarding the dreadful Word Gate proposed for nearby the Council are looking for other sites. They didn't respond to my suggestion that two miles east of Spurn Point was an excellent site.

ATM x 4

I've never heard anyone IRL, as they say, call these ATMs maybe a hole-in-the-wall or cash machine but never ATM. Anyhow all these 800kg money boxes are (like me) still running Windows XP; it's nice to know your money is safe behind the latest technology innit?

The street with the hall

Hmm maybe the signwriter who came up with this didn't understand that 'Hallgate' is not the gate of a hall but the street with the hall on it, in this case Cottingham castle, long gone. Or then maybe she/he did and could'nt give a monkey's either way; it's not important in the grand scheme of things I must admit. And don't be misled into thinking this is some ancient watering hole. I remember it was Hallgate bookshop not so many years ago; books to beer is progress of a sort...

After I'd written the above I realised I've posted this pub's sign before some five years ago, it was looking a tad tired then. I think I prefer the new one. The cameras are still there, keeping us safe from whatever.

Another large bit of a mess

Had a short wander about town for first time in a while and came across the sorry state of the Hull Hole aka the Beverley Gate remains. You'll recall that after a plebiscite the council rearranged the excavation with new seating and so on.  Soon after it reopened the walls, perhaps predictably, became an adventure playground for young and not so young children who were clambering all over even riding bicycles and skateboarding on it. Parents of said children seemingly thinking it was a good idea and parents, as we know, are not allowed to say no any more for fear off being accused of abuse. Naturally the old walls or what's left of them did not take kindly to such misuse and damage was done. So in its infinite wisdom the Council had protective bricks put on top; using lime mortar and the employment of some local college brickwork students. (The Council may have been trying to do this work on the cheap; I couldn't possibly comment). Even as it was being done it was understood that it wouldn't stop idiots (there is no other word) from playing on the walls and so it proved. However the mortar used has also failed and the now the new bricks are falling off as well. And if I'm not mistaken the lime mortar is leaching onto to the ancient bricks making them white and unsightly. The place is now fenced off while yet another bright idea is sought. May I suggest getting in experts who know what they are doing when it comes to repairing ancient monuments not some enthusiastic trainees; oh and stiff fines for anyone climbing on the brickwork.  This is all a bit disappointing and worrying since the Beverley Gate is a scheduled monument of national interest and seems destined to be an even bigger ruin than it already is.

In case you're interested below is an old picture of how the Beverley Gate looked when it was less of a ruin than it is now. What you see above is the left hand base of the gate.

Are you aware of Hull?

Does a creeping, cold sensation grab you by the sensitive parts as you gradually realise that you are being seized with the gruesome realisation that you are 'aware of Hull: UK City of Culture'? Fear not; you are not alone. According to the tiny Leader, some 53% of people have struggled to cope with this awareness problem, with even more suffering in the badlands of the "North". There is only one cure but it is drastic and may be fatal. Go, get you to the godforsaken hole and disabuse yourself of all that nonsense, once and for all. Then let us never mention it again...

...quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.

A new coffee hole on King Edward Street is a blessing, I was beginning to worry in case there weren't enough to satisfy the cravings of the poor in spirit. This one claims to be independent unlike the one next door. It has seating upstairs no doubt with the very Gods themselves. Oh and the view is as I posted just the other day. Heavenly, almost.

The weekend in black and white is sipping a latte over here.

Cod

After yesterday's mammoth posting here's something simpler. Here's another of those piscatorial pavement plaques, this one lies near to the Hull hole at the end of Whitefriargate. 

Money Hole

Today there's news of an extra £250,000 top up for this place, on top of its annual increased grants from the Arts Council. That's £1.75 million in hand outs in the last four years. In February 2011 I wrote "No doubt there will be appeals for more public money to be spent on this place and no doubt more will be spent." Well I told you so ... Seems there's no-one with the balls to shut this place down, (it should never have been built in the first place!) especially not now there's the city of culture creeping closer.

The Public House

Next door to our greasy fingered barber is the Star of the West or rather the reinvented Star of the West. The original watering hole was on West Street (geddit!) and looked a lot like this. 

As I recall I went into the old place on my first Saturday afternoon in Hull some thirty five or more years ago and had a pint of uninspired beer and a memorably soggy and execrable steak pie. A fine welcome! The place remained a sleazy dive, frequented by Saturday night pub crawlers and reporters from the nearby Hull Daily Mail. I never went in again and can't really say I missed it when the old place was knocked down to make way for this. However in my assiduous research for this post I did come across a song about the Star of West, it's in the 'folk' style and clearly the writer was more impressed than I was.

The Fixer Upper

As promised  here are some shots from the innards of Castle Rising. We'll start at the ground level and work up, more tomorrow or whenever.

All's well that has a well, I suppose, though I would fancy drinking the stuff that came out of that hole.