Month: September 2007

Landscape changes. The motorway has seen to that in many places. I’m especially aware already on this walk, of the number of old roadways which have been abruptly capped by the construction of the M62.

The ‘empty junction of the old redundant road’ in yesterday’s poem is a good example [see picture]. Where once the B1230 met the A63 (if that’s what it was called back then), an active junction doubtlessly once busy with farm traffic and food lorries is now an empty space, seldom visited except by lost or curious travellers like me, or those seeking a quiet place off the highway to snack, make phonecalls or snooze.

I’ve found these redundant, curtailed routes most days on my journey so far: often because the OS maps (even the Explorers) sometimes make it seem possible that the old roads may continue beneath the motorway, or offer some way around. On Saturday, one approaching North Cave where the old tarmac has given way to lush and springy grass; today a bridleway near Eastrington marked both sides of the motorway but ending in a thicket.

At this point a drain runs under the motorway, of sufficient size for a human to crawl through, but despite finding this idea appealing I’m still some way short of taking such crazed decisions. Though, continuing to follow a route running parallel with, and ten feet beneath, the motorway, I did eventually have to scramble up a brambled bank to reach the top of Rudding Lane, the narrow bridge over the motorway the physical barrier there.

Landscape changes as we move through different trends in transport. Until yesterday I’d done much of my journey on the TransPennine Trail, and quite a bit of that on abandoned railway lines. Searching the map for ideas on today’s route (Gilberdyke to Howden) I noticed that the M62 itself, north of Newport, makes use of a derelict railway line, the old Hull to Barnsley line which also now forms part of the lovely Eastrington Ponds Nature Reserve where I spent a good afternoon hour sitting and reading.

Eastrington Ponds provides further instructive reflection on this theme. For, feeding the ducks and looking out over the gentle waters of the fishing lake I was struck by the realisation that the bricks which built Hull were made here… and how different a scene, how different the sounds and smells, there would have been when Eastrington Brickworks stood here.

Landscape changes as transport trends alter – and no doubt one day the M62 carriageways will be surrendered to nature or allowed to become channels for some other, newly-popular mode of movement. Walking, perhaps…

12.10pm: opened a packed lunch whilst sitting on a fence at the edge of the slip road to the B1230 (Newport – North Cave) road, directly opposite the first westbound M62 sign. At this point the road name switches from A63 to M62, and so this was the notional and emotional start of my journey alongside the motorway.

A circular walk taking in North Cave Wetlands Nature Reserve, the leisure lakes of Newport and a mile of the Market Weighton Canal path revealed many hidden aspects of life at this junction which I’d previously considered ‘anonymous’.

I composed the prayer, below, on that fence whilst aware that either side of the carriageways were two massive commercial nurseries, the admin building directly behind me emblazoned with a semi-derelict sign reading

V N DIJK
N RS RIE LIMI ED

Prayer at Junction 38

Bless those who nurse and nurture horticulture:
– the big Van Dijks’ expanding their glass avenues to every fields’ edge;
– the humble Walkers’ selling veg from a roadside tin shed;
– the elderly lady at Bridge Farm trimming rose bushes beneath the last eastbound motorway exit sign.

Bless the opportunity seekers and the individualist entrepeneurs on the B1230:
– Sunday Car Boot-goers selling and buying in a farmyard by The Mires;
– the man filling a bucket with apples from a tree on the slip road.

Bless the quarry workers
and the edible oil recyclers
working from behind security fences and down dusty lanes,
and the drivers of the trucks and carriers which sustain their trade.

Bless the lonely staff police guarding abandoned vehicles
in their compound at the empty junction of the old redundant road.

Bless the wildfowl and the Sunday twitchers of North Cave Nature Reserve;
the horse-and-carriage leisure takers down Dryham Lane;
the anglers of Newport’s generous lakes and canal sides.

At this place of anonymous endings and surprising starts
bless the Hull-bound,
and those facing the Pennine haul,
and the staff of The Triangle petrol station
serving the needs of them all.

The Humber bends at West Clough; twists north-westwards and drops its alignment with the Humber Bridge. And as I turned with it, then left the riverside to take the path alongside Welton Clough, it felt like a significant moment on the journey. Hull and the Humber Bridge behind, and now, ahead in the far distance, the next human-made icons in this flat landscape: the towers of Drax and Eggborough power stations, smoking in the afternoon sky.

A good ten miles, Hessle to South Cave, today, via Brough Airfield where two hobbyists were flying their radio-controlled planes in a far field, above which a glider pilot took out his craft for its weekend spin. And where inside, the sheds of BAE hummed and clanked with the activities of manufacturing Hawk jets. A young couple giggled and hugged on the security wall facing the estuary, dog walkers and joggers passed, and this hiker.

The old ferry road / old Roman road north out of Brough passes the Golf Club and the exclusive houses around it – marked for the passer-by by the presence of security gadgets and signs on the gate saying PLEASE USE OTHER ENTRANCE. If your home has more than one entrance, it’s big. This is Hull hinterland; it emerges in later conversations that some occupants here would equally look to Leeds to work, Meadowhall to shop, and lovely little Ellerker which I pass through next, for all its beauty has no shops, its one remaining licensed premises no longer a pub but an expensive restuarant.

Seems to me that South Cave has a bit more than that about it. Though the roads were choked with cars for the Farmers Market when I pass the public park it’s being well used: by the older villagers gathered at the bowls club pavilion, by younger women at the tennis courts, by families enjoying the well-equipped play area uphill and by gaggles of teenagers on benches. At the entrance a mobile opticians continues to trade: and the Castle (weddings and conferences) and the Fox & Coney (Theakstons on tap) are doing good Saturday afternoon business. I’m the guest of Andy and Michelle – they do a very good barbeque and later take me to the Green Dragon, Welton for more good conversation about Hull and its environs.

There’s a corner of the Humber coastline which doesn’t appear to have a name. Across the railway lines from Gypsyville, close enough to the busy A63 Clive Sullivan way to be battered by the vicious sounds of passing 70mph traffic, this edge connects the Mean High Water Line with the Mean Low Water Line in an expanse of mud and grubby rushes. The path which runs through it is bordered by tall tatty wire fencing unneccesarily urging passers by to KEEP OUT of a vast area of crumbling concrete colonised by nettles. On the river side of the path the metal rail at the corner has been speculatively graffitti’d TAZ LUZ DENIS I THINK.

At the western edge of the port of Hull (whose major activity has for many years been at the east), this is a corner whose presence and purpose have been forgotten: a dockland edge without docks.

And yet any traveller who walks this way, places their hands on that graffitti’d railing and looks outwards, will be rewarded with the most breathtaking sight: a view of the wide Humber and its bridge, some two-and-a-half miles away.

It is the simplicity of its design which makes the Humber Bridge a work of such constructed beauty. That, and its position in nature. Today, its two great stancions punctuate a vast clear blue East Yorkshire sky, the shallow roadway almost imperceptively curving across the sparkling, great Humber tides. This view means that this tatty corner of Hull is forever a place of revelation and wonder.

No matter that the bridge has failed to bring a hoped-for economic renaissance to Hull – expensive tolls and a geographical position still too far east to attract traffic from the north-south routes have seen to that.

No matter that my enjoyment of this place was interrupted by the excited incessant barking of a dog chasing waves of its own making in the brown waters below.

No matter that the Hull-bound traffic, crawling insect-like and silent across the distant bridge would soon assault my eyes and ears as I walked the footpath towards Hessle, just feet below the vicious screaming carriageway, causing me to start anticipating weeks more of such brutal interventions.

No matter, because this forgotten corner is a place where perspectives change, this scrubby edgeland causes even the most irrational, crazed or illiterate passer-by to see new possibilities, this dockland path without a dock is a place which validates speculations on life and love, because of that big sky, that great waterway, and the beautiful bridge which negotiates the space between.

Cartography: I will not forget Peter’s map of Hull, drawn on the back of an envelope at a cafe table, which broke the illusion I had that Hull is a city divided into two. A diagonal line – the Humber; a semicircle resting on it – the urban conurbation; and to the right of centre, a vertical line segmenting that semicircle into one large, one small portion – the River Hull.

So far, Peter’s sketch agreed with the oft-repeated view of Hull as having an east-west divide, usually stated in Rugby League terms (Hull FC, Hessle Road west-siders vs. Hull Kingston Rovers, team of the far-eastern Holderness Road). However he then went on to draw another vertical line, parallel to the other and to its left, which effectively cut the semicircle of Hull into three.

That line, he said, is the local authority boundary, and that, he suggested, is far more of a major divide than the perceived other. Hull city to the east of that line, the East Riding of Yorkshire to the west: and within the East Riding, the Hull suburbs, the posh bits, home to the holders of the city’s wealth who have chosen to live outside the city and – in a gesture of heavy political symbolism – to turn their faces towards Beverley, administrative centre of the East Riding of Yorkshire which was this week in the news for being the most ‘affordably affluent’ location in the UK, according to a report by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Most cities have wealthier suburbs which balance and serve them, Peter pointed out. Hull hasn’t.

Today I took a walk on the inner west side, among the radical reshaping of Hull’s centre-west at St Stephen’s (watching Tesco signs being fitted to shining white walls, joining snack bar queues of fluorescent-bibbed workers), along the Hessle Road, around the Kingston Communications Stadium and back into town past the Royal Infirmary, guided by a trail in Derek Spooner’s Discovering Cities: Kingston upon Hull.

Spooner is a little brisk in his description of Hessle Road, a teeming thoroughfare: ‘older and often dilapidated shops … still line much of Hessle Road, suggesting a low-income clientele’. There’s a hint of disapproval in this statement which sounds like it might come from the East Riding. Or the RBS. Though Spooner’s observations are factually true, I couldn’t find much to disapprove of in a mile-long stretch of shops busy with customers, buzzing with conversation, peppered with cafes outside which families and friends sat enjoying the late-morning sun. The RBS researchers deducted points from places which had “value” supermarket chains and fast-food joints. Hessle Road has many and I’d score it highly, for the sense of gentle vigour and human engagement which it shares, I think, with that other distinctive Hull thoroughfare, Holderness Road.

Great to see a street with so many original, ‘local’ shops still on it: individually-run electrical stores, bedding and curtain and DIY shops, hobbyist havens, fresh meat and fishmongers and specialist bases like the Chinese Medical Centre … I struggle to picture any equivalent road in Liverpool, richly diverse with low-cost personalised shops; and if those researchers truly believe that quality of life is best served by the presence of ‘luxury car dealerships and high-end hotels’, they evidently haven’t taken a long, close careful look at the lives being well lived down Hessle Road.

After an excellent tour around Hull’s Old Town with eminent guide Paul Schofield, I’m appreciating even more Hull’s ability to be enjoyably radical without anyone outside really noticing.

Radical in regeneration: because the old warehouses between the River Hull and the ancient High Street were converted for accommodation in 1981 – providing desirable dockland residences years before the other cities of the north caught that idea (1981 was the year L8 laid on the riots and Michael Hestletine responded by planting many trees there).

Radical in innovation: if the old dock becomes too small to take modern ships then fill it in, move the watercourse and start again elsewhere; oh, and convert the old dock into a beautiful, spacious town centre gardens for all to enjoy.

Radical in transportation: the booking office at Victoria Pier was the only British Rail terminus without rails – boats carried passengers and produce from here to the train line at New Holland on the opposite bank.

And above all (for this, it emerges, is Hull’s proudest and most defining moment), radical in opposition to undeserving rulers. Though he’s done it countless times before in 19 years of guiding Paul was enjoying standing at the remains of Beverley Gate telling me the tale of how the town’s governor Sir John Hotham declared for the Parliamentarian cause and, on that very spot, refused Charles I entry into the city and access to its large arsenal. It was, they say around here, the first spark of Parliamentarian revolt, an act of defiance which precipitated the English Civil War. The bit I like the best about this story, though, is that whilst standing in defiance twenty feet above the angered and embarrassed king, Governor Hotham did have the grace to lower down to the monarch a tray of refreshments to ease his long wait.

Hull folk seem to quietly enjoy undermining unctious authority. Perhaps that’s why they’ve put public lavatories directly beneath the city centre statues of William of Orange and Queen Victoria; it’s certainly why there’s a strong dock union tradition here, and why there’s still great respect for East Hull MP John Prescott, who has served them well, in a no-nonsense, deeply-rooted political style which is of course mocked by Westminster satirists, but, really, what do they know?

All seems calm and quiet in Longhill, a post-war leafy housing estate right at the very edge of the city boundary north of the long Holderness Road. And in the Longhill Link-Up Trust Cafe a calm, warm and thoughtful conversation with Peter Harrison, an ex-clergyman in the city of Hull who has bucked a trend by choosing to retire to Hull rather than from it. We are joined by others. Jill, a bright young woman who works at the cafe, offers us flapjack and chats easily about this estate which she’s lived in for some time and thinks of as a safe, secure, settled place, and gives me an insight into local culture (the preferred food of Hull, she says, is patties, potato ones). A member of the local genealogy group chips in; the vicar Maggie and an ordinand on placement from Durham arrive for a meeting; and an elderly lady eating a toasted teacake at the table nearest the door addresses a key theme which concerns them all: the recent closure of the Kwik Save opposite which has meant long, difficult journeys for the likes of her to the large shops outside the estate. The lady wants the Trust to get a petition going, to reinstate a store here.

Soon another local issue rears its head: the sinister nature of a well-known council house, whose many tenants over the years have been scared away by all manner of demonic apparitions and whose present occupier, a woman with mental health problems, is becoming troublesomely dark and devilish in her behaviour. Part of the house’s infamy is due to numerous well-publicised attempts to exorcise it which all failed. The house’s current troublous tenant has been uppermost in the thoughts of a young woman who has joined us at our table, who works with her mum at the beauty salon over the road. She’s been losing sleep, she tells us, because the last time that woman visited their shop her behaviour and language was erratic, aggressive, threatening. And she was due to make a return visit this lunchtime.

Here events take an unexpected turn and prompted by Peter (who may be quiet but is very persuasive) I find myself being invited by the beauty salon girl to come and ‘say a blessing’ in the salon in anticipation of the troubled woman’s visit. It’s the sort of invitation which is impossible to refuse, so at 11.30am I find myself snug in a cosy cream-coloured leather chair chatting to the two salon staff and their customer and, once she’s been taken to a side room to have a manicure (or something) done, I say a prayer there, beneath the nail varnish shelves, for peace, protection and blessing on the place. It’s not what I’d thought I’d be doing when I set out on the 56 bus this morning.

Later Peter (who’s been telling everyone that I’m walking the M62 praying for people I meet on the way) walks me around the tidy homes and gardens of Longhill. We tut at the excessive armoury surrounding the new Children’s Centre; we note how (in contrast to North Bransholme) there are all generations of families settled here; we talk about youth work provision and the pros and cons of fundraising; and we comment on how quiet it is, despite the secondary school pupils still being on holiday.

But I’ve already begun to think that it’s perhaps always calm and quiet in Longhill. At least, that is, on the surface.

If you’re talking about the edge of Hull then you’re talking about the edge… Hull, a city which consists almost solely of outer estates (because there’s barely any sort of inner core), has just carried on building outwards, northwards, eastwards ever since WW2 bombings flattened 5,300 homes and damaged 80,000 more, and half the city centre was destroyed. Hull, a city which is not in competition with any other (because there’s no other city around), has taken its time reconstructing itself. In fact, bomb-site car parks are still in evidence, indicating ‘that development pressures in the city centre have been weak’ [Spooner, 2005], a nicely understated, perhaps typically Hull-like way of putting it.

I’ve spent a fascinating afternoon talking about these things with Andy Dorton on the very edge of Hull. Bransholme is regarded as outer Hull but North Bransholme isn’t on most people’s register at all. And Andy and his family live on the very edge of North Bransholme. It really literally is all fields from there; it’s also The East Riding of Yorkshire, just across the grass verge beside Cumbrian Way, where a young mum struggled to get her child’s buggy off the bus after our long journey from town.

Cliches abound, of course, about seemingly abandoned places like North Bransholme. Too tiresome to repeat them. Instead I’ll quote from an Unlock paper which I suspect may have Andy’s hand in it, Hull – “the pioneering city” [pdf]:

As one of the poorer cities, Hull has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the UK.
With house prices being one of the lowest in the country, people aren’t as crippled by mortgages.
With the high rate of teenage pregnancies, the population at least is remaining stable in spite of the numbers leaving the city.
Even though it’s just sold off its own telephone system, Hull is the only UK city with its name on a mainline train and the only city with a first-class football ground owned by the people.
Hull’s low church attendance, rather than a sign of flailing spirituality, is arguably a sign of a desire for authenticity rather than religiosity.

On a roundabout at the southern edge of North Bransholme, just across the road from the entrance to Kingswood High School, the city council have placed a sign which carries one word: PRIDE. It’s about all that’s in evidence here of the city’s Wilberforce 2007 campaign, it’s one-quarter of a slogan which is everywhere in evidence fluttering large and colourfully on city centre buildings, PRIDE FREEDOM BELIEF CHANGE.

Our walk around the vast and spacious North Bransholme estate demonstrated each of these things: PRIDE – in the well-tended gardens of many little terraced homes; FREEDOM – of expression in the way that most council tenants have individually fenced around their properties (and in the way that graffiti artists have creatively adjusted the outlook of supermarket side walls); BELIEF – a neighbour of Andy’s bravely launching herself into a new role as a childminder, her first-ever customer arriving as we sat sipping tea; and CHANGE – North Bransholme is a place which has barely had a settled existence since the early overflows of West Hull’s failing fishing fraternity began to move here, so the occupants who have stayed have learned to adapt, and though ‘community’ is a much-overused and abused term, perhaps are learning how to build it, in a typically ponderous Hull-like way, right there on the very edge.

A big afternoon in Hull city centre. Not that you’d notice it amongst the shoppers ambling through Victoria Square while pirates (strongly resembling jobbing students earning beer money) gave out balloons to children, and parents put their hands in their pockets for those same kids to have fairground rides. But down on the docks were some major heritage-driven maritime celebrations, including the appearance of a replica HMS Bounty, and over at the KC Stadium Hull (fourth in the Super League and proud in their gleaming hi-tech West Hull home) were hosting the Rugby League season’s last Humberside derby, versus Hull Kingston Rovers (illustrious but poorer relations from the city’s East side, struggling to keep their place in the Super League at the end of their first top-tier campaign)

As happens in derby games, Hull capitulated and humble KR romped back across the river 42-6 winners. I, footsore from yesterday, was drawn towards the stadium by the sound of the crowds, past barriers surrounding the enormous and close to completion St Stephens development, and got there in time to catch the flow of Hull fans crossing the bridge over the Bridlington line onto Londesborough Street, trying to catch their mood, confusing myself about which team was which and remaining in confusion even after I’d heard the result. It was, after all, unexpected and it is, after all, what this afternoon will be most remembered for by most occupants of this city for some time to come.

The route home provided a group of teenaged Hull fans with the means to make noise (a harmless way of venting their disappointment at the result), running their plastic flagpoles along factory railings and superstore building site fences, pinging plastic bottles off items of street furniture (road signs, crossing barriers). These Thoughtless Acts reminded me of Jane Fulton Suri‘s categories of ways we interact with our environment, and got me wondering about what, in her terms, these boys were doing – reacting (‘we interact automatically with objects and spaces that we encounter’)? responding (‘some qualities and features prompt us to behave in particular ways’)? or co-opting (‘we make use of opportunities present in our immediate environment’)? I thought maybe they were doing the latter, though further observation may have revealed more; but my hurting feet carried me back to my digs and left the lads to continue making a city centre din out of a derby day defeat.

Another flow, of course: the railway. And today I walked the route of the old Hornsea – Hull railway line, fifteen miles in searing heat. A 12-stop route which used to take the trains about forty minutes, took me about six-and-a-half hours, with fewer stops. Something about the speeding ghosts of this route, perhaps, or the linear geography, but though it hurt and my frying head throbbed, I kept pressing on, through the crumbling station platforms at Ellerby, Skirlaugh, Swine, on to where the Transpennine Trail severs the housing estates on the Eastern edge of Hull.

By this stage in the journey, head red with sun and exertion, eyes red with pain, legs slowing and shambling, somewhere by Summergangs I encountered a man mirroring my movements, staggering towards me carrying on his shoulders half a bicycle (no wheels, broken chain), and in his hands various misshapen carrier bags. He delighted in telling me, at great length and high volume, that he’d just found six hundred quid on the path. Lucky man. And that if I’d been there a few minutes earlier I’d have found it instead.

This was the fullest – if freakiest – conversation of the day, which thankfully shattered my uncharitable theory that the nearer the city I’d get, the less civil people would be. Certainly there were consistently more cheery greetings from dog-walkers and cyclists at the Hornsea end of the trail, more averted eyes in Hull. Perhaps the cheeriness factor is more related to leisure – it was the hurrying shoppers who tended to ignore me, Hull end, it was the Hornsea weekenders who said things to me like “Say ‘ello to t’Beatles when you get there”). And my man with the tall story about having six hundred quid in his pocket, and half a bike on his shoulders – he was most definitely, like me, a man of dubious leisure.