Tuesday 7 February 2012

Captains' Heads and the Milky Way

There was snow on the ground at home. Any trip out in the car would need to be on main roads. Any trip out on foot would need to be very local and any trip out on a bike would be horrible. We opted for a car ride which included a quick stop to grab photos of a couple of blue plaques in Hull.

The area close to the railway station in Hull has been rebuilt over recent years. Did I say railway station? I meant the Paragon Interchange of course. It used to be the Paragon station with the bus station next door, now they are all under one roof. Next door is a shopping centre called St Stephens. Not, you'll notice, the St Stephens commodity-cash interchange, but maybe that is coming. The roads to the west were changed or even removed as part of the process. St Stephens Square disappeared but gave its name to the shopping centre. The Spring Street theatre, which had the Hull Truck Theatre Company based there, has been replaced by a new theatre called the Hull Truck, presumably because it is not on Spring Street any more.

A short new road was added to give access to an area otherwise cut off by the development. This is called Milky Way. Far from being a galactic super highway, it is where Northern Dairies had a distribution depot before the redevelopment.

The two plaques were easy to find, one being a plaque for Hull College which has had a presence in Park Street since 1898 and one being for a Volunteer Fire Brigade. The fire station had some carvings around the doorways that were good to see. The building is in reasonable condition and the carvings looked recently painted, to the extent that the layers of paint may be obscuring some of the detail in the carvings. The carvings were of firemen and horses. Apparently the firemen were the captains of the brigade at the time.

The carvings of horses showed they were as important to the brigade as their captains; horse-drawn engines being all that was available in 1887.

Worth a journey out in the snow.

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