Our cub reporter Angus Young earns his spurs with this wonderful piece of research that takes in churches and zoos and all manner of architectural secrets.

Take a stroll down Hutt Street and eventually you come across a rather curious house. Unlike the uniform red-brick terraced properties surrounding it, this one features a very different design with a large door, oblong windows and protruding front gable roof. There’s also a side archway entrance with a window above.

In old photographs the house looks like it’s clad in dull-coloured pebble dash. Today it stands out because it’s painted white and criss-crossed with mock Tudor beams painted black while the door and windows are bright red. The current look dates from the 1960s but what is also striking is an original layer of stones clad around its base.

Luckily, master stonemason Andrew Gomersall’s workshop and yard lies directly opposite and he can read old stone like some people read books. He’s also done a lot of research on the history of the neighbourhood and, in particular, the former Hull Zoological Gardens which once stood nearby. “I’m almost certain the stone is from York Minster. There’s nothing remotely like it around here in Hull,” he says. If Andrew is correct (and we think he is), his theory certainly fits the story of the Zoological Gardens.

Opened off Spring Bank in 1840, the zoo and pleasure gardens operated until 1861. Entry was one shilling for adults and sixpence for children and, for a while, it attracted visitors from all over Yorkshire who took special excursions to travel to Hull to marvel at the sight of elephants, tigers, camels and polar bears.

As well as housing exotic animals and staging live entertainment, the grounds also featured  architectural attractions added each season including a Swiss chalet for the goats, a Moorish temple for the elephants and what was described as a ‘Heathen Temple’ displaying various curiosities associated with Buddhism.

Alongside these was an area known as The Ruins, a carefully-assembled folly of unwanted decorative masonry from several churches to capitalise on the then fashionable study antiquities. The bulk of the stonework came from York Minster, having been sold off at auction in 1844 following a devastating fire there four years earlier. Most of it was damaged but that didn’t deter Thomas Hammond, a Hull chemist and honorary secretary of the Zoological Society, who snapped up 27 lots at the auction.

Transported to Hull and re-built at the zoo, The Ruins would eventually go under the hammer again in 1862 along with the zoo’s ornamental buildings after its closure. Advertised as ‘Ancient Church Architecture’, some of it was bought by Hull Corporation for £45 and re-erected in the newly-opened Pearson Park where once more they became known as The Ruins.

Apart from being marked on maps of the zoo, there is no actual image of them being there. However, the Pearson Park version features on several surviving early 20th century postcards. They were eventually removed in the 1950s.

There’s also no record of where other items from the zoo went but it is known that “A Unique Swiss Entrance Lodge” was sold at the auction held in April 1862 along with the elephant house, a monkey house and a bear pit. It seems this lodge was then taken down and rebuilt in nearby Hutt Street where it briefly became the home of the zoo’s former superintendent Simpson Seaman, who had also been responsible for the attraction’s regular fireworks displays.

In addition to his role at the zoo, Seaman also ran a private museum in what is now the Polar Bear pub featuring the work of his taxidermist father as well as his own acquisitions, including the skeleton of an elephant. He also sold fireworks there but a disastrous fire in 1865 not only nearly killed him but also destroyed his entire collection. He recovered from his injuries and ran it as a pub without the museum until 1871 when he moved to Sussex where he died a year later.

His old lodge house in Hutt Street and its stones from York Minster are now all that physically remains of an extraordinary chapter in Hull’s Victorian history.

Angus Young

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Medieval headcounts in Hull were also hampered by plague. In 1349 the Black Death is believed to have killed around half of the town’s population while plagues in the late 15th and early 16th centuries featured lockdowns, entire streets being gated off and strangers being banned from entering the town. Things were so bad at one stage that no official town records were kept for two years. Despite this, Hull’s population always recovered and continued to grow.

When Robinson Cruse author Daniel Defoe visited Hull in the early 1720s, he was not only struck by its bustling port but also by how many people were squeezed into such a small place. “The town is exceedingly close built, and should a fire ever be its fate, it might suffer deeply on that account; ‘tis extraordinarily populous, even to an inconvenience, having really no room to extend itself by buildings,” he wrote. At the time, around 7,500 people lived in Hull, hemmed in by the Medieval town walls and the natural boundaries of the Humber estuary and the River Hull with a military fort on its east bank. By then, Hull was booming but, as Defoe had noted, there was physically nowhere to expand.

That all changed in the 1770s when part of the walls were removed to allow for the construction of the town’s first dock which eventually became Queen’s Gardens.

The first Census in 1801 recorded a population of 22,000. By then, plans were in the pipeline to dismantle what was left of the walls and extend the town southwards to the estuary itself by using material excavated to create the dock. 

The industrial revolution and the development of more docks would transform Hull as new areas of housing were developed beyond the Old Town. Free of the constraints of brick walls and water, the city boundaries were extended four times between 1882 and 1935. By the time of the 1901 Census, the city’s population had grown to 236,772.

This remarkable upward trajectory was briefly slowed by the First World War when around 7,000 men from Hull were killed in action.

In the Second World War there were an estimated 1,200 civilian fatalities in addition to military personnel but by 1950 the population was up to 356,138.

The city’s population peaked in 1961 when 368,000 were recorded as living here but then followed four decades of slow but steady decline with families reducing in size and parents increasingly looking to move their children into schools in the neighbouring East Riding. However, over the last two decades Hull’s population has started to grow again.

Between the last two censuses in 2011 and 2021, the population increased by 4.1 per cent to around 267,010 thanks mainly to the development of Kingswood and an influx of people from Poland, Romania and other EU countries.

Angus Young

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