Which Walton Street Landmark Pre-dates Hull Fair?

If you head to hull Fair vis Spring Bank this week, our railway housing correspondent Angus Young reports, you’ll likely pass a building with a little-known past.

The Spring Bank/ Walton Street cottages, yesterday.

Hull Fair has been on its present site in Walton Street for well over a century. The annual extravaganza moved there in 1880 and shows no sign of going anywhere else anytime soon despite many believing it should do. The Fair has changed considerably since its early days but one building in Walton Street not only pre-dates it but still looks much the same as when it was first constructed.

The Hull to Bridlington railway line opened in October 1846. The new double track line left the Hull to Selby line at Dairycoates and headed north to Cottingham, passing through Driffield before reaching Bridlington. Two years later a new five-mile route was created in Hull to link the line to the newly-opened Paragon station. This route is the one which still exists today, carrying trains behind Hull Royal Infirmary and the MKM Stadium and over a level crossing on Spring Bank West.

Back in 1848, the opening and closing of the crossing gates was a manual operation. As there were only five trains a day running between Hull and Bridlington, closing the gates created little disruption as Spring Bank West – then still known as Derringham Bank – was little more than a country lane surrounded by fields. However, as more services were introduced the need to open and close the gates on a more frequent basis became more important until a decision was made to build two cottages adjacent to the crossing where railwaymen assigned operate the gates and a signal box could live with their families. It’s believed the cottages were built around 1870 – a decade before the arrival of Hull Fair.


The Spring Bank/ Walton Street cottages, yesterday.

Automation eventually removed the need for a signal box and the old gates. The box is long gone but the cottages are still there, now being used as a car sales business.

Joseph McBride lived in one of the cottages in the 1970s as a child and recalls they were quite spartan. He said: “I lived in one of the ex-railwaymens’ cottages from 1972 to 1975 when I was at  Paisley Street School before going to the Boulevard boys’ junior school. There was no hot water and we had to use an outside toilet. We rented it off Larards before it was sold to Ced Francis who converted them into a car sales business.”

It’s thought the origin of the distinctive white-coloured look of the cottages lies with Mr Francis, who decided on a major makeover when he acquired the two properties. Most of the original internal features have long since disappeared but externally the two cottages still retain much of their historical charm, including two tiny windows. Keen-eyed passers-by might also notice a first floor doorway leading into fresh air, a connecting external stairway having been removed at some point in the distant past.

Surprisingly, the two cottages are not listed despite their age and importance as a rare surviving example of residential railway architecture from over 150 years ago.

Angus Young

Which Bransholme Roundabout Was Once A TV Location?

With Wes Anderson spotted location scouting in Hull lately, our unlikely hotspot correspondent Angus Young looks back at an odd film set in the city from years ago.

Bransholme, yesterday.

Far be it from us here at Curiosity Towers to be picky but we think the Hullywood Walking Trail is missing a trick. For those unfamiliar with it, the official trail takes participants around various locations in Hull used in TV and films. Available online and in printed form, it includes familiar spots in the city centre used for scenes in the likes of Victoria, Enola Holmes 2 and The Personal History of David Copperfield. However, there’s one location missing – a bus stop in Bransholme.

Back in 1990 it wasn’t a stopping place for buses. Instead, it was a roundabout on Kesteven Way. It was also the location for the filming of a now largely-forgotten hour-long drama screened  on Channel 4 the following year starring Alexei Sayle, the late Stratford Johns and a very young Johnny Lee Miller. The play was part of the channel’s ‘4 Play’ series of original dramas which kicked off with Chains of Love, the story of an all-girl sex toy party written by Hull Truck founder Mike Bradwell and starring Cleethorpes-born actress Julie Peasgood.

Alexie Sayle on Kesteven roundabout in roughly 1990.

Luckily for fans of surreal, bleak and largely incomprehensible TV, the Bransholme-set play co-written by Sayle and David Stafford is still available to watch in full on YouTube. ‘Itch’ tells the tale of a semi-mute hitch hiker (Sayle) trying to get to Colchester who finds himself marooned on a roundabout on the edge of an unidentified run-down town (Bransholme) unable to persuade anyone to give him a lift. Across the road lives a family (including Miller) who sometimes visit their local pub (run by Johns) to mull over their impending eviction by a development corporation planning to build a vast new upmarket housing estate, retail park and a marina on the surrounding open countryside. “Do you know much about the Yukon during the Gold Rush up there in Alaska? “says Millar’s father with a sigh. “Well, it will be like round here, only a bit warmer.”

Sayle’s hitchhiker spends the next year living on the roundabout amid a landscape of abandoned cars, dumped sofas and upturned dustbins. Eventually, he joins forces with the family to turn their grim surroundings into something more colourful. There are also some local cameos, including a Willingham’s breakdown lorry and a fleet of Dennis Taylor rental vans.

Press ad for Itch

The storyline, such as it is, veers from the bizarre to the ridiculous. In one scene, one of the corporation’s executives is flattened and killed by a goat dropped from a helicopter. However, apart from the goat, the play actually mirrors what was looming on the horizon in real life in that particular neck of the woods.

Within a few years, the open fields beyond Kesteven Way would be re-developed as Kingswood in much the same way as the proposed new town being mapped out in the play. As such, watching it 35 years on provides a fascinating glimpse of a world which has largely disappeared except for the row of council houses where Millar’s family lived. As for the roundabout, it’s been removed and replaced with a layby and a bus stop. [Alexie Sayle has returned to Hull several times since and likes our egg custards. Fact – Ed.)

‘Itch’ might not have the appeal of a Victorian costume drama and there’s far too much of Sayle’s self-indulgent nonsense on display but the play is Bransholme’s big claim to TV and film fame and, as such, should be celebrated as such. Get those Hullywood walking Trail leaflets back to the printers pronto!

Angus Young