What Land In The Hull Area Does The King Own?

As it’s Charlie’s birthday, we asked our royal correspondent Angus Young to work out which bits of his land we’re traipsing round on.

As the town where King Charles I was famously refused entry and told to sling his royal hook, it’s perhaps not surprising that his current namesake has little direct interest in Hull. However, through the Crown Estate King Charles III does have a hefty stake in the immediate surrounding area.

Technically, the assets of the Crown Estate are classed as hereditary possessions of the sovereign for the duration of their reign which are ‘held in the right of the Crown’. They range from agricultural land and forests to shopping centres and most of Regent Street in central London. Under the rules, a king or queen cannot sell them off or pocket all revenues raised from the assets. The estate isn’t fully controlled by the monarch either. Instead, it’s run by a semi-independent public body overseen by a board of commissioners with profits being split between the government and the monarch under what is known as the sovereign grant mechanism.

Accounts recently published for last year show the latest annual grant heading to the palace rising to £132m, up from £86m. This increase in profits has been attributed to the Crown’s ownership of most of the UK’s seabed stretching 12 nautical miles from the mainland and its vested rights to explore and use natural resources of the continental shelf which extends to 200 miles off the coast. Historically, the 12-mile boundary line was designed to determine jurisdiction over shipwrecks and the occasional washed-up whale. These days, the boom in offshore wind farms is boosting profits like never before. Worth remembering the next time you visit Bridlington, Hornsea or Withernsea and look out at those wind farms on the horizon. It’s not just the inland waters of the North Sea that keep a few bob coming into the Royal purse from this neck of the woods..

Most of the bed and foreshore of the Humber estuary is also owned by the Crown Estate, albeit currently leased to Associated British Ports on a 999-year term agreed back in1869. As such, developments such as the construction of the Humber Bridge and the recent extension of Alexandra Dock in Hull have both required Crown Estate approval. 

The ancient royal claim on the estuary also means one of the Crown’s most unusual landholdings is the aptly named Sunk Island, an isolated chunk of mainly agricultural land in Holderness which was once part of a sandbank in the middle of the Humber. Today it’s no longer an island but a parish in its own right and home to 228 people scattered across just over 9,000 acres with the main cluster of properties around a mile from the foreshore.

Further north there’s another slab of Crown Estate land in Holderness. Back in 1866 the Crown bought 2,166 acres of land in the ancient parish of Swine from the Earl of Shaftesbury whose family had owned a significant part of it since the early 17th century. The £120,000 deal included the Earl’s inherited manor and ten farms and was part of a series of acquisitions by the Crown involving nearby land at Benningholme, Oubrough and Dowthorpe. After the purchase, the Crown embarked on a building programme in Swine with most of the current village and a number of surviving outlying farms dating from this period. It also built a new school which was used for exactly100 years until its closure in 1968 and a sewage disposal works eventually adopted by the local council in 1967,

Similar Crown-owned estates in East Yorkshire include Garton on the Wolds, Sutton-upon- Derwent and Gardham near Cherry Burton.

Angus Young

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How Did Gipsyville Get Its Name?

Having heard a couple of different answers to this question lately, we thought we’d dispatch our cub reporter Angus Young to get the absolute lowdown.

Most neighbourhoods in Hull owe their name to geographical history. Drypool was originally a tiny hamlet based in a dried up pool, Bransholme comes from an old Scandinavian word for a water meadow while Spring Bank hardly needs an explanation. Gipsyville, however, is a different kettle of fish with a name derived from an early 20th century household cleaning product

While a popular brand of laundry soap provided the inspiration for Port Sunlight near Liverpool, part of West Hull gets its name from a metal polish for stoves and fireplaces called Gipsy Black made from black lead. Gipsy Black was a best seller for Hargreaves Brothers & Co. which was first established in Hull in 1867 by brothers Theophilis and Matthew Hargreaves.

They first set up a manufacturing business at Ocean Works in Kent Street off Holderness Road, making blue and black lead for use in cleaning products. By 1907 it was time to expand and a ten-acre site just outside the city boundary was acquired for the development of a new factory. The company’s new production base was built in 1910 on what is now the site of the Dairycoates industrial estate. Christened Gipsyville after its main product, the new factory was regarded as being part of a model industrial development capable of creating a cluster of connected businesses.

For its time, the company was also progressive in terms of its employees by promoting a number of social activities and producing its own newspaper although it stopped short of following Reckitts’ example in Garden Village by building homes for its employees. Instead, speculative developers spotted an opportunity and began building terraced houses in a series of new streets adjacent to the factory south of Hessle Road. The new factory was soon joined by another at the bottom of one of these new streets when metal container manufacturer F. Atkins & Co. opened a plant next door. It was a logical move as Atkins already supplied Hargreaves with the tins to fill and then sell its paste-like Gipsy Black polish.

Eventually, the Gipsyville name became synonymous with the wider surrounding area rather than just the factory site but things could have been very different as another of the firm’s popular products was Glosso, advertised as “the one-minute polish producing in the shortest time the brightest polish”. Imagine catching the last bus to Glossoville or having a pint back in the Glossoville Tavern back in the day.

A 1913 report in the Lincolnshire Echo on a visit to the factory by local grocers states only a tenth of the site was in use at the time but nonetheless highlights the firm’s “immense buildings” and adds: “Messrs Hargreaves’ output and turnover may be fairly described as stupendous.” By 1920 the company seemed to be going from strength to strength having taken over no fewer than 20 other businesses in the preceding 14 years, acquiring several popular brands in the process, with factories in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and two in Canada as well as Hull. By then, the wider neighbourhood was expanding with the building of new council housing  to the north of Hessle Road which would eventually become known as the Gipsyville estate.

However, any hopes the estate’s new residents of getting a job at Hargreaves would soon vanish. In September 1922 shareholders at the company’s annual meeting were told of a heavy financial loss caused by a collapse in export trade following the depreciation of a number of foreign currencies as well as “political and industrial unrest in almost every part of the globe”. This instability had also resulted in delays in establishing new factories in Ireland and France and within two months of the meeting it was being reported the directors were considering selling the company and all of its assets.

When the private sale was completed the identity of the buyer was revealed to be none other than cross-city rival Reckitts, which had been a neighbouring business in Kent Street when the Hargreaves brothers first started. As part of the  £355,000 purchase, Reckitts acquired all of Hargreaves’ land, buildings, stock, trademarks and debts as well as full control of 22 associated companies. The deal also required the Hargreaves directors to refrain from setting up any other similar business for the next 20 years. While Gipsyville was about to become an established community, the company and the product which inspired its name would disappear overnight.

Today Reckitts is still going strong, the old Atkins building is occupied by several small firms and all that remains of the Hargreaves factory is an impressively long brick boundary wall running the length of those eight terraced streets south of  Hessle Road.

Angus Young