What’s Going On With The Old Hospital In Park Street?

Is yet another beautiful Hull building being left rot ahead of demolition? Our derelict heritage correspondent Angus Young hopes not.

The Gothic Revival facade of the ‘extraordinary’ Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, yesterday.

What would Victorian architect Samuel Musgrave make of his elegant buildings today? For a start, he might wonder how and why many of them are no longer around.

St. Silas’s Anglican Church in Barmston Street was consecrated in 1871 and held regular services until 1967. It was demolished two years later. Home Bay in Madeley Street opened in 1880 as the Refuge for Aged Fishermen and their Widows. It was later known as Madeley Chambers but eventually disappeared in the early 1980s as part of a wider clearance programme to make way for the new-look A63 dual carriageway. Musgrave’s extensions to the Sculcoates Union Workhouse in Beverley Road were added in 1883. They included new school buildings, staff accommodation and four domed towers. Older readers might remember it as Kingston General Hospital which was finally demolished in 2002 to make way for a new school.

However, others have survived. Had he been around today he would probably chuckle at his 1886 Corn Exchange in Beverley housing a chic department store. He might also approve of his Fish Street Day Schools overlooking Trinity Square now forming part of the neighbouring Old Grammar School Museum. And he would be very pleased that his United Reformed Church in Hornsea is not only still standing but remains a place of worship just as he envisaged in his 1872 design.

A building worth saving for the front doorway alone.

As for his extraordinary Gothic landmark in Hull’s Park Street, like the rest of us Musgrave might be wondering what is actually going on.

His original 1891 design for the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children includes many familiar features – towers, pinnacles and a large, flamboyant main entrance door. It could easily double as Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  A larger extension was added in 1920, requiring the demolition of one of the main towers on Musgrave’s original building. It operated as a hospital until 1967 when patient care was transferred to Hull Royal Infirmary but various health services remained based at some parts of the site until 2020.

After being sold, the Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust said farewell to their former home. “The building – though maintaining its beauty in the way of an impressive staircase, colourful tiling on the floors and magnificent high ceilings  – has well and truly seen better days,”  said the trust.

So what’s next ? In 2021 planning permission was granted to convert the building into 60 apartments and to build a new three to five-storey complex at the site to add another 65 residential units. Since then very little has happened.

The wider site – previously known as Victoria House in its NHS days – is owned by property developer James Ledger who has previously converted a number of historic buildings into residential use, including the former Charterhouse school, James Reckitt Library and  the Winding House on Victoria Dock. Whether he still intends to go-ahead with the ambitious facelift project in Park Street or sell the site is unknown. We asked for an update but, as yet, have not received a reply.

Having stood largely empty for the best part of a decade, let’s hope someone can help bring a new lease of life to Samuel Musgrave’s masterpiece.

Angus Young

Which Detective Novelist Managed Hull City?

With City back in the Premiership today, our soccer scribes correspondent Phil Ascough looks at the moonlighting gig of a previous top flight manager.

Is the linesman far away or is that striker massive?

He led Hull City to two Premier League promotions, the FA Cup Final and a brief campaign in European competition. He also managed a dozen other clubs and his son recently took on his first manager role. As a player he made more than 700 appearances including more than 300 for Manchester United. But throughout a professional career which began in 1979 at Gillingham he never – as far as we know – had to deal with the murder of a colleague. Not even for missing a penalty or notching an own goal.

That’s what sets Steve Bruce apart from Steve Barnes, manager and coach of Leddersford Town.

Barnes was the character created by Bruce as the hero in all three of his detective novels. The titles – “Striker!”, “Sweeper!”, and “Defender!” – are, thankfully, not the full extent of the creator’s imagination. Typically self-deprecating, Bruce once told an interviewer from Eurosport that you could probably pick up a copy of any of the titles for 99p. In fact they’re pretty hard to come by. I think I paid about a tenner for my copy of Striker! and we read excerpts from it during a football literature event at the Humber Mouth Festival in 2013.

More recently I’ve seen it available online for more than £150 and, after recent events, the cover alone could make it worth a punt. The artwork shows a player, unluckily wearing the number 13, lying face down on a football pitch in a pool of blood, the smear on his blue and white striped shirt indicating he’s been stabbed in the back. A bloodstained knife, presumably the murder weapon, has been dropped inches from the victim’s body. Yet the fans in the stand are just sitting there, the stewards and ballboys are unmoved, and the assistant referee is waiting at the halfway line, flag just hanging down from his wrist, having not seen anything untoward. You could be forgiven for thinking someone finally snapped after watching the antics of Argentina’s World Cup bad boys, went too far, and everyone in the stadium turned a blind eye.

The original price of £5.50 now seems like an absolute bargain.

It’s an easy read in that you can get through it in maybe two hours, so about the same duration as watching a match with half time and a bit of added time. And maybe something a little stronger than water during the hydration breaks to get more in tune with Bruce’s flights of fantasy. But it’s also a challenge as the first three lines undermine the picture and confuse the reader about the crime scene:

“Bright red blood on the knife blade.”

“The knife is in my hand.”

“Duffy’s dead body stretched out on the locker room floor.”

Barnes is the manager, an undisguised Steve Bruce writing in the first person about the pressures of managing an unfashionable football club with a shot of getting into the Premier League. Duffy is the new signing and top striker. Barnes suspects his assistant of having committed the deadly deed and the flimsy scenario descends into a shambles of shoot-out, kidnapping, and Barnes swimming the length of a reservoir to escape gangsters – or possibly terrorists. References drawn from Bruce’s playing career – he only moved into management a year before Striker! was published – demonstrate his passion for fitness, a strong moral code, Jaguar cars and painful cliches.

You can’t judge the book by its cover but some of the reviews are worth a read. A one-star review of Sweeper! Makes the assumption that Bruce has attempted parody: “The cover, the title, everything about this sounds like a send up surely?” Tongue is no doubt firmly in cheek for this assessment of Defender!: “Absolutely genius. The plot twists are phenomenal and the imagery that Steve conjures up of Brazil and food is on a par with Shakespeare. A must read, 5 out of 5.” As for Striker!, the consensus seems to be “so bad it’s good”: “There is something about this book that makes it absolutely brilliant… even though it’s, err, awful! I read it in one sitting (it’s only 128 pages long) which took me a couple of hours. Hours that I will never have again, but I’m glad that I spent them reading this.”

And then there’s Bruce’s own honest opinion. He told the Eurosport interviewer: “It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure I want to be reminded of how bad they were. Just because I got a GCSE in English, I thought I was going to be the next Dick Francis. It didn’t make any contribution at all to anyone’s income. It became a laughing stock, to be honest. I think they’re probably still on the shelves somewhere.”

 And when a Sky Sports reporter asked Bruce if he would be “dusting off his typewriter” he replied: “No. Have you read them? Go and read them and you’ll understand why.”

Phil Ascough

Did William Wilberforce Own A Pet?

At Curiosity, we like to think we’re not afraid to handle the big questions. Here, our animal ownership correspondent Angus Young takes on a surprisingly important one.

Wilberforce’s statue at Wilberforce House, yesterday. He looks to us like a cat man.

In June 1826 a meeting of like-minded people was held at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane in London. The gathering was taking place because of shared determination among those present to change animals’ lives and among their number was an MP.

By then, Hull-born William Wilberforce was best-known for heading an ultimately successful parliamentary  campaign to end the British slave trade. However, he also had a common cause with most of those present in the coffee house that day. Wilberforce was convinced of the importance of religion, education, morality and championed  numerous related causes and campaigns. Among them was a burgeoning movement to protect animals from human cruelty.

At the time, cruelty to animals was widely accepted by society. Few people kept pets and animals were used for working, food and entertainment while setting dogs on chained bulls or bears was considered a sport. Four years earlier the first-ever law protecting animals had been passed after a campaign by an Irish MP Richard Martin. The legislation applied to horses and cattle. Martin was also present in the coffee house along with Wilberforce and the Reverend Arthur Broome, a vocal animal welfare campaigner and vicar of St. Mary’s in the Bow.

Together, the meeting of 22 people agreed to form a new society dedicated to the prevention of cruelty of animals, later re-named as the RSPCA when  Queen Victoria gave her permission for the addition of the prefix  ‘Royal’. Wilberforce’s interest in the subject was a long-standing one, prompted by his own religious conviction. He wrote many essays on how to combat the mistreatment of animals, including a fierce condemnation of the practice of bull-fighting. His belief was that both man and animal were of the same origin and, as such, they were both meant to live in a harmonious relationship.

Early campaigns organised by the new society covered animal welfare on farms and animal fighting. Until then and like most large towns, Wilberforce’s birthplace was rife with animal cruelty. Bull-baiting continued to be a regular event at carnivals during Wilberforce’s lifetime while cock-fighting remained a popular pastime. A book printed in Hull in 1761 titled The Gentleman’s or Farmer’s Companion even provided extensive advice on how to buy and breed fighting cocks along with tips on their diet and how to house them in coops fragranced with burnt herbs to protect the birds from mites.

Today, the RSPA hosts an annual Wilberforce Lecture allowing leading figures to talk about the relationship between humans and animals and recently published the Wilberforce Report, mapping out a detailed look at the challenges and opportunities facing animal well-being over the next 25 years. As for pets, it’s known that when Wilberforce married his family home in London became a slightly eccentric place with numerous pets living inside the house, including a cherished rabbit.

Alas, we don’t know the rabbit’s name.

Angus Young