Our unlikely history correspondent Angus Young finds some of the biggest hits in pop began life on top of a local shop.

Search online for famous UK music scene locations and some familiar places pop up. There’s the zebra crossing in Abbey Road made famous by The Beatles, Salford Lads’ Club courtesy of The Smiths and London’s Berwick Street as featured on the cover of Oasis’ What’s The Story Morning Glory?

Here in Hull we also have our fair share of contenders. The Adelphi Club in De Grey Street needs no introduction, a giant sculpted guitar in East Park commemorates Mick Ronson’s days as a council gardener there while the shop which inspired Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt to call themselves Everything But The Girl still stands on Beverley Road although it’s now a home to the Hull & Humber Chamber of Commerce. However, one address in the city and its place in global pop history remains largely overlooked.

Today, the first-floor flat in Anlaby Road sits above the Euro Food Mini Market. There’s no blue plaque, just a recently-installed Royal Mail postal and collection locker. Back in the late 1960s the flat was home to an aspiring teenage musician who had moved from Grimsby to join a band called The Hammer. Rod Temperton had little in the way of belongings except for a Hammond organ nicknamed Betsy which he kept in the flat between gigs.

Hull entertainment agency boss Peter McLeod was the band’s manager. He recalled: “When Rod joined there was a big change in the music. They dropped all the soul stuff and although they still did pop, Rod was into more far out material like Hawkwind and Soft Machine and he brought that into the group. Rod could disappear for days in his flat with his songwriting and he was absolutely assiduous with it. He used to stay up all night writing through until the next day.”

The Hammer became more popular as a live act in Europe than the UK but were always struggling to make good money. The band relied on the generosity of the owner of a nearby Chinese takeaway on Anlaby Road for free meals while Rod worked a side hustle playing keyboards in the Flamingo Club, a notorious late-night coffee club in Londesborough Street. Hull musician Peter Green was a regular visitor at the flat. He said: “There was always a terrible smell, It wasn’t Rod’s fault because it came from a pet shop next door.”

The Hammer’s hopes of a big breakthrough eventually arrived with a trip to London to record an audition album for the DJM label and play a Friday night gig at The Marquee Club with the music press, agents and studio executives expected to be in the audience. The recording went well but DJM boss Dick James said he would only release an album if Rod relinquished his songwriting rights. The band refused and instead James signed another unknown act who had auditioned material at the same time in a neighbouring studio. The new signing was a keyboard player called Reg Dwight, later better known as Elton John.

The Marquee gig also went badly. The Hammer’s bass player Stan Saye later recalled: “It was the day Jimi Hendrix died. I think we played to an audience of three.” The band returned to Hull and continued touring but, according to Saye, “the spirit had gone”. The inevitable split followed and after four years living in Anlaby Road, Rod packed his bags and relocated to Germany where he joined a band called Sundown Carousel playing covers in a residency in Frankfurt.

In 1973 he answered an advert in Melody Maker magazine from a soul band looking for a keyboard player. Over the next three years Heatwave would adopt Hull as their second home as they rehearsed, recorded and played here before finally breaking through with UK and US chart success with Boogie Nights.

Rod’s musical style had evolved into slick disco and he was soon writing global hits for Michael Jackson, including Off The Wall, Rock With You and Thriller. Were early versions of those songs crafted in a flat in Anlaby Road ? Probably not but without it acting as a musical stepping stone they might never have seen the light of day.

Angus Young

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We’ve done the widest, so we sent our thin thoroughfare correspondent Angus Young out with a tape measure to find the exact opposite.

If you are a regular Curiosity visitor, you might have seen Leanne Cloudsdale nominating Westbourne Avenue as her favourite street in the city recently. While taking a stroll along it, she revealed it was the widest of the four main Avenues linking Princes Avenue and Chanterlands Avenue. The 80ft span includes both the road and the generous grass verges on either side, reflecting the grandiose Victorian vision behind what was, at the time of its construction, Hull’s poshest street. If you ignore the subsequent development of dual carriageways with equally generous central reservations, Westbourne Avenue still  remains Hull’s widest residential street. All of which got us wondering which street is the narrowest?

Inevitably, our research led us to the Old Town where people have been living cheek by jowl for centuries and, in particular, Bishop Lane. According to our trusty Curiosity measuring tape, there’s a 16ft 4in space between the front doors on either side of the cobbled lane.

Bishop Lane originally ran from High Street through to the junction with Land of Green Ginger, having previously been known as Bishop’s Gate. It would later also be briefly known as Denton Lane. It was first recorded in 1347and poll tax records for 1377 show a total of 43 households in the lane with an adult population of 68.

The west side eventually became known as Bowlalley Lane but the eastern end not only retained its title but also maintained a reputation as a highly desirable place to live. In a newspaper advert from 1787 it was described as “a clean and retired street nearly in the centre of the town of Kingston upon Hull, with every requisite, out-office and a spacious garden behind the same.”

Like many streets in the Old Town, Bishop Lane was the result of houses being squeezed into old plots of garden land as Hull’s population expanded. The residential nature of the lane started to change in the late 17th century when a number of businesses opened and in the 19th century it was peppered with drinking establishments. For some reason, all of them opened on the south side of the lane. A 1791 directory of those living and working there gives some idea of the mix of residents and businesses with a surgeon, a shoemaker, a tailor and a pawnbroker rubbing shoulders with a shipowner, a postmaster, a painter and a brandy merchant.

Perhaps the best known address in Bishop Lane is Number One which stands at the south-east corner overlooking the junction with High Street. It is believed to have been built in the late 18th century after the demolition of an arched tenement at the end of the lane. Since then it’s been a merchant’s house, an alehouse, the office of a ship’s broker and the residence of a tailor before it was extended to include the neighbouring property at Number Two.

By the 1960s it was being used as a nightclub, reaching its peak a decade later as the legendary Bier Keller. These days Hitchcock’s vegetarian restaurant occupies the lower floor. Somewhat of a Hull institution, their all-you-can-eat buffets have been filling diners for the last four decades.

Angus Young

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Our post-war demolition correspondent Angus Young writes about a fella you may not have heard of but who the whole city owes a debt of gratitude.

A young Army colonel carefully picks his way through the debris of bomb-damaged buildings in Hull’s Old Town. He’s on leave from active wartime service with the Green Howards in Cyprus and he’s on a mission. In 1936 at the age of just 23, Rupert Alec-Smith took the first steps to form the Georgian Society for East Yorkshire. Distressed by the demolition of the early 18th century Winestead Hall and already a keen  scholar of local history, the grandson of the founder of a prominent local timber importing firm used his family’s business contacts to recruit a formidable committee to spearhead the new society.Among them were East Riding Council chairman John Dunnington-Jefferson, Basil Reckitt of Reckitt & Colman, two local MPs and two architects – Hull City Hall designer Joseph Hirst and Francis Johnson from Bridlington.

The society’s initial focus was on trying to curb the increasing conversion or loss of Georgian era country houses and mansions like Winestead Hall. However, the issue accelerated dramatically in Hull during the Second World War when bomb damage typically resulted in demolition rather than restoration of grand Georgian houses in the Old Town. While on leave, Alec-Smith returned to Hull and would spend several hours rescuing fittings from damaged Georgian residences lining High Street

After the war, the city council showed little appetite to restore what was left. Instead, it commissioned a new masterplan for Hull proposing the demolition of many properties in High Street. Alec-Smith continued to salvage what he could from the buildings before they were bulldozed while turning his attention to saving and restoring two of the most prominent remaining Georgian landmarks in High Street. Under his leadership, the society acquired both Maister House and Blaydes House.

He then persuaded the National Trust to take on Maister House while the society itself funded the restoration of Blaydes House, damaged by a bomb blast which completely destroyed a neighbouring building in 1941. Blaydes House was later sold to the University of Hull for just £1 and now hosts the university’s Maritime Historical Studies Centre. Once home to a family of wealthy merchants, Grade I listed Maister House is now the National Trust’s only property in the whole of East Yorkshire and is leased by a music company.

Alec-Smith’s eye for architectural detail also resulted in a Georgian chimney piece retrieved from one High Street building earmarked for demolition ending up being installed in his own home – a Georgian era rectory – in Winestead after the war. In a later account of the rectory and its many sympathetic period additions from elsewhere, he wrote: “Lovers of houses so often seek permanence in the things they love.”

His passion for local and family history included everything from furniture to artworks. A 3,000-strong collection of his papers now held in Hull History Centre include documents on the medieval church and civic history of Hedon, maps and plans for numerous places across East Yorkshire, ancient manorial records for the village of Elstronwick, copies of enclosure acts and volumes of records about the Maister family. The collection also features nearly 20 years of correspondence with the poet John Betjeman, who became a good friend through a shared love of historical architecture.

Alec-Smith later became a Conservative councillor in Hull and served as Lord Mayor in 1970. He died in 1983 but his name lives on in a charitable fund he set up as a bequest which is now administered by the city council. It provides funding to buy objects of artistic or historic interest relating to Hull which can be added to the council’s own public collections.

Angus Young

You can’t drive down Hessle High Road without seeing them, but what and they and why? As always, Hull Tour Guide Paul Schofield has the answers.