Every town and city, it seems, has their own word for the alleys that run behind houses. But why do people in Hull call them Tenfoots?
Hull’s tenfoots formed part of a huge house-building boom which started in the late 19th century with new terraced housing being constructed in what had been largely open countryside beyond the historic city centre.
Designed to address chronic overcrowding and associated infectious diseases such as cholera in rapidly-expanding industrial towns, the 1875 Public Health Act had not only set out legal requirements for drainage and public sanitation but also new buildings, such as minimum window sizes and specifications for foundations, and legal standards for new streets.
Under the legislation, streets not intended for use by horse and carriage and less than 100 feet long could be 24 feet wide. These ‘backroads’ were generally designed to allow ash and privy waste to be removed from houses without the need to carry it out through the front door. However, subsequent byelaws allowed local authorities leeway to introduce their own rules on dimension and many opted for a much narrower width.
Hull’s oldest surviving tenfoots suggest they were built to the absolute minimum local width possible, presumably allowing developers to still squeeze as much new housing in as they could.
These early tenfoots were also paved with double hexagon-shaped bricks known as Scoria – an ancient Greek word meaning excrement or dung while the Romans used it as a name for hot lava bursting out of a volcano.
The latter no doubt inspired Victorian recycling pioneer Joseph Woodward who used the name for his brick-making company in Darlington. He used molten iron ore waste – known as slag – from the bottom of local blast furnaces to create the distinctive silvery blue bricks which were laid in back alleys across the North of England.
Hull’s remaining Scoria tenfoots – to be found off Hessle Road and Beverley Road Road – are now included in Hull City Council’s Local List of important heritage assets.
It’s clear that while tenfoots became common in Hull, other slightly wider ‘backroads’ were also built. Land Registry records for conveyances dated 1905 for two new properties in Salisbury Street in the Avenues include details of the construction and maintenance of a “backroad or way of twelve feet in width” for the use of all the owners and occupiers of other plots on the “Park Avenue estate”.
Deeds for other properties in nearby Victoria Avenue also refer to twelve feet wide backroads with many stipulating their use for servants and workmen who could not possibly be seen entering by the front door.
Over a century later in 2018 these same passages were the subject of a public inquiry into proposals to restrict public access to them via a new bylaw. Despite measuring twelve feet, they are all referred to as ‘tenfoots’ in the independent planning inspector’s final report. This adoption of the phrase as the colloquial name in Hull for most backroads seems to have happened shortly after the First World War.
The first reference to a tenfoot in local newspapers was in a 1919 advertisement for a property up for sale. From then onwards, tenfoots would feature in a range of stories, from reports of flooding and poor maintenance to terrible accidents and even brutal murders.
By Angus Young