Poor Sam

Poor Sam.

There he was impaled on street railings outside a tall apartment block. The spikes clear through his bloody abdomen and penetrating an eye socket in a most distressing fashion. Poor Sam had died by falling off the roof, it was clear.
Yet in Sammy's right hand a cut throat razor and on his neck several shallow cuts and one huge slice across the arteries and wind pipe. Poor Sam had cut his throat, nay nearly sliced his head off and  then fallen off the roof.
Still and all next to poor Sam's corpse a broken glass and a bottle of wine with a strong smell of almonds. And Sam, well he stank of booze. His bloods, when they were eventually done, showed he'd have died of alcohol poisoning if the cyanide hadn't gotten to him first.
At the inquest the jury heard that the safety rail on the roof was faulty and  had given way and juries, it is well known,  hate to give a verdict of suicide so poor Sam was deemed to have met a death by misadventure.
But the coroner, who, like you, had listened to all this with an increasing sense of disbelief, and who was aware of increasing numbers of similar deaths in the area and that there was a rash of sudden railing impalings (but not in Sweden where railings were padded as a precaution) wasn't having any of it so he sent poor Sam back to the pathologist, a Dr Mallard, who told to me this sad tale, at great rambling length.
This time it was  found that lodged in poor Sam's mushed up brain were the remains of a .22 slug; from the kind of gun, it is said, that is favoured by a lady.
Soon after they arrested a Miss Otis, there was gunshot residue on her velvet gown, and so they took her away to the jail but an angry mobbed lynched her and hung from an old willow tree but that is by the way.
As for poor Sam ... well there was yet a further examination and it seems that on his way down from roof to earth Sam's last breath  took in a passing  virion, which lodged in his airway and was later mopped up by a swab and taken to a lab and expanded by magic into millions of strands of virus nucleic acid. Poor Sam, unlikely as it may seem, it turned out poor Sam died of Covid19, sure he did, it says so on his  death certificate.
He lies forgotten in an unmarked but much disturbed hole, a caution against straying down Lover's Lane, watching too many detectives on TV and jumping to the wrong surmise.

Pile them high

Somehow in the rush to build new housing around Queen Street/Humber Street area the squat little building on the corner of Blanket Row has acquired three storeys of  new places to call home. The whole of Blanket Row, for so long just waste ground,  is now a big building site with execrable or is that executive (I tend to confuse the two) apartments springing up for folk to work off their mortgages on (or for property companies to buy up wholesale and rent out) and as the sign says this is city living at its best.

Scott's Square was once somewhere down there, a speculative venture (aka a slum) packing in as many properties as the law and the Council would allow. Plus ça change as they say in the city of culture.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone ...

What you've never had, I suppose, you'll never miss. So future new visitors to Lowgate might wonder at older folks shaking their heads and sighing a little at the loss of the 1970s brown glazed façade of the block opposite Holy Trinity. Gone forever now the near perfect reflections that any and I guess every local photographer and tourist snapped up on their first trip around town ... I know old empty offices serve no purpose and folk need places to live and poor threatened landlords die such a painful death without income ...and all the rest... so anyway here are new apartments whose occupants will no doubt complain about old folk pointing their crooked fingers at their windows, shaking their heads and sighing.

Well, OK then just once more ...  for old times' (and old timers') sake ...

*Shakes head and sighs*

The Quality Street Lights

So here's some old flats on Porter Street all lit up as an arts project called "I Wish To Communicate With You" for some reason that escapes me. Puts me in mind of those coloured cellophane wrappers that came (probably still do for all I know) with Quality Street chocolates. Obviously it's all to do with that damn culture thing. The pictures I've seen of it, including this one, really don't do it any justice, it's much more impressive in real life, though hardly a stunningly original piece.

Roundabouts but no swings

Quite the most pointless roundabout in town. Behind are the battery farms off Osborne Street where people are raised to become awesome citizens and quite a few of them are.

Block of colour

Anlaby Road, Hull

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Change of use

Paragon Street, Hull

In what appears to be a remarkable outbreak of common sense Lloyd's Bank is moving from its position on Paragon Street to a new place round the corner on Jameson Street. Yeah wow, I know, exciting (not). But bear with me, the old place along with the empty former Job Centre next door is being converted into apartments with affordable rents. Bringing people to live in the town centre, occupying these large empty shops and offices has got to be a 'good thing'. If the scheme succeeds there are plenty of similar buildings that could be used in this way. Whisper it gently though, this is social housing (if by proxy), with a not-for-profit trust and the Council owned builders firm involved under a Government project to bring empty buildings back into use. And it only tickles the surface of the massive housing shortage crisis in this green and pleasant land, still the journey of a thousand miles begins by putting your shoes on as someone once said.

Jameson Street, Hull

Sunday mornin' and I'm fallin' ...

So what would get a crowd out on a Sunday morning in Orchard Park?

Well maybe a bit of demolition might stir some interest

Seems the world and his mother was there to see the fun.

Then the bang, well bang's too short a word for the thumping great crack like thunder and the jolting shock.

And a second later it was all over. Done and dusted as they say.

Party's over; time to go home.

This was the end of Highcourt on Orchard Park. Bit of a blink and you'll miss it situation, it came down too fast for me, so if you want to see the action here's a video from YouTube.

Look your last on all things not so lovely

High rise buildings were seen as an answer to a lack of space in inner cities, you couldn't build out so you built up. Strange then that when Hull spread out into the fields and countryside surrounding it in the 1960's building hundreds of Council houses in the fancifully named Orchard Park Estate, it also built several high rise blocks despite there being no lack of space. OPE, as it is tagged by local grafittistas, was designed along the lines of Radburn, New Jersey, a garden city 'planned for the motor age'. Well what might have worked in 1930's NJ didn't quite workout in East Yorkshire. One suspects the crossing of palms with silver may have happened as it did in other slum clearances and redevelopments in other towns across the country at the time. Anyhow a high rise with a country view turned out to be no more popular than a high rise with a view of the back of Paragon Station. Nor did it lead to a community-in-the-air rather a dystopian anti-social nightmare with the usual mix of high unemployment (currently 27%), vandalism, drugs and crime. So to cut a long and sadly predictable story short these towers are being removed either by explosion or gobbled up by a giant building eating machine. This one, Highcourt, is the last one standing and it too should be gone soon with a bang so I'm told. 

Meanwhile in another part of town I read that 5,402 new homes are set to be built in Hull in the next five years. I love the exactness of the figure and the vagueness of the phrase "set to be built". Maybe the palms haven't as yet been crossed with enough silver ...