By the 1850s the O.S. map shows that the area of Myton Manor (as had been) west of the town docks of Princes and Humber Docks had become quite built-up, more densely so the nearer to the ‘old town’. Coltman Street was the most westerly street off Hessle Road, a street of high value villas, while immediately south of Hessle Road the area was a mass of orchards, market gardens and allotments taking advantage of the fertile estuarine silt soils and the nearby market for the produce grown. Indeed on the north side of Hessle Road and next to Coltman Street were the ‘Botanic Gardens’, a place of resort in leisure time, accessed by Linnaeus Street off Anlaby Road today opposite Hull Royal Infirmary, then the site of one of Hull’s two workhouses.
With the construction and opening of Albert Dock in the 1860s and St. Andrew’s Dock as a purpose-built fishing fleet dock in the 1880s along the Humber foreshore the need for close-by worker’s housing led to the rapid development of the nearby post-Enclosure fields of this part of Hessle Common. By the 1890s (see above map extract) this had become one of the most dense housing areas in the country with hundreds of terraces leading of a grid-plan of main streets. Various ground-plans were devised to maximise housing/acre. The 25 inch O.S. map of the early 20th century shows in detail this housing development north of Albert and St. Andrew’s Dock and the equivalent area north of Hessle Road westwards as far as the Hessle Road railway crossing. This was a community on the edge of Hull, until Pickering Park was opened in 1911 and the inter-war local authority housing at Gypsyville west of Hessle Rd. railway crossing remained mostly post-Enclosure fields. Thus the ‘Hessle Road Community’ retained a strong sense of identity and lived, then, closer to fields than the town centre.
Very few of these houses remain following wholesale demolition in the 1960s and 1970s, most of the area now being modern industrial units. Most residents were moved to newly built local council accommodation at Bransholme satellite town, again much closer to fields than the town centre.