As is probably the case with most public parks around the country Pearson Park, Hull is a pale image of its former self in terms of ‘fixtures and fittings’ in the Park, although this should not detract from their ongoing value and simply reflects the fact that local authorities now have a wider spectrum of responsibilities, and now, in an era of declining income. Some parks, of course, have had an injection of capital over the last two decades as a result of Heritage Lottery monies being targeted to that end and this has often resulted in a restoration of some of the park’s original fixtures and fittings. One good regional example is People’s Park, Grimsby, another (hopefully) might be Pearson Park in the not too distant future.
The picture above shows Pearson Park’s ‘triumphal arch’ entrance off Beverley Road. At the time of the Park’s creation (1860) Beverley Road was a linear housing area on the edge of town with some of the contemporary middle-class mock-Gothic roadside housing surviving still. The land on which the Park was created would have previously been fields. Relevant committee minutes (s.p.b.) show that originally there was a large fountain just inside the Park which would have been visible through the ‘triumphal arch’. As an aside I don’t know what mechanics were put in place to drive a fountain in the 1860s, what drove up the water?
In 1886 the Pearson Park fountain ‘near the chief entrance’ was, for whatever reason, in need of restoration while two further fountains on the opposite side of the Park beside Princes Avenue were to be filled-in with soil and planted with flowers. The former no longer exists, its site probably being where a circle of trees now stands.
Also Pearson Park was of its time in having grand statues, one of Queen Victoria and one of the Prince Consort (both surviving) commemorating the royal visit to Hull in the 1850s. This was a level of ‘fixtures and fittings’ that was not to be replicated in latter Hull parks.