David Neave, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding (Yale University Press, 2005, 715), concludes the section on Sunk Island by stating that the Crown Colony was ‘a short-lived venture but some of the brick and tile cottages remain’. I have not researched the inter-war years for Sunk Island but the final source reproduced in Meadley, J. A Sunk Island Miscellany is a copy of the relevant section from Kelly’s Directory of 1937 where, along with the independent farmers, is listed ‘Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries farmers’ and the name of the ‘manager’. Was this the descendent of the Crown Colony?
A similar development to Crown Colony can be found north of Hull in the parish of Woodmansey/Dunswell. Here, west of what was the main road from Hull to Beverley, stand a series of semi-detached substantial cottages each with a very large garden. David Neave (see above p. 395) tells us that these were built in the 1920s ‘on (as?) Hull Corporation smallholdings’. The picture above is taken from Dunswell’s reference in Wikipedia and is a copy of a painting entitled ‘Wagon and Horses Inn, Dunswell’ painted by F.S. Smith around 1900. The view chosen is looking south and even in 1900 the built-up area of Hull would still have been over a mile beyond with the hamlet of Newland en-route. The road shown had been a turnpike from 1744 to 1871 (see MacMahon, K.A. Roads and Turnpike Trusts in Eastern Yorkshire (East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1964) but Smith shows it as having then a very poor surface (across the centuries it had been a notorious road to travel along it often being very deep mud owing to its location in the Hull valley plain and closeness to the River itself).
So to conclude for this section of blogs – is Reed’s Island (see early blogs in this section) going to go the way of Ravenser Odd or Sunk Island?
(If any regular reader would like to suggest a blog theme that interests them then I will consider the idea(s).