Yesterday’s blog was finished early because, by mistake, I pressed the ‘Publish’ button instead of the ‘Save’ button, at which point there was no turning back.
Anyway, the cupola seen in Pearson Park was moved to the municipal park shortly before the outbreak of the Great War as an architectural artefact displayed in this public area. Incidentally the man-made mound was created for children to run up and down on to access the open-sided cupola, mounds were popular features in municipal parks because it was felt that if children were expending energy scrambling up and down they were less likely to be causing mischief and damage elsewhere in the Park.
The cupola had been rescued intact from the demolition of Hull’s first purpose-built town hall designed by Cuthbert Brodrick in an ‘Italianate’ style (see above) and built in the 1860s only to be replaced by the existing, much larger, Guildhall as part of the works following the passing in Parliament of an Improvement Act, 1897, promoted by Hull Corporation. ‘The plan was virtually complete by 1908, except for the demolition three years later of Cuthbert Brodrick’s Italianate Town Hall (1864) and its replacement by the present Guildhall in 1914 to harmonise with the new municipal buildings stretching along Alfred Gelder Street’ (Gillett, E. and MacMahon, K. A History of Hull, (Hull University Press, 1989, 419).
As may be seen from the early photo. above the cupola, re-located in Pearson Park, had been at the very top of a tower built over the main entrance on Lowgate to Brodrick’s Town Hall. The tower had a clock-face on each side but the cupola above had a purely decorative function, hence its relevance to the current theme.
The cupola had eight ‘Romanesque’ openings between eight pillars, these capped by a dome sporting a central metal spike about which were three metal crowns. A fourth horizontal projection which, when first seen, seemed like a fourth crown was in fact the base plate of the upper pinnacle.