The photo above shows the ruined church of St. Peter’s, Drypool after being bombed in 1941, scanned from Neave, D. Lost Churches and Chapels of Hull (1991, 57 and s.p.b.).
The first map showing any post medieval detail of Drypool village area I currently have access to is Hollar’s ‘bird’s eye view’ plan of Hull of 1640. By then a massive linear fortification had been built in Drypool village to defend Hull from possible land attack from Holderness, (this built following instructions issued by Henry VIII after his visits of 1541) comprising of a thick wall with a fort at its southern and northern ends and a third fort in the middle. This must have dwarfed the village which Hollar shows as about 10 cottages north of the church (in contrast to the village shown in the medieval plan, see Drypool (1), five of the cottages appear to cluster around a village green (see later). However, Hollar also shows the position of a six-arch bridge over the River Hull connecting North Gate in the medieval town walls with the north Fort on the Drypool side. Thus Drypool citizens now had a convenient way of going to and from Hull.
On Buck’s ‘The South-East Prospect of Kingston upon Hull’ three buildings are shown on the extreme right (apart from the fort) one being the church tower, matching Poulson’s illustration in having diagonal buttresses (see picture Drypool 2) the others being a large house and a double-pitch roofed building of uncertain purpose. Clearly then still, by the mid 18th century, Drypool was still a rural area apart from the defences.
By the time of Thew’s ‘Plan of the Town of Kingston upon Hull’, 1784, the linear fortification had been replaced by the Citadel, a moated and walled triangular structure incorporating a ‘magazine’, ‘Blockhouse’ (beside the mouth of the River Hull), ‘officer’s barracks’, ‘soldier’s barracks’ and ‘French Prison'(?). The position of Drypool church is shown but the rest of the village simply shown as a terrace of six cottages and a large area of ‘Closes’.
(to be continued).