The photo above shows the ‘central’ avenue at West Park, Hull looking south towards the Park’s main entrance (for pedestrians) off Anlaby Road. Paul Gibson’s excellent illustrated booklet on the history of West Park, published 2011, includes an extract from the 1928 O.S. 6 inch map and showing that half way along this avenue was a fountain around which the carriageway curved. This has long gone although the footpath that curved east from the fountain survives so the fountain’s position can be accurately defined. Just north of where the photo was taken were then two terraces either side of the north end of the carriageway with a few steps leading up. Back then these were almost certainly the site of parterres, or flower beds, although the map extract shows trees there as well. At this north end of the central carriageway was a long conservatory, almost certainly one of the ones open to the public in which were propagated and grown semi-tropical plants and shrubs. Gibson’s booklet shows a photo of this conservatory with the ‘Acklam Clock’ showing clearly (the story of this clock is recounted in the booklet); this conservatory had been built in 1885 and was removed in 1952, one wonders what happened to the clock.
Today, this area at the north end of the central carriageway shows no evidence of the steps, terraces or parterres and is beside the back wall of the ‘Tiger’s’ gym building off Walton St. (not the MKM Stadium). The area shows footings of what may have been post 1952 buildings now, in turn, gone, but on the eastern side of where the conservatory once was are some low man-made mounds showing where footpaths once existed while the trees around are of many different species and some, presumably, dating from the original planting of the 1880s.