The photo above shows the particularly well prepared information board at Pickering Park, just inside the main gates.
Following on from the previous blog the question arises as to whether Christopher Pickering was competing with T.R. Ferens (East Park) with a view to ensuring that west Hull had as good a park as east Hull? If so this is no bad thing because such a mindset benefitted the town as a whole. The two park plans were not identical anyway as C. Pickering at Pickering Park deliberately donated, from the outset, a much greater proportion of the site to team sport facilities.
Maybe Pickering and the City Engineer were much more aware of the greater expectations on municipal parks than had been the case when East Park was being created. East Park was able to get up with rising expectations because T.R. Ferens kept purchasing sections of land onto which the park could expand, especially in the case of a boating lake.
Incidentally, The long lake seen at Pickering Park today (not now used for boating) is a truncated version of the original, the earlier one arching round the northern part of the site. An aerial photo of the original boating lake is so grainy that I haven’t included it here.
Although the original excavations of these boating lakes were massive projects, by the 1920s the income from the rental of boats to members of the public was claimed to more than cover ongoing costs for a number of years. Sailing/rowing was one of the great attractions in parks back then.