Have just completed preparing the quarterly newsletter for the Friends of Pearson Park, my 17th.
On Saturday last was highlighting the once green areas off Spring Bank. It was the latest of my monthly guided walks highlighting Hull’s green areas (although this was once green areas). Started at Morpeth St. and spoke about the once Zoological Gardens which stood between there and Peel St., with Hutt St. now running through the centre of the once gardens. Detailed information on the Zoological Gardens may be got from a booklet produced by Claire and Verity of Hull History Centre and can be viewed on the website of the Hull History Centre. The gardens and cages lasted between 1840 and 1861. It is encouraging to learn that some local people in 1840s objected to the keeping of foreign animals in very small, by later standards, cages.
A fortunate coincidence was that the stonemason Andrew Gomersall was opening his ‘Zoo Keeper’s Yard’ on that day as part of the Hull History Week open visits. He showed us round.
Having walked back to Spring Bank along Peel St. we then walked west to Botanic Crossing as was, and then on to Sunnybank and looking through Hymers perimeter fencing described the features of the Botanic Gardens on this site which existed here 1880-1890. This was Hull’s second Botanic Garden, the first on Linnaeus St. existed from1812-1877.
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a Swedish botanist who devised a way of categorising all life on Earth, a great pillar of learning of the late Renaissance on a par with Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution of the 1850s.