Author name: Richard Clarke

The picture above is taken from One Hundred and Twenty-One Views of Hull and District c.1910 (s.p.b.s) and shows the ‘Mound, East Park’. This feature was almost certainly not natural but a result of the top-soil dug out to create the large serpentine lake. It seems to have been made into a sort of playground and […]

The story of Hull’s East Park begins in 1882 when the Parks Committee minutes record that a sub-committee was to search-out a ‘suitable site … in the East and West Districts for the use of the people as and for a Public Park’. In the following months discussions with various landowners took place with the

This third blog about the early days of West Park includes a picture (above) of the original bandstand on the island (s.p.b.), this taken from the Malet Lambert Reprint identified in the last blog. The lake, island, rustic bridge and bandstand are long-gone. Already by the late 1880s the Corporation Parks Committee was making provision for

The picture above is one of three grainy images of West Park, Hull copied from One Hundred and Twenty-One Views of Hull and District, c.1910, this publication reproduced as Malet Lambert Local History Reprint, Extra Volume No. 82. The volume also contains early photos of East, Pearson and Pickering Parks (in the last case only

As regards the early development of Hull’s West Park it needs to be recorded straightway that in 2011 Paul Gibson published his excellent booklet on this topic (cover-page see above). In May 1882 the Minutes of Hull Corporation’s Parks Committee, 1882-1884, record that a sub-committee was formed to search for a ‘suitable site … in

As with many public parks around the country created in the mid-to-late 19th century, at Pearson Park, Hull the intention was to sell-off plots of land around the perimeter of the land allocated to the park for ‘villa development’, often envisaged for relatively large detached (although terraces/semis survive beside Pearson Park) period houses and where proximity to the