Author name: Richard Clarke

An additional point re the last blog’s consideration of the common features of public parks and municipal cemeteries is that in 1904 Kingston upon Hull Urban Sanitary Authority combined the two previously separate committees for Burials and Parks, henceforth known as the Parks and Burials Committee. The picture above shows the south-west corner of Castle St. disused […]

The picture above shows a brick-built table tomb in Hull’s Castle Street cemetery/disused burial ground, this area soon to be radically altered by road-works connected with the upgrading of the local road system. It is occasionally asked why consider cemeteries in the same category as public parks and recreation grounds? The answer is as follows. To

Going back, for a moment, to a point made in the last blog re the ‘mound’ at East Park, a minute of March 1905 stated that soil for the mound was being carted from  the’Town Hall Extension’. This refers, I think, to the westward extension of the City Hall to create what was originally the

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