By 1773, The Haven, as the port on the River Hull was known, had become unfit for purpose: The river was narrow, tidal and muddy, but not only that, it was becoming so overcrowded that ships were getting damaged, and so a consortium of interested parties formed the Hull Dock Company with the purpose of constructing a new dock.

After being granted permission to use the old city walls as part of the construction, the Dock Company eventually decided to build the new dock along the path of the north wall as far as Beverley Gate. Starting work in 1775 it took three years to build, with its entrance via the River Hull just south of the North Bridge, which seemed a bit short-sighted if you ask me, because it meant that ships still needed to gain access via the Haven.

The map below (drawn in 1786) shows how The Dock, as it was simply called, replaced the north city wall. Note also how the castle had been replaced by a citadel.

With trade still growing, it was inevitable that the Dock Company needed to put their thinking caps on again, and the plan they came up with was to build a Humber Dock at the southern end of the city walls which would give direct access, via an outer basin, to and from the Humber. Construction started in 1803, and after encountering a few technical problems, the new Humber Dock was officially opened on 30^th June 1809, with the first dock now being renamed the Old Dock.

One of the stipulations of building the Humber Dock was that once trade had reached a certain level, then a third dock should be built connecting it with The Old Dock and this condition was met in 1825. Continuing to follow the line of the old City Walls, Junction Dock was completed in 1829.

The map below shows how the city looked in 1866. By now the three Town Docks have virtually made the old part of the city an island, and those of you who have looked at the map closely, will notice that the Old Dock and Junction Dock have been renamed Queen’s Dock and Prince’s Dock respectively. This was in honour of a visit made by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1854.

As trade continued to increase, then so did the number of docks, and by the time the map above had been drawn up, you can see that Victoria Dock and its associated facilities had taken over the citadel on the eastern side of the river and a new ‘West Dock’ (later re-named Albert Dock) had been constructed along the banks of the Humber on the western side. As time progressed, more were to follow, and a lot of this growth was down to the needs of an increasing population that was required to work in Britain’s ever expanding industries.

The Industrial Revolution rapidly changed Britain’s green and pleasant land into one of towns with smoking chimneys and rows of terraced houses – but that didn’t happen in Hull, or at least not to the same degree. The areas where coal and minerals could be mined were not found in any great quantities around this low-lying part of Yorkshire, and the city’s fortunes lay with its status as a port and the trades associated with it.

Many of these local trades were connected with the traditional business of whaling, and I think it’s fair to say that Hull’s reputation as a major whaling port is not something that the city is particularly proud of – and not something that I want to dwell on for too long either. For people living in the Arctic back then, whale meat was a source of food that was necessary to survive and the mammals were caught in small numbers, but Hull whalers caught them for other reasons and in larger numbers. The blubber was used for heating and lighting (and of course this was before alternative ways were found for providing it), and whalebone (better described as baleen as it’s not really bone at all) was used for manufacturing all manner of stuff from umbrellas, fishing rods and female undergarments. How many whales were killed by Hull whalers I wouldn’t know, but it’s also worth pointing out that a good number of those involved also lost their lives in what was an extremely dangerous business.

The pic below shows the Hull whaler Diana trapped in ice for over six months (1866/67) in Baffin Bay. The disaster claimed the lives of 13 crew, and when the ship ran aground off the Lincolnshire coast in 1869, she became the last ship of the once large and lucrative Hull whaling fleet.

The second half of the 19^th century also saw a different kind of activity at the port when over 2 million migrants disembarked at Riverside Quay on their way to a new life. They came from places all over Northern Europe, including Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Russia and Sweden. After some obligatory form-filling, trains then took them to ports such as London, Southampton and Liverpool where they boarded liners that took them to the New World.

There’s a sculpture by Neil Hadlock, unveiled in 2001, that remembers these events and is located on reclaimed land at the Bullnose where ships waited for high tide before entering Humber Dock.

In 1897, Hull was granted city status, and although prosperity had reached its peak by the time WWI broke out, it was still a major target for the Luftwaffe in WWII. Many British cities were heavily bombed during the Blitz, but Hull doesn’t often get mentioned as a city that was badly hit, and yet much of the city centre was destroyed and 95% of the city’s houses damaged, resulting in half the 320,000 population being made homeless: Around 1,200 people were killed and 3,000 injured during those air raids, but the port did manage to keep functioning. With all this going on, the people still never lost their sense of humour: The Hull comedian, Norman Collier tells of how his family were filing into an air raid shelter one night when his ‘Mam’ dashed back towards the house “Where are you going, Mary,” said Dad. “Back for my false teeth,” she replied. “Come back here, the Germans are dropping bombs not meat pies,”.

Meat pies are a staple food in Northern England – and so is Fish n’ Chips, so much so, that during the First and Second World Wars, it was one of the few foods that wasn’t rationed in Britain, as it was a firm favourite with the working classes and helped to keep up morale.

Coastal communities everywhere have always been involved in catching fish, but Hull’s rise as a major fishing port began with the discovery of large shoals of cod (and herring) on the Dogger Bank in the mid-1800s. As steam replaced sail, ships started to venture further afield to places like Iceland and the Barents Sea where there were plentiful supplies of cod and haddock which were the British public’s preferred choice of fish to go with their chips (and still is). With an ever-increasing amount of fish being offloaded, it was decided to build a dedicated dock on the Humber, west of the Albert and William Wright Docks. Named after the patron saint of fishermen, St. Andrew’s Dock opened in September 1883 and naturally spawned a host of shore-based jobs to service the 350 or so trawlers. Fish factories and fish merchants worked alongside engineers, shipwrights, net makers and riggers, many of whom lived along the Hessle Road.

The 20^th century saw Hull become one of the world’s largest fishing ports. Thanks to a suspension of fishing during the Second World War, stocks had greatly increased, and the introduction of freezer trawlers meant that Hull fishing boats could be found in places like Iceland, Norway, Bear Island (Svalbard), Greenland and Labrador. The men from Hull didn’t have it all their own way though because they had stiff competition from their neighbours across the Humber at Grimsby, who had a fleet of freezer trawlers of their own.

These freezer vessels were too big for the Fish Dock (as St Andrew’s Dock was commonly known) and so operations were transferred to the William Wright Dock in 1975. This dock, which had opened in 1873, was joined up with the adjacent Albert Dock in 1910, and redeveloped in the 1950s.

Of course, hauling in large catches of fish on an industrial scale was never going to be sustainable, and the Humber ports of Hull and Grimsby were hit hard when territorial limits were imposed around the coasts of their main fishing grounds.

The biggest altercation came with Iceland where boats from Hull had fished since the 15^th century. There had been many disagreements over the years, but in 1958 several countries held a meeting at the United Nations in which they were seeking an extension of their territorial limits to 12 nautical miles. No agreement was forthcoming, but Iceland unilaterally imposed it anyway. Needless to say, Britain (and other nations) refused to accept Iceland’s decision and British fishing boats were escorted to the Icelandic fishing grounds by the Royal Navy. Confrontation was inevitable, and although there were no serious deliberate incidents regarding casualties, both sides suffered damage to boats and equipment.

In total, there were three Cod Wars as they became known: The first was from 1958-1961, the second, 1972-73 and the third from 1975-76. You might not think that Iceland was in a position to take on the Royal Navy, but it held a trump card: It lies in the centre of the GIUK Gap, a strategic and important location for NATO. GIUK stands for Greenland, Iceland and the UK, who between them control access between the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean. When Iceland threatened to pull out of NATO, other members had to sit up and take note, and a NATO brokered agreement in 1976 gave Iceland pretty well much what they wanted – an exclusive 12 mile zone where only Icelandic boats could fish and a 200 mile fishery zone where other nations could only fish with Iceland’s permission. The UK responded by abandoning its ‘open seas’ fishing policy and introduced a 200 mile exclusion zone of its own, and since 1982, a 200 nautical mile zone has been the international standard under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Cod Wars had come to an end, but so had Hull’s prosperity.

It appears that there was no long term fallout from the affair as far as relations with Iceland were concerned because Hull is twinned with Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, and ironically, Icelandic companies have set up fish processing plants in Hull, which at least has provided much needed employment for the locals.

As if to cement this strange love affair, there’s a statue where the River Hull meets the Humber called ‘Voyage’ which was presented to the city by its Icelandic creator, Steinunn Thorarinsdottir in 2006. It looks out over the Humber towards the North Sea and in the direction that fishermen would have taken on their journey north towards the Icelandic fishing grounds. There’s a twin statue in the small village of Vik in Iceland, where Hull fishermen were looked after when any of their ships came to grief. As far as I know, the one in Vik is still standing, but the one in Hull was stolen by some toerag in 2011, but the council dipped into their reserves and asked the artist to make another one. I took the pictures below when the original was still there

The creation of the 200 mile limit around the traditional fishing grounds for Hull trawlers meant that the boats had nowhere to go. Not only was it bad news for the fishermen, but it was also bad news for Hull in general as many people were employed in the business. As with other towns in post-industrial Britain, recovery from such a fatal blow was going to take some time, and the area around the docks must have left the city looking a very forlorn place indeed. So what’s happened since? Many of the old docks have been covered over and turned into shopping centres and such like – but not all. On the eastern side of the river, Alexandra Dock, which was opened in 1885 by the Hull and Barnsley Railway to facilitate the export of coal from the South Yorkshire collieries, is being transformed into Green Port Hull, a development which includes renewable energy projects and  the construction of blades for offshore wind turbines.

On the other side of the Holderness Drain from Alexandra Dock is the King George Dock (built in 1914) and the Queen Elizabeth Dock extension (1969). Since 1965 it’s been used as the departure point for ferries to The Netherlands, and today is used by P&O ferries for its service to Rotterdam. Beyond the ferry port is Salt End Oil Jetties, which service a large chemical plant and power station, so the port still seems to have some future – and so it should.

I ended my previous post by looking across the River Hull to Victoria Pier from The Deep aquarium, and now that I’ve explained how important the maritime trade has been to the city, it’s time to walk over the Millennium Bridge to see how the Town Docks look today.

My first impression of the western side of the river was not that great to be honest as much of it seemed to be in need of some urgent regeneration, but it seems as though since I was here, that’s exactly what has happened, or at least to some degree. I walked down to the Voyage statue and along to Victoria Pier, which although it was a Saturday morning, was still eerily quiet. I was the only one around as I walked across the frosty wooden boards to gaze out over the Humber estuary. It was quite a sublime moment, and not one that I expected (see featured image at the top of the page).

Continuing around past the Minerva, a pub that I wouldn’t have been able to resist had it been open, I then crossed over the Humber Dock Basin via the lock gates. This was where ships waited to enter the Humber Dock, the second of the Town Docks to be built if you remember.

The dock closed to shipping in August 1967 and permanently in 1969, but it’s now, believe it or not, a marina. It came as a complete surprise to me as I never thought of Hull having a marina somehow, but I don’t know why not come to think of it. Another surprise was seeing the Spurn Lightship moored up here.

Walking up the western side of the dock, I needed to cross the Railway Dock Swing Bridge in order to get to Castle Street. The Railway Dock incidentally, was opened in 1846 to serve the Hull and Selby Railway and is now part of the marina. Castle Street forms part of the busy main A63/M62 connection to Leeds and the subject of road improvement schemes for years. Since I was here, an impressive looking new bridge called Murdoch’s Connection has been installed to give pedestrians a safer link to the town centre whilst allowing traffic to flow more freely underneath.

The video below is by the ALW Research team.

Having negotiated Castle Street without the help of a £22m bridge, I came to what was the former Prince’s Dock (originally Junction Dock) which closed in 1968 and redeveloped as a shopping centre called Prince’s Quay in 1991. Needless to say, I didn’t stop to find out what was inside as I don’t do shopping – unless it’s for books.

Instead I focused on reaching the first dock Hull had – The Dock/Queen’s Dock – except that it wasn’t there – and that’s because in the 1930s they filled it in after there was no more use for it.

The first pic below is how the dock looked before it was transformed into Queen’s Gardens, and the second one is a view of how it looks now thanks to the Grey Arrows Drone Club.

I can well understand why people love to use drones, but I’ve never got into it, and the best I can show you is how cold it was the day I was here.

Across the road from the Rose Bowl Fountain are the former Hull Dock Company’s headquarters in Queen Victoria Square, an impressive building now housing the city’s Maritime Museum. I’d run out of time to visit it because I’d arranged to meet Kay in the square where there’s another impressive building – namely  the City Hall.

You may have forgotten by now, but we had a football match to attend this afternoon, and after some excellent fish n’ chips (what else?) in the historically interesting and haunted Ye Olde White Harte we headed over to the KC Stadium.

Donning our red & white scarves, we were approached by a Hull supporter as we walked towards the stadium. Unlike some of the altercations I’ve been involved in at football matches, this chap held out his hand and thanked us for making the journey up here in such icy conditions. After quite a long chat he took us to the visitors entrance and wished us good luck. I’m not used to this sort of welcome at an away football ground and it was no different inside the stadium where a female steward looked after my wife like an old mother hen. Kay was impressed with the Hull fans, but less so with ours. She’s not been to very many football matches, and she felt embarrassed with what was coming out of the mouths of our fans. Singing (to the tune of Sloop John B) “Hull is a s***hole I wanna go home” was one of the more acceptable chants they blasted out.

Even after the game, we met some more friendly Hull fans who helped us find our way back to the city centre, but the most important question is ‘did we get revenge for that Wembley defeat? Unfortunately not, the result was Hull City 2 Bristol City 0, and for those going back to Bristol tonight it was going to be a long journey home as the weather forecast was looking grim, but for us we had another day here tomorrow to make up our minds about whether Hull really is a ‘crap’ town.

POSTED – OCTOBER 2023