The Old Harbour

The stretch of river running from The Deep to North Bridge was originally known as The Old Harbour and was where ships used to moor to load and discharge cargo. Reminders of this function can still be seen today by the side of the river. As you walk up, notice such things as the mooring buoys on the side of the jetty, the wooden platforms jutting out from old warehouses, the metal sheet coverings protecting the corners of buildings, the cranes attached to the side of buildings and the cobbled staithes running down from the dockside to High Street.

Hull’s fishing industry is also represented on this stretch of the river with the presence of the Arctic Corsair, now a floating museum but in its day, the last of the sidewinding trawlers. Despite its presence, much of the fishing industry operated from the west of the city, firstly out of Humber Dock, now the marina, and from the end of the 19th century, at St Andrews Dock even further to the west.

Just beyond the Arctic Corsair, take a moment to look to your left to see the garden of Wilberforce House, which retains many of its original features and style. You then pass under the Pease family’s warehouses, now transformed into apartments but at one time owned by Hull merchant Joseph Pease. His initials can still be seen on the warehouse façade as can the original crane used to load and unload goods.  On the other side of the river is a rare maritime building previously owned by Hull Trinity House to store buoys in when it was responsible for the pilotage on the River Humber. The adjacent tubular jib crane is also a listed structure and is only one of a handful of its type still in existence. To its left is the entrance to Victoria Dock. This dock was built in the 1840s to deal with Hull’s growing timber trade, but closed in the 1960s with changing patterns of trade, and by the 1990s it had been transformed into an upmarket residential estate fronting the Humber.

The Pease Warehouses in 1864, Courtesy of The Chris Ketchell Collection

On the other side of the entrance to Victoria Dock is the Clarence Flour Mills building, constructed by the famous Hull milling family, the Ranks. It is an important reminder that much of Hull’s wealth, particularly in the 19th century, came from trade in grains and seeds, not fishing or whaling.  The Rank family led the way in terms of importing corn but many other types of grain such as rapeseed, linseed and cottonseed were all imported to Hull to be crushed in mills along the banks of the river. The oils were subsequently used in the manufacture of products such as paint, soap and margarine.  The engineering firms needed to produce and service the seed crushing equipment also developed rapidly and that legacy of engineering companies continues to this day, especially around the Wincolmlee area beyond North Bridge.

Crossing over the River at Drypool Bridge, you can look back across the River to Blaydes House, the area at the back of which still clearly shows some of Hull’s former dry docks used for shipbuilding. Most well known of the ships built here is the HMS Bounty used in the famous mutiny, but other notable ships to emerge from these dry docks include HMS Boreas, Nelson’s first official command in the West Indies, and also the Alexander, the largest of the famous First Fleet, the first flotilla of 11 ships carrying felons and settlers to Australia.

There has been a crossing at North Bridge since the 15th century and it has been the principal route into the town of Hull from the east for hundreds of years. Notice how the main road from the east bends around before going back down Great Union Street. This would have been the site of one of the two blockhouses, built by Henry VIII along with a central castle on the east of the town for protection. This most northerly of the blockhouses would have directly overlooked the old North Bridge thus providing excellent control over this key entrance to the city. You can still see the course of the old North Bridge just to the south of the current one.

Also from North Bridge, you can look across and up river to the industrial area of Wincolmlee. 200 years ago this would have been the site of the Blubber Yards, where the whale flesh was boiled in large pots to extract its oil. The smell was apparently terrible! During the sieges of Hull in the English Civil War, this area would have been a no mans land with Royalist forces to the north firing canons down towards the town walls.