The Avenues

There is a corner of Hull like no other. We call it the Avenues, and it is a very special place, a warren of streets where I can lose myself. Urban, Victorian, Bohemian. A postcode that means the world. A corner of the Land of Green Ginger that is forever Saturday morning. It is where Yorkshire meets the world, vibrant, youthful and diverse. The university fuels it with energy, and the nineteenth century tempers the air, a riot of red brick and yellow, of stone and wood. As the name hints, it is an area of grid-like avenues, an area where symmetry rules. Yet each villa is unique, grand and overly mature; hints of genteel decay, overgrown in parts, bald in others. There is a smell I associate with the area, a doughy scent from the bread factory and a mulchy tang of dampness, of freshly roasted coffee and pancakes.

I discovered the Avenues later in life. I was born nearby, across a few miles of marshy countryside, in a market town called Beverley. And of course Hull featured large in my childhood, a place for toy shopping and fish and chips, museum visits and occasionally the dentist. My childhood Hull was in the city centre, where concrete city blocks and Brutalism replaced bombed out Victorian palaces of commerce . I never knew the Avenues existed. One day, as an adult, I went for a drink at the nearby Polar Bear. With my hosts I ventured into Newland Avenue and I was hooked.

The hub of the Avenues is Newland Avenue, a bustling street of modest buildings. Its entrance is marked by a painted railway bridge on one end and the university at the other. Streets of 19th century terraces run off Newland Avenue like fishbones from a spine.

It is a short bus journey from central Hull, or a moderate walk. Few tourists venture to Hull’s Bohemia however. I particularly enjoy the Avenues on Saturdays, when the area comes into its own. The coffee shops zing with conversation, scented with bacon sandwiches and chocolate cake. The shops are quirky. Vintage clothes and old fashioned butchers, cheek by jowl with bakeries that have survived unchanged from the 1970s. Places where chocolate eclairs and cream cakes sit in paper cups on Formica counters, metal trays of scones and sticky buns. Sans serif lettering on dusty menus, brilliantly coloured jam tarts, little custard pies.

Yet it is time to wander further, to leave the crowd and plunge into the tranquillity of the surrounding Avenues. Silence but for the wind in the trees. It is mysterious and evocative, the grand villas speaking of richer times. I am fascinated by these enormous houses, trying to peek into living rooms where books stretch from floor to ceiling. There is a softness, like moss covered stone, rock smoothed by powerful currents. At junctions, at the axis points there are several fountains, classical; echoes of Classical Greece.

One special road is Ella Street, the so-called street of Birds and Shadows. Gems of red brick and small alleys where cats prowl and mice cower. A few minutes’ walk, but a world away, is Grafton Street, punctuated by its flat roofed pub, known locally as the Bin. I was delighted and surprised to wander in there one day to discover t-shirts printed with my artwork. Grafton Street leads to Beverley Road, and feels edgier, the fringe of Bohemia perhaps but no longer its epicentre. Front gardens where damp mattresses rot, front doors of peeling wood and rotting plywood.

In sharp contrast is Newland Park, a figure of 8 road where trees tower over exclusive detached houses, small Edwardian palaces behind luxuriant hedges. Philip Larkin lived here once.

There is nowhere quite like the Avenues, Hull’s Bohemia. It has an atmosphere that I have seldom encountered elsewhere. It is worth a visit.