Just came across this great picture of the restaurant in the Thornton Varley department store... please log in to view this image (From Hull The Good Old Days on Facebook) For those not familiar with Thornton Varley's, their fantastic department store was destroyed by the Luftwaffe, they built a new one, which was later taken over by Debenhams... please log in to view this image please log in to view this image
For anyone who's interested, here's details of the Abercrombie Plan, alongside details of what actually happened to the redevelopment of the city centre after the war. The raised road to stop the fruit market and marina areas being cut off from the rest of the city centre is a particularly interesting and particularly disappointing omission... http://rtpi.org.uk/media/998408/david_neave.pdf
Bladons department store on Prospect Street was converted to offices and became Shirethorne House... please log in to view this image
Another picture of the original Thornton Varley store shortly after it was bombed... please log in to view this image
The original Cecil cinema - opposite where it is now. It was bombed and is now where Europa House stands. please log in to view this image
Great find that. Really interesting. I do actually think we have some very good quality post war buildings in the City Centre. Thank Christ though, they didn't build that dual carrageway through the old town. It would have destroyed High Street and most of the heritage we have left. They did enough damage with the building of Castle Street. Splitting the old town in two.
Another good piccy, removing the trees that used to run down the centre of Spring Bank... please log in to view this image
I remember my mother telling me how my uncle was a display manager at Thornton's. One day he designed a window display mainly using the colour mauve, That night there was a fire at the store, how widespread i don't know, but my family were all deeply superstitious and they blamed the colour scheme. (Don't ask me why, they just did. Superstition isn't always based on logic). After that my mother would allow nothing mauve into the house. Cadbury's chocolate used to have a mauve wrapper; if she ever bought any Cadbury's she would even discard the wrapper before she brought it into the house.
Thanks for that. Very interesting for me as there are several mentions of my Uncle Bill who was Chairman of the town planning committee.
Aarhus Tiger, my best mate is Danish and from Aarhus - we used to watch games all the time in the Golden Lion! You might know him!?
I can remember going to the new Cecil just after it opened to see Davy Crockett and the wild frontier.
I heard something on RH a while ago about elephants which used to be walked from Ferensway down to where Zoological is now, and there was some story about one elephant ending up stuck in a shop after smelling ginger and sticking its head in. Since then I noticed there's loads of slabs in the pavement on Spring Bank which depict the story. It looks completely daft without knowing the back story, but very Hull.
