Basement Instinct

I would like to have seen, first hand, the central area of Kingston Upon Hull in the years before the devastation wrought to its population and stock of buildings by wartime bombing.

The statistics of destruction are well documented and make sobering reading.

Hull was the most consistently and heavily bombed place only after London but this has never really been acknowledged in history or in any memorial or commemorative form subsequently. There are sporadic exhibitions covering the wartime years but only flirtatious and temporary in nature. Attempts to establish a permanent home in the city have so far failed. Ironically the current location of choice  is one of only 8 remaining second world war ruins in the whole of the UK, a former Picture House on Beverley Road.

A few older and established terraced streets in Hull still retain breaks and gaps where homes were bombed and the buttresses of former chimney breasts can be seen on surviving, now exposed party walls.

I have of course seen black and white photographs of central Hull pre-bombing and it was undoubtedly quite a handsome place with a range of striking, architecturally significant buildings to testify to a flourishing and wealthy maritime and commercial trade over the centuries. Some have survived although will have had to be substantially rebuilt . These are now out of scale and context amongst some hideous post war and 1960s and 70's structures which have made the city centre drab and uninspiring.

My first full time job was from an office on Albion Street. The north side retained a long Georgian Terrace, originally Gentlemen's Town Houses, but in the mid 1980's was entirely in business and non-residential use.

The buildings were grand, if not a little worn and sorry in condition after some years of low budget maintenance by successive owners and occupiers. I was shoved up in one of the attic rooms being last in amongst the new arrivals. The firm was celebrating a Century in business, much of it from the same premises.

The view out of my top floor window was reasonably interesting in quieter moments of my workload. Albion Street was always busy as it provided a rat-run shortcut around the city centre as well as leading to a Brewery, The New Theatre and a complex of highly staffed Council offices.

A large tract of rough ground opposite my building provided surface car parking for workers, shoppers and casual visitors.

I was surprised that such a large bit of open ground existed under the pressures for development which made cities the dynamic places that they are. The explanation was given by a senior Partner of the firm.

The site had previously been occupied by a large, colonnaded fronted public building, Hull's Municipal Museum. In grainy archived photo's the scale of this Institution was certainly substantial. The housed collection was by all accounts a credit to the wealthy benefactors whose donations had secured notable treasures and exhibits perhaps otherwise destined for other regional cities.

In the lead up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the phoney war of inaction in Britain following the Nazi invasion of Poland, some concerns were expressed by the City Elders about the vulnerability of the Museum and its catalogue to damage from inevitable air raids.

The Museum Director gave assurances through the Hull Daily Mail that there was no risk from anything except a direct hit. This was tempting providence in the extreme but it took until 24th June 1943, some time into the 4 years of Hull's exposure to bombing from the Luftwaffe, for the fateful incendiary bomb to hit, explode  and cause the building to catch fire and collapse.

Valiant efforts by fire wardens and staff did salvage some items but thousands were destroyed.

The heritage of more than a hundred years had evaporated overnight.

Levelling of the site took place in the late 1940's and from the 1970's the Council operated it as a car park.

In 1988 the digging of a course for drains across the often waterlogged car park uncovered ancient pottery and a stone Buddha. The works to level the site after the war had simply entombed the Museum Basement level and its stored artefacts.

A full scale archaeological dig was commissioned in 1989. This must have been most interesting for those working on what was predictably named 'The Phoenix Project' as excavation will have found items in age and epoch order as stored before that June night. The phrase of shooting fish in a barrel is apt in this situation.

In a matter of days more than 2500 items were brought to the surface. Many of the much greater actual number of finds during the Project were in excellent condition from ancient world coins to Egyptian obelisks, jewellery to dinosaur bones and the jaw of a killer whale. One of the caretakers from June 1943 made himself known to the 1989 archaeologists and informed them of the likelihood of finding his motorbike which had been left in the Municipal Museum Boiler Room. It's rather crumpled and compressed form when brought out of the debris was one of the most surprising revelations of the project.

Memories of the wartime years were rekindled in the City and the discoveries captured the interest of the public. The site, by now under a large weatherproof cover, was opened to visitors via elevated walkways and viewing areas. Many came as a form of pilgrimage and homage.

Unfortunately, even though  momentum, motivation and emotions peaked with the high profile dig,  an opportunity was sorely missed to establish a more permanent presence in or around the site or elsewhere in Hull as a lasting memorial to a City and its unsung heroism from 1939 to 1945.