Dead Centre of Town

Thanks to the satellite views provided by Google Earth I have spent many quite productive hours imagining that I was  flying over my home area.

Of course I have tried to put a date on when the currently displayed aerial image of my house was taken from space on the basis of what car was parked on the driveway or what had been left out on the rear lawn  and not put away in the shed.

The level of detail and focus from the spy in near earth orbit is not brilliant. I left a packet of sage and onion stuffing on the patio with the intention of logging on and trying to focus in and read the label but that was a bit of a waste of that particular hour.

What does show up very clearly however are the areas of open space through the suburbs and the wider urban and city areas. The main City Parks are easily made out. They are the green fertile oasis areas in the middle of a patchwork of red, slate black and concrete grey roof tiles. The greenbelt zones between the composite towns and villages that make up the larger Hull conurbation are like narrow battlefield front lines with the common drainage ditches as makeshift trenches and as much under attack from development encroachment as this similie clumsily suggests.

Then there are the strange very regularly shaped parcels of open land sat in the middle of built up areas looking like the centre court at Wimbledon before they put the roof on it. Some are very easily explained. Old Graveyards.

At one time located on the outer edge of the town they were developed up to and around as the City grew at a rapid pace. In most cases there are some retained headstones and memorials but otherwise these have been removed before they fall on someone taking a short cut through the graveyard or have been carefully arranged against the outer boundaries to warn people off and satisfy the Heritage people.

The very eroded inscriptions on the poor sandstone tablets imply that there may not be many ancestors around to visit and leave flowers.

The City, viewed from high altitude is bisected by broad land drains. A much larger number of these drain ditches have been culverted and filled but their courses can still be detected. I have seen photographs from as recently as the 1950's of these smelly watercourses which must have contributed to the list of fatalities annually from either falling in or being bitten by something that crawled out of them.

Again, stranded by the spread of suburbia, are the old landfill sites.

In the days before strict controls on what got dumped and where I expect that any allocated hole in the ground was just filled up with anything. The landfills originated from shallow clay or mineral extraction for brick making or road construction. If these landfills are still within living memory then they remain undeveloped but with the inevitable misplacement or acccidental deletion of archives it is very possible that such land areas may be inadvertently built upon.

This is not a problem with commercial development. A strip of land on the Humber bank, formerly a waste tip, is now occupied by some swanky offices and car dealerships. The buildings have been so constructed to be impermeable to the methane produced by the decomposing waste beneath or with an arrangement of shiny stainless steel vents and chimneys to at least release the noxious gas above the roof height for dissipation in the air.

Residential development is another issue.

In some well documented housing estates the night sky is lit up as the gas burning flares ignite in response to a release of gas. The impact on demand and values for the executive housing is a good source of work for local lawyers and surveyors.

Where a potential hazard has been clearly recorded there can be two main consequences.

The first is that the land surface invariably steams and on colder seasonal mornings there can be a low, dense mist whereas the rest of the local area is clear and bright. This does give a nice view on some mornings and many photo opportunities to be submitted to the local interest section of the newspaper. I have seen flourescent jacketed contractors amongst the low mist with test drill rigs so perhaps the emissions could be captured and used as an alternative source of energy. The local tramp is often seen asleep on the field taking advantage of the warmth from the ground or perhaps succumbing to the fumes in equal proportion.

The second consequence is the utter panic amongst prospective house buyers when their Environmental Report, a common value added input in the house buying process, flags up the presence of a landfill site within 500 metres or less of their dream home.

If the landfill is not documented then there can be some justification in calling the information a deal breaker. However, the fact that the area is already fully built up and has been for the last 15 years indicates that the local population know of the fact but are not bothered.

The usual filling for the old pits and workings was industrial waste. I was involved in a professional capacity in assessing the impact on the value of a bungalow which had started to subside into a large hole on a 1960's estate. The site had originally been the dumping ground for the iron filings and shavings of a large boiler and radiator manufacturer.If it is good for bodily health to take in iron then it follows that putting iron into the soil cannot surely have any adverse implications.

The problem was that the accumulated ferrous levels in the soil ate through the main metal water supply pipe and the initial pin hole leak developed into a full burst . Over time the ground and foundations beneath the bungalow and indeed its near neighbours gave way. The repair of the pipe took some months and at tangible cost.

Unfortunately the replacement pipe was also in metal and within a few years the same corrosion and leak happened affecting the newly stabilised but almost insurance write-off properties. Eventually the engineers went for plastic pipes.

In my slacker moments I like to study in detail the old maps of the former Victoria Dock on the Hull waterfront. The main dock basins and slipways have been gentrified into nice features to compliment a very attractive residential estate of houses and flats.

The primary function of the dock was to recieve the imports of timber from the Baltic countries. Somewere amongst the housing will have been the contaminative processes for tanalising the timber. The football field as the only open greenspace on the estate is not developable for reasons of contamination.

One of the nice executive calibre houses has subsequently started to topple over into one of the infilled timber ponds being been built precariously balanced atop of the dock wall.

What I am still determined to locate however is much more interesting.

The old maps clearly show the location of a large group of buildings under the title of Typhoid and Cholera Hospital. That makes interesting reading if little Jacob and Jocasta, occupants of the house built on the site of the institution, after a session of digging in the garden approach their parents with a collection of dry old bones.