That is more by happy coincidence than design as within its broadly square footprint and two floors it actually comprises four houses.
If you have some difficulty imagining the format then try to visualise how the original house builders, Barratt Homes described it back in the early 1980's as "Quarter Detached".
I have always considered this to be a bit, well quite a lot, of poetic licence as the use of the term Detached suggests something quite exclusive but then it is dragged back, screaming into reality in the realisation that it is in fact just a segment of the whole.
For all of its false pretensions and illusions of grandeur the layout does actually function well as a compact home. There is a small open porch, supported on a metal stanchion and adjacent a compartment for a refuse bin or in this particular case, a tall American style fridge freezer. The front door opens out into the "L" shaped living and dining area although the stubby offshoot is largely taken up by a wrought iron framed, open tread staircase. This does give just amount enough space for a dining table and two chairs beneath. The rest of the ground floor is a galley kitchen.
Although cramped there is quite an advantage in being able to carry out food preparation and cooking, plating up, washing up and putting the pots away whilst just swivelling round in the same spot on the floor. The construction of the feature stairs makes them very flexible and springy but a conventional tread and riser arrangement would just not fit.
Upstairs is a double sized bedroom and a bathroom.
As a home for a singleton or young couple it meets all of the basic and fundamental requirements. Energy efficiency is good and running costs will be below average. In the early 1980's, before the standard expectations of the house buying public for en suites, utility rooms and a cloakroom with toilet even in the tiniest of properties the Quarter Detached was considered quite a pioneering innovation.
As for my reference to a look-a-likey Signal Box?
Well, consulting the archive maps (again) for the location indicated that from the mid 19th Century and up until the 1960's the site was under the black spidery map legend of railway sidings.
The status of the City Of Hull as a Port was emphasised by the sheer volume of rail freight going from and to the expansive Docks, either for export to Europe and the rest of the World or as imports many of which were loaded onto the trains before being taken 'cross country to Liverpool and other West Coast Ports for the onward journey to the Americas and Far East.
The goods in transit could be bulk raw materials, timber, cattle and manufactured products but a striking fact is that more than 2 million immigrants also passed through Hull in the 19th and early to mid 20th Century. Some of the travellers escaping persecution and poverty in Central and Eastern Europe stayed put in Hull, including ancestors of my wife who hailed, separately from Germany and Sweden.
If it were possible to go back in time with our quarter detached house the outlook in the 1880's would have been clouded in coal dust and combusted steam from the incessant procession of railway engines as well as a riot of noise from metal wheels on rail joints, the clang of couplings and creak of wooden carriages and box-cars.
In fact such would be the persistence of disturbance and airborne contamination that residing anywhere near what the Old Map refers to as the "Locomotive Junction" would be pretty well unbearable not to mention nerve jangling and very unhealthy.
The scene today is so far from that historic era.
The house is in a quiet cul de sac surrounded by neat private gardens and well maintained properties. There are absolutely no features remaining that would indicate the past land use although I did write a while ago on the great story of a homeowner just around the corner from this place who, whilst digging out footings for an extension, uncovered a Train Turntable.
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