by Ethel Smith

Created on: October 07, 2007

HULL CITY COUNCIL MUSEUMS

The free entrance museums and art gallery in Kingston-Upon-Hull are all maintained, run and funded through the Leisure Services Department of the local council, with additional funding when received. The Maritime Museum until the early seventies was housed in a small museum based at Pickering Park Hull. This was away from the city centre, on the road to a small village called Hessle .

I remember the Pickering Park museum as a child in the fifties. Of course at that time it looked vast but really it was quite compact. In the grounds were huge whalebones; relics of our bygone fishing days, when Hull was a huge port .In the sixties Hull was the third largest port in England. Hard to believe now.

As fishing declined I suppose the powers that be saw the importance of preserving artefacts from that part of Hull's past. How right they were and what a vast store of information the Maritime Museum holds.

THE TOWN DOCKS/MARITIME MUSEUM

The maritime museum is located in the pedestrianised Victoria Square in Kingston-Upon-Hull, which is on the north bank of the River Humber in East Yorkshire, England. Nearby is the Humber bridge which at one time in the last 30 years was the longest bridge of it's type in the world.

The museum building itself is triangular in shape and the roof at each of it's three corners has a dome. All in all it's quite an impressive building from the outside. It's a beige coloured stone building which, along with the other buildings in Victoria Square, was sandblasted a few years ago to remove decades of grime. It came up a treat .

The building was actually the dock offices when the docks were still nearby. At the back was a dock which is now filled in (the Queens Gardens) and across the road was the Princes Dock (partially visible but over which a large shopping centre has been built) If you have heard or seen any paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw you may have seen his painting of Princes Dock from 1887. It is typical of his style at the time and shows a very different and atmospheric Hull. I'm 99% sure there is one of the dock offices also.

There is a back entrance to the maritime museum but it is usually closed in winter. I think this was probably the main entrance from the docks many years ago . When these doors are open, weather permitting, you can come out and sit near the flowerbeds and large stone fountain and enjoy an ice-cream or a picnic lunch. Of course you can sit out here any time of year but Hull does have icy winds

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