History of Hull: Parks - Pearson Park
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 เม.ย. 2021
- The story behind Hull's oldest remaining park, and the man behind it!
If you are interested in learning more about Zacariah Pearson, do check out this marvellous book, written by one of his descendants, Marian Shaw;
www.abebooks.co.uk/9781845301...
If you want to be more involved in helping the renovation and upkeep of the park, join the Friends of Pearson Park Facebook group.
/ pearsonparkfriends
If you're anything like me, viewing historical Ordnance Survey maps side by side with modern satellite views will certainly eat up far too much of your time!
maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/index...
For more info and updates, please follow me on Twitter
/ hullhistorynerd
and Instagram
/ hullhistorynerd
and Facebook!
/ hullhistorynerd
And if you enjoyed this video, please consider visiting my Patreon page and becoming a patron to help me make these videos faster and with better gear!
/ hullhistorynerd
Or make a one-off donation to the Support Hull History Nerd fundraiser if you don't want to commit to monthly patronage - any donations are welcome, from the price of a coffee to the price of a new camera! It all helps me make ends meet so I can devote more time to making these videos and less to 'normal' work!
www.gofundme.com/f/hull-histo...
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A message to everyone who watches & subscribed to the hull history nerd, I'm sure you'll all agree....he (hhn) and his videos and history lessons of hull are brilliant!....thanks hull history nerd... great work sir.
touché, it's like all the thoughts and questions iv had about hull he answers them, great work
I'm at the uni, walk past this place pretty regularly. Nice to know some local history while studying here too :)
For all the years I took it for granted, Thank you Mr Pearson
Amen!
As perhaps previously related, H H N: I first met my Darling Mary almost 50 years ago, just outside Pearson Park's main gate, adjoining Princes Avenue. Love at first [insert text here]. Mary lived at ** Westbourne Avenue.
We are still together (💖), albeit after some minor ups and downs along the road. However ... all our Children and Grandchildren are Healthy, Happy and Loving.
Thank you, especially for this upload. It is more than a wee bit special.
Stay free. Rab 🎯 🍻 😎
One of many stories where this park takes an important place, I've no doubt!
@@hullhistorynerd Cannot disagree! All the best to you and yours, from mine and me. R 👍
@@RHR-221b Nic one Rab, a joy to read...
My brothers and sisters were brought up at Newland Holmes in Hull as my dad was in the merchant Navy its a real shame what's happening in Hull with a lot of these places been knocked down for New Builds just found this channel and really enjoying it 👍🙏
I lived on Park grove. I loved this park. I recall playing football at 1am.
Lived on Pearson Park during my Uni days, many a happy afternoon spent playing impromptu football games there.
Sir, you bring back so many memories from long ago. My local park was Peter Pan Park...... I remember daring to enter the old gun emplacements and searching for shrapnel while picnicking with my mother.......Thank you!
I have used Pearson Park but never knew it's History. Again you brought the story to life and provided background. It just adds another dimension to the story :)
I love the park and always have. I was there with my son last year who wanted me to show him where I grew up and this was the first place we stopped. I was impressed with the updates. He was impressed with the Victorian villas. I think your work is wonderful. I never knew there were cotton mills in Hull but it makes sense as an adjunct or diversification to the woollen trade to Europe and the Baltic. There might be another video project in that for you!
Clicked as soon as I saw the upload notification
Excellent video as always
Very good, enjoyed that, thank you.
The wife and I were dragged up in 'ull - love this series. My first driving lesson was the Park's perimeter road. PS See next entry.......
Great video.
Really interesting video. There seems to have been a much more philanthropic attitude back in those days, not least in Hull. One wonders what legacies our current business people will leave behind them..🤔
I lived there as a child and have many happy memories of it.
I lived there 20 years ago and loved it, even though it was a bit dodgy then. You wouldn't walk through the park at night, and I remember finding used syringes in our back garden! One day I'll get to visit Hull again, it's a great city full of really lovely people
I have fond memories of Hull and it’s people, I lived there for 10 yrs from the late 1980’s. Interesting video, thank you. 👌💕
Another excellent and informative video.
My aunt lived at no.56 and I have very happy memories of playing in the park as a child. I also fished in the pond, which I fell into a couple of times...😁
Interesting bit of civil war connection there never would have thought a park in hull would have any sort of relation to it
I used to work for hall construction hull and apparently they did most of the building of the houses on the park just for anyone who's possiblity interested in that part of the history 👍
My great x3 grandfather David Parkinson Garbutt. Built the Avenues and the Fountains 😊
Funnily enough, he gets a mention in the forthcoming video on Newland in the section about the Avenues!
Thanks for another excellent video . Please keep em coming 👍
Another excellent video that brings back many happy memories. I now live abroad, so I don't get back to Hull very often. The last time I was in the park was probably around 2004 when my son was still young enough to enjoy the playground, I'm so pleased to hear that features such as the bandstand are being brought back. Thank you once again for another wonderful trip down memory lane,
superb
Another great video thank you I was born and bred in the avenues caught tiddlers in the pond and practised my football skills to become the next Stuart Pearson in that park
🎯 🍻 😎
Thank you for that interesting story about Pearson Park, I enjoyed going there as a child and it was great to hear the history. I live in Malton now but I’m happy to see the renovations that have been done recently.
I saw that you’re giving a talk about the history of the Hull Docks. In case you’d be interested, my father was Operations Manager at King George Dock during the 1960’s and 70’s and I have some photos and letters about different developments, like the opening of Queen Elizabeth dock. Thanks for all your videos Linda.
Another great video thanks used to live on Reynoldson st when we were first married brought the kids here many times many happy memories thanks again
Thank you I enjoyed this a lot. I live in New Zealand now but often think of re visiting the park I loved from the 70s and 80s with my Grandparents Annie and Cyril Whitworth of Edgecombe street. It was their park too as kids.
Love us a bit walking and history. Great stuff!
Greetings from Leipzig, Mr. Nerd. Thank you for another interesting post.
A fantastic presentation!!
Keep up the good work!! 🙂👌
Indeed, I remember this park with fondness. A great legacy. I believe the fishing magnates ended up owning some of those fine villas. Flats now, o'course.. Great videos, I really enjoy these!
Thankyou, glad you're enjoying them! More park ones to come over the coming weeks and months too
Pearson Park: I lived on Westbourne Avenue aged 10 in 1976. During the drought of '76 the grass in Pearson park dried up so much, we could see shapes on the park surface appearing. These were rectangular, circular and linear features which may have possibly indicated underground or past features of the landscape before the park was built. This begs the question, what was there before the park? Or was Pearson so brilliant he just had all the buried services interconnect through the park? Also, the park authority (Council?) used to drain the pond. The wildfowl and litter made it pretty shitty, but at least in the 70's the powers that were made an effort to keep it clean. So they would drain it. We could see a large metal pipe in the middle of the pond pissing out clean water to refill the pond. So, where was the source? Was it a local drain, many of which would be close to the avenues e.g. Cottingham drain? Obviously someone from "Parks and Gardens" in Hull City Council knew when to drain the pond and when to refill it, but more importantly they knew where all the taps, cogs and infrastructure were. I have no idea about the management of the park today, except that a very good friend of mine from the University of Nottingham has sampled the pond waters as part of a wider UK sampling effort on Duckweed. A very tiny plant that can tell you a massive amount about pollution. Not that we think there is any massive problem, but the ionomics analyses of the Pearson park waters suggest it is a sink for run off containing lots of metal ions from the local area. We ruled out the Sunday morning drunkies sitting on the benches and turfing the empty aluminium cans into the pond. The cans take so long to rot in the water. The wild fowl might perhaps introduce more metals into the pond through their concentration of metal ions in poo they do into the pond. Or perhaps there are other water ingress of historical perspective into the pond that we do not know about. What we do know is that Pearson Park and It's pond are brilliant and very important ecologically.
Those marks on the grass may well have been the remains of the bandstand under the surface as well as some older small huts or buildings like the old aviary, seen on the 1880s map, and, likely, the course of water pipes and drainage.
As far as I know the water for the pond is just fresh water from the main water supply, but I'm not an expert in these things!
On the contrary dear Hull History Nerd, you are the expert on these things which is why we love your videos and try to engage with you. If anyone has a synthesis of Hull history it's you 🙂
Nice to learn more my city thank you
brilliant video as always keep up the good work im from burstwick near hull so love all these videos thank you
It's a lovely park. Haven't been since they started the restoration work. Will definitely have to make a visit soon.
Well worth a look, the new additions give a real taste of how it used to be!
Another interesting video. Cheers.
Fascinating, History Nerd. Another worthwhile glimpse into Hull's past. I'm West Hull origin so I don't remember ever going to Pearson Park. I knew of it but it was a "posh" park. It's only through the efforts of Hull's great benefactors that we have such things, but the whole idea of rich folks stepping up to help the "impoverished" really yanks my chain.
The great unwashed are useful only for their birth certificate, their vote, and their willingness to go to war in far flung places to escape the grinding poverty of daily life. It all seems lopsided, as if meant to be, and even though cynical I think there is some truth to it.
I find your commentary quite engaging. It's a bit of a nostalgic journey certainly, but it's a good distraction from today's crap going on around us. Western society might well be the most affluent it's ever been in our entire history, but I'm not sure the price we're paying is actually worth it....
Not so much 'meant to be' so much as 'just as planned'. The people who took power in prehistoric days because they were stronger/ commanded more warriors/ had more money have always gained their power by stepping on the backs of others, whether it be the labour of farmers and craftsmen, or the martial forces they could use. Once someone took power in a small community, they would often cement it by establishing their dominance over everyone else, and pass it on to their heirs, creating dynasties that even now still represent many of the people at the very top of our society. The only thing that's fundamentally different between your "great unwashed" and those people are the cultures of power and powerlessness fostered by centuries, even millennia of reinforcement. Denying them education, encouraging things like the protestant work ethic, brutally putting them down at any hint of insurrection, and so on.
It wasn't until the growth of the trade unions and the labour movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that working class people actually gained a say in the way they were ruled through a voice in parliament; before this, you had the conservatives (who for the most part weren't really interested in the welfare of working people), and the liberals (who for the most part weren't really interested in the welfare of working people but had a few philanthropists and humanists who thought they should at least try to do nice things for them). It was the first time in British history that there was a movement by working people for working people.
That culture of powerlessness and power however is still with us to this day, with those whose families have always held power feeling entitled to that power and the poor feeling excluded from it, and also feeling that they don't deserve it anyway.
@@hullhistorynerd That was an interesting read, HN. Eloquently stated, and I totally agree. I've never actually drilled that deep, but seeing it in words makes entire sense. Being from a somewhat impoverished background myself, (who wasn't in my circle?) I've long been acutely aware of the divide between those who have the coin, and the rest of us, although of course as a child I rarely went much beyond the end of the street, and my world was playing footy in the street, marbles on bombed buildings and watching trains go past the end of the street.
We didn't get TV till very late in the day, and my father would never let me read two of his 3 papers when I was small. News of the World and People. I was allowed to read the Hull Daily Mail, since that was presumably local enough not to contain news that might be too much for a child. At least I think that was the rationale...
We've certainly come a long way from those dark days, and I'm thankful to have come of age in the 60's, the best decade for a boomer like me.
It's a shame you're just about done with our railways HN, but as always I look forward to your presentations whatever they might be. If they're about Hull, that's good enough for me, I'm in...
@@logotrikesOh, I'm far from done with the railways; that was just the railways of *Hull*, and there's one more bonus episode to come in that series... but there's a whole new series I'm working on called Lost Railways of Yorkshire, and the first one up is the old York-Beverley line! I would have had that one up in January, only we got hit with extra lockdowns which really set back my filming schedule, pushing me back to short, local videos for the time being. But they're coming!
@@hullhistorynerd Great news HN!! This lockdown will be over soon hopefully, and we'll see you out and about once more....
@@logotrikes I'm planning to shoot some B roll footage for it this week!
Ha I won!! Will watch and like after Antiques Roadshow!!!🤣🤣🤣
Enjoyed that one again mate. Very interesting. Loving the park videos
Still got a few to go, too! Next up is probably West Park, though I'm also going to be working on some bigger videos like the railway and docks ones again now that things are easing up!
@@hullhistorynerd Brilliant. Love learning all about my dad's birthplace. Some of it is familiar to me, but not everything. We have similar channels but I'm more Leeds and West Yorkshire
Awesome, I'll have to check it out!
Ha, I did check out your channel and totally recognised you as I've watched your vids before! Excellent stuff :)
Was only there in February doing a run round the park, use to play football on it many moons ago....nice park, but East park is much better....keep up the good work Mr nerd, great videos as per usual
Great video, and glad you tube suggested it. Have been researching West Park in Wolverhampton and it also has been called the Peoples Park too. 👍
It doesn't surprise me, there was a real surge in philanthropy during the later 19th century and doing things 'for the people' was certainly in vogue!
@@hullhistorynerd very true, gained a new subscriber 👍
Great video, as always. Any chance of anything on Boothferry estate in the future? Grew up there but don’t really know anything about it, and no good at the research haha. Keep up the good content, look forward to the next one!
Oddly enough I don't know much about it myself! Out past Spring Bank West and the end of Anlaby Road my knowledge dwindles, I'm afraid, it's part of Hull I never had much opportunity to visit. But who knows what will come as time rolls on? I often find stuff in my research that spurs me on to make different episodes I'd never even planned on, so always a possibility!
I was much more familiar with Peter Pan Park and the large area around Costello playing fields.I do remember the grandeur of Pearson Park though and for a year lived on Marlborough Ave, fairly close to it.
Another very interesting and informative programme, Well done ! Just one quick comment. When did it become more 'PC' to call this area West Hull, when I was growing up, the are beyond Chanterlands Ave eastwards towards Beverley Road etc was always 'North Hull .
Well, I'm almost 50 and it's always been West Hull to me. North Hull has always referred to the area above Cott Road in my lifetime, as in the North Hull Estate. I suspect your use might be a very, very old one that has been passed down from grandparents that dates from the time when that area really *was* the northernmost part of Hull, but it hasn't been that for well over a century now.
The older name is, however, reflected in the parliamentary constituency of Hull North, which covers that area, but certainly colloquially everything west of the river and south of Cott Road was always West Hull to me.
Which of the main routes in and out of Hull (Anlaby Road, Beverley Road etc) was developed first?
As far as I can tell, it's probably Hessle Road; I know that slum housing (the courts) were being built along it, pretty much where the A63 crosses the area near Railway Dock and the shopping park where Toys 'r Us used to be, from the early years of the 19th century, and the development of Albert and especially St Andrew's docks accelerated the process.
Anlaby Road also expanded westward fairly early, too, followed quickly by Beverley Road, as the city grew outwards and engulfed the village of Sculcoates. Spring Bank was the last of the west Hull main roads to grow due to it's boggy nature.
On the east side, Hedon Road and Holderness Road had, like all of the west Hull roads, been country lanes for centuries, but Hedon Road was developed first due to the new docks, Victoria, then Alexandra, and later King George V. Holderness Road is, with Spring Bank, the joint youngest of Hull's roads in terms of being built on, as East Hull really is generally much younger than the west side; it wasn't until the very end if the 19th century that Holderness Road began to be developed; most of the houses from Witham to Holderness House were built from the 1880s to 1900, and past that its mostly 20th century building work.
@@hullhistorynerd Thank you for responding.
Was the "shelter for fallen women" founded by Zachariah Pearson the Female Penitentiary on Anlaby Road? My 3x great aunt was there as a 14 year old girl in 1861, is there a good history of the institution?
Alas, that's not the one Pearson was involved in; the one he contributed to was on Nile Street, near to where the Hull History Centre is today. I'm not aware of any detailed histories of those shelters, but I'm sure some sort of vague story could be pieced together from some other sources at the history centre when it reopens.
@@hullhistorynerd Ah thanks, that clears it up. I've promised myself a trip to the History Centre either this year or next, looks like a great resource. Stay safe and keep on posting these great videos.
Have you done any programmes about Hulls role in 19c emigration to America from Norther Europe?
That particular topic gets covered in the first episode of the Hull and Selby Railway video, where I cover the emigration platforms and waiting room that are still at Paragon station!
Very interesting bit of history mmm how come I not on your patron list🤨
Oh no! My bad, I'm so sorry, I really should have a file I use for every video instead of manually making the title cards every time, it looks as though I somehow managed to miss you this time round.
I shall put you in twice next time to make up for it!
@@hullhistorynerd that's ok mate 👍😄
@@WILD35 😎🍻
Now a no go arena unfortunately thanks to the wonderful Beverly rd
It was very busy when I was there, people from all over, and there was no bother, so I think that's probably a bit overstated!
@@hullhistorynerd I got my jaw broken by a nice chap for ‘staring at him’ so I’ve give it a miss since!
Ah, that can happen anywhere. I got threatened with being 'cut up' by a couple of lads when I was filming round the bankside area for my first video. Hull's no worse than anywhere else, and Bev Road is no worse than other parts of the city. What happened to you there could easily have happened in town, or even down one of the Avenues (trust me, I used to live down Marlborough and I've had a few dodgy near misses round there).
@@hullhistorynerd I know what you mean but once bitten twice shy.
I do understand; I had my pelvis broken a few years back by a boy racer speeding across a petrol station forecourt; the trick is to blame the boy racer, not the petrol station!
no the great big house we're the moonies lived