25th May, 2020 Newland 4, Point of View 11.

Finally in this Newland section a word about roads. In an immediate area without any canals it was the River Hull and local ‘king’s highways’ (a term much used in 18th century but not today) along which people, commerce and agricultural goods moved.

In 1744 the road from Hull to Beverley was ‘turnpiked’, this turnpike skirting Sculcoates parish and passing through Newland. One of the ‘bars’, at which point travellers, wagons or herds of farm animals had to pay a toll the income from which was used to improve the road’s surface, was sited in Newland at a point approximately where the Cottingham Road, Clough Road, Beverley Road four-cross-ways is now. A ‘bar’ would have been a movable barrier across the road with alongside a board displaying charges and usually a toll-keeper’s cottage nearby. The income went to the turnpike company (or ‘trust’) and the toll keepers were employed by the company. The Hull to Beverley Turnpike Trust was wound-up in 1871.

Beverley Road led south to Beverley Gate over the centuries that Hull’s 14th century town walls existed. However, a much less prominent (today) ‘highway’ ran roughly parallel to the east and terminated almost certainly at the North Gate through the town walls, until this section of the town walls was demolished with the excavating of the ‘New Dock’ in the 1770s. This was Green Lane, with some sections surviving as Oak Road. The photo. above shows the well researched double-sided information board at the entrance to Oak Road Playing Fields, at the east end of Beresford Avenue, north Hull.

Green Lane branched off the Hull to Beverley road at a point opposite the eastern end of Endike Lane and followed in a south-south-easterly direction forming (later) the eastern side of the second detached cemetery on Sculcoates Lane, along a short stretch of Air Street/Sculcoates Lane, today, between two right-angle bends, on past the Charterhouse site to North Gate.

(to be continued)

Point of view 10 – Having heard the defence of the Prime Minister’s chief advisor it seems to be a fine-line between whether he did right or wrong. What is as concerning is that the controversy brings into the focus, again, the very issue of ‘political advisers’. Are these people paid by the political party or from the public purse? We might all at times have benefitted from good advise, myself especially, but these would have been acts of friendship and/or kindness – unpaid.

Does a prime minister, alongside cabinet colleagues, not know, collectively, what to decide on the basis of political/rule of law principles? Some decisions may prove a mistake, but some advise from an advisor might prove a mistake.

Normally such people seem to be influential (and wealthy) but ‘in the shadows’ with no defined position in constitutional government. ‘Movers and shakers’ behind the picture we are shown.