Times Like These

Hull Heritage Open Day 2013
Trinity House Chapel
From the outside...

....and the inside

What I love about the annual Heritage Open Days is that they give you a once-only opportunity to get a glimpse at something that remains hidden the rest of the year - places you pass by all the time and have never noticed, or wondered 'what's behind that door?'. Whenever I've walked down Princes Dock Street, I could never have imagined a sea god reclining under a stained glass window was behind the gates of Trinity House ...Or that a perfectly preserved parquet floor and Art Deco fireplace lay up an unprepossessing staircase in a former fruit brokers on the corner of Humber Street.* Like Alice In Wonderland, you briefly get to go through a door into another world. In some cases, it's the last opportunity you'll get, before a building alters forever - like Samman House, which is being converted into flats (sympathetic to its original features, according to its developers). Who wouldn't want those stained glass windows in their living room?!

*Caleb's Place houses an antiques centre which is open all year-round

The photos below are are of the stained glass windows in Samman House, formerly Hull Chamber of Commerce, on Bowl Alley Lane. The Heritage Open Days brochure describes them as "the first (photo) depicting shipping through the ages while the second set of four panels were installed 30 years later as part of the city's contribution to the Festival of Britain in 1951, and were gifts from the paint, seed crushing and wholesale grocery trades and depict in detail the processes and places involved in these trades". It was poignant to recognise some of those trades and places and those that have disappeared, in a building whose own use has changed with the times, and will hopefully remain a testament to them.