Hostelries of Hull.
- Stewart
- Jul 7
- 5 min read
With the arrival of midsummer, it was time for former work colleague Eric and me to set forth on one of our quarterly excursions to explore the pubs of a particular town or city. These trips, timed to take place on or around the solstices and equinoctes, have previously seen us visit the boozers of Belper, and the taverns of Tamworth could well feature in the future. We visited my old hometown of Gorleston in December and my old student haunts of Bangor in March and having already relived Eric's student days in Sheffield it was time to visit his hometown, Kingston-upon-Hull. As nobody ever seems to use the place's Sunday best name, I'll follow suit and simply refer to it by the name of the river it sits on, dividing the city into east and west.
All of our targets were in west Hull. Our first port of call was the Minerva which sits on the bank of the Humber estuary.
Hanging above its doors are a couple of Tetley lanterns and inside I managed to sample the, seemingly pretty hard to find nowadays, hand-pulled Tetley bitter.
The other establishments that we patronised included two places that are on CAMRA's list of Heritage Pubs which feature historic pub interiors. Both are three-star rated. One was Ye Olde White Harte on Silver Street, where the mayor and aldermen once plotted to overthrow Hull's catholic governor – all part of 1688's Glorious Revolution...
...and the other was the plainly younger and less pretentiously named, White Hart on Alfred Gelder Street, with its wonderful Burmantoft ceramic bar.
All in all, seven pubs visited and eight different brews sampled, with each of them coming from a different brewer. It was a great day out.
As we wandered around the city Eric, being a historian returning to his hometown, admirably filled the role of a very knowledgeable tour guide, offering up snippet after snippet about the city's past, including the fact that Hull was the second most bombed city in the UK, after London, during World War II. In 2018 a memorial was unveiled on Paragon Street featuring the names of the citizens of Hull that were killed in air-raids.
With around ninety-five percent of Hull's buildings being damaged or destroyed in the blitz it's hardly surprising that just a few minutes' walk away from our hotel once stood a pub. The Myton Tavern was to be found at 61 Porter Street, on the eastern apex of where Porter Street cut at an angle across Adelaide Street.
Probably opening in the 1840s its first landlord was Robert Wharam...
...and as we move forward through the decades the Wharams were there census after census. Robert was still dispensing pints in 1861...
...but by 1871 son Henry had taken over.
Henry died in his bed in the Myton a month or so before the occasion of the next headcount and by the time that the enumerator paid his visit one Tom Morrel was the landlord.
Whilst it looks as if the Wharam interest in the pub had finished, this was not quite the case, for Humber pilot Tom was married to Henry's sister, Mary, who spent census night elsewhere in the city.
By 1891 it certainly looks as if the Wharam association has finished, for I can find no connection between the family and Jesse Balding...
...or Leonard Cooper who was mine host by 1901.
What I have found, though, is this newspaper report from 1903. Perhaps it was as hard to make a pub pay back then as it appears to be now.
By 1911 Robert Bilton and family were in residence...
...and in 1921, the cover sheet for the census informs us that W. B. Lynes was at the Myton.
The inside of the document tells us that the pub was a Moors' and Robson's establishment and also that William Bertram Lynes was Canadian.
In 1923, William took the Lynes family back to Canada and the pub was possibly taken on by Freddie Fox. Fred had been at the Old Ferry Boat on Wincolmlee in the early 1920s and was at the Myton when it closed, but whether there were other folk there between times I haven't been able to establish.
By the late 1930s a lot of the surrounding terraced housing was being demolished in a slum clearance programme and the aerial photograph below, dated 1937, shows the Myton Tavern on the apex formed from the meeting of the two roads, surrounded by wasteland. And this was before Hermann Goering's minions had started their work.
Across Adelaide Road from the pub five-storey blocks of flats were built. Designed by the City Architect, David Harvey, and known locally as the Australian Houses because the blocks were named after Australian cities – although last time I consulted an atlas Wellington and Auckland were both in New Zealand – they still exhibited facets of Art Deco as that design period was just about drawing to a close.
The first couple of blocks were completed before the outbreak of World War II and the Myton can be seen in this photograph of the opening ceremony in 1938. Selina Fox, Freddie's wife, can be spotted wearing, appropriately enough, a fox fur.
The Myton didn't serve the residents of the new flats for very long. After sustaining damage in an air raid on 8th May 1941 the pub closed. Its licence was eventually transferred in 1951 to the also now bygone Maybury pub on Maybury Road. A grassy space now covers the footprint of the former Myton Tavern.
Eric's and my next excursion will be a little after the autumnal equinox but I'm sure the next bit of this drivel will appear sooner than that.
If you are interested, there is a wealth of information regarding Hull and East Yorkshire's social history on Paul Gibson's website.
Bernard Sharp's image is copyright and is reused under this licence.
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