Lord Line, Hull

History

This and several other buildings that remain used to make up St Andrew’s dock. The Dock opened in 1883 and was originally designed for the coal trade but was used almost exclusively for the fishing industry. The dock had its own ice plant, a maintenance slipway, banks, shops, cafes and even had a post office, a doctor’s surgery and a police station, complete with prison cells. The dock was extended in 1897. The Lord Line building officially opened in 1949 to serve Hull’s trawling industry. The trawlers left for the North Sea and the Norwegian sea. A survey in 1954 said that for every fisherman working at sea there were up to three people working ashore in associated jobs. This totalled almost 50,000 workers or one-in-five of Hull’s population at the time.

The decline started when Iceland declared there would be a 200 mile limit to where trawlers would be able to fish off Iceland itself. It struck a massive blow to the fishing industry. One so significant that the industry never recovered and the dock closed in 1975. Apparently 6,000 men sailed to their deaths at sea in this most dangerous post-war occupation. The filling of the dock itself began in the late 1980s. It has been threatened with demolition but local history groups protested and at present the future of the building is uncertain.

Source:
http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/industrial-sites/33228-lord-line-building-st-andrews-docks-hull-2016-a.html

Esoteric Eric