Cottingham Local History Society

In the beginning: Britons, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings

Cottingham ‘the homestead of the Cottingas (Cotta’s people)’ is first recorded in 1086 in Domesday Book as Cotingeham and Cotingha(m), but it was probably already 500 or 600 years old by then, having been founded by Angles sometime perhaps between the late fifth century and their conversion to Christianity in the early seventh century. The Angles or Engles and their close neighbours, the Saxons, were military-backed migrants from north-west Germany and adjacent lands in modern Denmark and Frisia, who gradually conquered and settled much of eastern Britain following the abandonment of Britain by the Romans in 407–410 AD. The existing population of Britons, whose language was the ancestor of modern Welsh, either fled north or west or were subjugated.

Little survives archaeologically in Cottingham from these times, but trial excavations of the old manor hall grounds in Hallgate in 1991 revealed sherds of Anglian pottery dating from between about 650 to about 850. Of the Romanised Britons that they defeated and probably enslaved, we have no visible evidence, although we get a glimpse of pre-Romano-British wealth in the four gold bracelets, now in the British Museum, that were found in the 1860s at two sites, on land south of Thwaite Street and land at Wanleys (Wanlass Farm) in north Cottingham.

What attracted the Angles to settle here was the availability of water, woodland and good soil. The village lies on the eastern, dip slope of the Yorkshire Wolds on a gravel spread at the end of a dry glacial valley, from where the land gradually drops eastward to the river Hull flood plain. The variety of chalk, gravel, clay and peaty soils between them provided excellent drainage for the original settlement as well as rich agricultural land for growing crops, woods for building timber, making fires and pasturing pigs, grass pastures and meadows for sheep and cattle and marshes for wild-fowling, while the river Hull provided fish, eels, some unwelcome flooding from time to time and a means of transporting heavy goods up to Beverley and down to the Humber estuary. In the late Middle Ages access to water from the springs at Derringham in south Cottingham were a source of violent disputes between Cottingham and Hull.

There was also plenty of fresh water to be got from wells dug into the chalk aquifer below. This aquifer still supplies much of the water for Hull residents (there are three pumping stations in the parish) and, although the water table is much lower than it used to be because of modern pumping, springs continue to erupt in Cottingham in exceptionally wet winters. There are three streams. The naturally east-flowing but intermittent Broad Lane Beck depends on field run-off and the unpredictable flowing of the Keldgate springs to the west of the village. Mill Beck and its tributary Creyke Beck run southward from permanent springs in the north of the parish and were man-made to drive two medieval water mills, North Mill and South Mill.

The Vikings. The Danish Viking army conquered the Angles in Yorkshire in the late 9th century and their kith and kin settled in significant numbers in Cottingham and elsewhere across eastern and northern England. It was they who introduced words like beck ‘stream’, bank ‘bank of a stream’, keld ‘spring’, carr ‘marsh’, dyke ‘ditch’ and gate ‘street’ to the Anglian dialect of Old English that was then spoken in Cottingham. Some are preserved in Cottingham’s earliest street names: Beck Bank, Hallgate, Northgate, Newgate (Street) and Endyke Lane. Hall, North, New, Lane and Street are inherited from Old English. The mixture of English and Danish words reveals an intimate Scandinavianisation of Cottingham’s Anglian community. Endyke is first recorded as Navendyke in 1282, referring to a sheep pasture next to the dyke that flowed into the R. Hull. The dyke is probably named after a man bearing the Old Danish personal name Nafni. Perhaps he was a 10th‑century lord of Cottingham. The son of a high-ranking man with this name is associated with Northumbria (the English kingdom north of the Humber) in 1016. Inglemire is recorded as Illemere in 1282 and Iglemere in 1408. It probably contains Old Danish *igle ‘leech’ and Old English mere ‘pool’. Blood-letting using leeches was a common form of medication. Thwaite (Street) is named from Old Danish thwēt ‘land cleared by felling trees’, for use as meadow or pasture. The hamlet of Eppleworth is named from Old Danish epil and vith ‘apple wood’. These Danish-speaking settlers were mostly farmers, especially of livestock. The villages of Risby, Skidby, Willerby, Wauldby, Tranby and Anlaby, which lie on the top of the Wolds near Cottingham, contain the Old Danish word bȳ ‘farm’ or ‘village’, and were probably originally cattle or sheep farms.

The Norman Conquest: castle, market, deer park, mills, church and priory

In the late 9th and early 10th centuries Danish Vikings seized territory not only in England but also in north-western France, founding the Dukedom of Normandy in 911. In 1066 William Duke of Normandy enforced his claim to the English throne by military victory at Hastings and began to dispossess most of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobility of their lands. Domesday Book records that before the Conquest the lord of the joint manors of Cotingham and Pileford was a man with the Danish name Gamal, and that he was replaced by one of William’s own men, Hugh fitz Baudry (Hugo filius Baldrici in the Latin text of Domesday Book). Pileford ‘ford mark by wooden piles or stakes’ is probably recalled in the name of the modern Pillwoods Farm, adjacent to Creyke Beck.

In COTINGHA(M) and PILEFORD Gamal had 16 carucates of land and 2 parts of one carucate of land taxable. Land for 8 ploughs. Now Hugh has there 4 ploughs, and 20 villeins [unfree peasants] and 3 bordars [small cottagers], who have 7 ploughs, and … mill(s?), 8s, woodland pasture, 7 furlongs long and 3 wide. The whole manors, 4 leagues [about 6 miles] long and 1 wide. And 5 fisheries, 8,000 eels. Value before the reign of Edward [before 1066] £4; now £7. [A pound was worth a lot more a thousand years ago!]

The entry for Cottingham in Domesday Book

The Castle. In 1087, after William the Conquerors’ death, Hugh was himself replaced as lord of Cottingham by Robert de Stuteville, who took his name from the family’s estate in Étoutteville-sur-Mer in Normandy. The de Stutevilles were a high-ranking family among the Norman elite. Robert’s great-grandson, William de Stuteville (c1140–1203), lord of both Cottingham and of Buttercrambe in the North Riding, received lucrative royal offices, including those of king’s justice, warden of a number of royal castles and sheriff of several counties. In 1201, King John visited him in Cottingham, appointed him Sheriff of Yorkshire and gave him permission to enclose and fortify his manor house at the west end of Hallgate (‘the street to the Hall’), by re-building the house on a motte or castle mound and surrounding it with a double moat. This was not just a status symbol but for added security in violent times, including threats of civil war and raids into Yorkshire by Scottish armies. The house was neglected by its subsequent owners, the Wakes and the Plantagenets, who preferred to live on their other estates in England or France. By the late 1340s it had fallen into decay and by the 1540s nothing of its buildings survived above ground. The motte is still there, though lower in height than it once was, partly through having been tilled for market gardening. Sections of the deep inner moat survive in some modern back gardens. Its name ‘Baynard Castle’ on OS maps is a nineteenth-century invention.

The Norman motte in 1978. CLHS archive, KG 402

The Market. In 1199 King John granted William de Stuteville a licence to hold a Thursday market in Cottingham and in 1200 a licence for an annual fair. Market Green in King Street is a visible reminder of this. The weekly market lapsed in the nineteenth century but was revived in 1985 by Cottingham traders and is still going strong every Thursday. In 1425 the fair was held on the Thwaite, a piece of common pasture to the east of St Mary’s Church, but in recent times Market Green has been used for fairs on Cottingham Day in July and the Christmas Festival in December.

Market Green, painted in 1896 or 1898 (the signed date is difficult to read) by John Edward Frith, a coach painter of King St, whose trademark was the miniature horse-drawn cab. There are plenty of bicycles but no cars (yet).

CLHS Archive, AJG Market Green. Frith 1898A

The Deer Park. Park Lane, running from Northgate through Cottingham Parks towards the boundary with Beverley, recalls the Stutevilles’ creation of a large deer park north of the manor house. There they bred venison, rabbits and game birds for the tables of the nobility and horses for hunting. The park contained a laund or woodland glade and was bounded by woods to the west and the east. Harland, first recorded in 1408, may be a compound of Old English hār ‘hoar, grey’ and Old Danish lund ‘wood’.

The extensive area once known as Cottingham Parks now contains a same-named golf and leisure club, modern housing, Hull University’s Lawns halls of residence, Cottingham High School, an arable farm (Burn Park Farm), salad nurseries, a major electricity sub-station and a solar farm.

Map adapted and reproduced with permission from A History of the County of York North Riding: Volume 4, London, 1979. Victoria County History © University of London.

The Mills. Mills for grinding corn were an important source of income for medieval lords of the manor, who required their tenants to use them and pay a toll. The de Stutevilles built a windmill next to the water mill north of Northgate, probably because the flow of water in Mill Beck was not reliable enough. In the eighteenth century this wooden post mill was replaced by a brick tower mill, called North Mill. We have photos of it showing how it looked before it was demolished in 1900.

CLHS archive, RM North Mill.                         CLHS archive, NB Snuff Mill House.

Water for the South Mill was also fed by Mill Beck but, perhaps because it was reinforced by its tributaries Creyke Beck and (intermittently) Broad Lane Beck, no wind power was needed. In the early eighteenth century it was converted from a corn mill into a paper mill. Then in about 1755 William Travis, a Hull tobacco merchant, turned it into a tobacco and snuff mill. It soon came to be known as Snuff Mill and the road to it from the junction of Newgate and Thwaite Street as Snuff Mill Lane. In the nineteenth century it was used for manufacturing worsted cloth and then oil-press bagging for Hull’s oil-seed crushing industry. The mill closed in 1904, after which it was pulled down, but Travis’s Snuff Mill House, a fine three-storeyed building of about 1760 survives. A drawing of it by Henry Roper Spencer (1889–1978) shows the mill race.

In about 1772 another corn windmill, perhaps a timber smock mill, was built in west Cottingham, to the south of Harland Way. It was known as Low Mill and was pulled down in the early 1870s. The short approach road known as Mill Lane now leads to the public cemetery that was opened in 1889 on the site of the mill. A bridleway runs from it southward through the cemetery down to Eppleworth Road.

The Church. Cottingham’s large, beautiful parish church is mainly fourteenth-century, reflecting the wealth of later lords, the Wakes and the Plantagenets. The French-inspired, slender-pillared nave was built in the Decorated style a little after 1317, when Thomas Wake, great-great grandson of Joan de Stuteville, came of age.

The handsome chancel was built in the Perpendicular style for Nicholas of Louth, the rector from 1362 to 1384. He had been treasurer of Edward III’s lands in France and one of his many rewards included the gift of the incumbency of Cottingham by Edward’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, who was now lord of Cottingham by virtue of his marriage to Joan Countess of Kent. She was Thomas Wake’s niece and heiress of his manor of Cottingham. The chancel was possibly designed by Henry Yvele, Edward III’s master mason, who built the naves of Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. Its original stained-glass windows no longer survive, but a description of them in 1620 included the coats of arms of the Black Prince, the Earls of Kent and Knights of the Garter. A tiny piece of surviving fourteenth-century glass (a male saint’s head) has been placed in the south-west window of the south aisle.

St Mary’s chancel. Photo by Austin Redman

The replacement East Window depicts the Adoration of the Magi. It was commissioned at vast expense in about 1875 from the leading European painter of glass windows, Jean-Baptiste Capronnier of Brussels, by Elizabeth Jane Gee, widow of Hull shipping magnate Joseph Gee of Cottingham House. It is one of three fine windows by Capronnier in the church. The vicar of St Mary’s from 1841 to 1889 was the Rev. Charles Overton, who from 1845 onwards substantially restored the church, removing all the old paintwork on the walls and the wooden box pews and galleries, and replacing its reredos, its floor, roof and window glass, some of it in the form of stained glass funded by other wealthy Hull business men who lived in Cottingham.

The impressive upper tower was added in about 1400. Unfortunately, it was so heavy that the crossing and nave pillars bent outwards and had to be reinforced to prevent collapse. The tower has eight bells (still rung in 2024), the earliest being 1638. Its Latin inscription translates as “When I am rung I am the rose of the world called Mary” and may recall the fact that at that time, a hundred years after the Reformation and when many villagers were convinced Protestants, the lay rector, Sir Michael Warton, his wife Everilda and his vicar, Edward Gibson, were Catholic in their sympathies.

A contemporary, but much restored, memorial brass to Nicholas of Louth (de Luda in Latin) is in the floor near the altar. Another brass, to John Smith (who died in 1540) and his wife, is sited on the south wall of the chancel, and a plethora of fine stone, alabaster and glass memorials to some of Cottingham’s wealthiest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century residents can be seen in the chancel and the nave. One memorial is to Ralph Burton (1725–68), who was second-in-command to General Wolfe at the siege of Quebec and who was then appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Montreal, before returning to England, where he became MP for Wareham in Dorset and lord of the manor of Cottingham (by purchase).                                                                                                                                                    

St Mary’s Church, Cottingham, east end, in 1975. CLHS archive KG 427

 

The Priory. In 1322 Thomas Wake built a priory on Northgate but for legal reasons he had to abandon it and re-build it three years later on the site of the hamlet of Newton (which he removed), naming the priory Haltemprice (Anglo-Norman French Haulte Emprise “noble enterprise”). A victim of the Reformation, it was demolished in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII, but some moulded brickwork and some stone blocks from the Prior’s house were used in the farmhouse that was built there in 1584. This house was Grade II* listed and was lived in until the 1970s, after which it was left empty and vandalised. Its current owner is restoring it.

The name of the priory was adopted by the newly created Haltemprice Urban District Council (1935 to 1974), which replaced Cottingham Urban District Council (1894–1935). In 1952, the Council was awarded a coat of arms, incorporating the priory’s heraldic shield. Cottingham Local History Society was founded in the same year by one of the Cottingham councillors, John Whitehouse, who was allowed to use the Haltemprice UDC’s coat of arms as the Society’s badge.

Haltemprice UDC coat of arms. Photo by Katrin McClure

The Reformation, religious non-conformity and the Civil War

Following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Protestantism took hold in Cottingham and nonconformist worship subsequently flourished here. Religious non-conformity and political radicalism tended to flourish in ‘open villages’ like Cottingham, where ownership of the land was not concentrated in the hands of a single person (the lord of the manor) but divided between several lords or other independent people. Around 700 dissenters were recorded in the parish in 1676. John Wesley visited Cottingham several times, and in 1790 his friend Thomas Thompson, a Hull banker, financed Cottingham’s first Wesleyan chapel, in Northgate. This was later acquired by the Salvation Army. A Primitive Methodist chapel was built in 1861 in Broad Lane. After the Second World War it was converted into offices and commercial premises; it is currently a skin care parlour.

The Grade II* Zion chapel (1819) in Hallgate (left) was described by Pevsner as “one of the finest Nonconformist chapels in the Riding”, with its slender pillars, gallery and pulpit. Like the larger and handsome Methodist chapel (1878), also in Hallgate (right), it is still open for worship.

The Zion and Methodist churches in 1991, CLHS archive PE 029

In the 1950s a group of educationally-minded Zion Congregationalists formed a break-away Evangelical Church, which in 1989 changed its name to Christ Church, building a church and children’s nursery on Endyke Lane.

Following the Catholic Relief Act of 1791, Roman Catholics were allowed to worship again. A Catholic Church, the Holy Cross (recalling the dedication of Haltemprice Priory), was built in Carrington Avenue in 1929.

 

Christ Church in 1991, CLHS archive PE 029                                                                                                                                                                    Holy Cross in 1998, CLHS archive ALD 38

These four churches and the Anglican St Mary’s are active in the community and often work together.

The old divisions sparked by the Reformation have softened into mutual respect and cooperation, although some residual, bible-based independence was evident in Cottingham until quite recently by the presence of buildings occupied by the Plymouth Brethren and by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1977 the Brethren built a meeting house in Inglemire Lane, which was later replaced by one on North Moor Lane, and in 2009 they bought the old Board School in Hallgate to educate their own children. In 2018, however, the Brethren left Cottingham, and the school and its site have been converted into a housing complex. Jehovah’s Witnesses built a Kingdom Hall in New Village Road in 1979 but sold the building in 2019.

The Civil War. Cottingham’s proximity to the port of Hull has been largely an economic blessing, but it has had its downsides. In the reign of Charles I, Hull was a heavily armed fortress, of major strategic importance in defending northern England from attacks by the Scots, and its vast stock of armaments was savagely fought over by Royalists and Parliamentarians during the Civil War, when Hull was twice laid siege. In the 1630s and 1640s Cottingham was repeatedly plundered by the starving, undisciplined Royalist soldiery that were quartered here. Villagers’ livestock and crops were seized and most of the silver plate of St Mary’s was stolen. Probably most of the villagers were sympathetic to Protestantism, but some of its gentry remained Catholic, including the lay rector, Sir Michael Warton, whose appointee as vicar of St Mary’s, Edward Gibson, fled the village in 1642 to join the Royalist forces. Musket shot from military skirmishes is occasionally found in Cottingham gardens.

Cottingham’s oldest houses

In the fifteenth century the Wake inheritance ‘daughtered out’ and Cottingham manor was subsequently split into four. By that time the Norman fortified manor house had long been abandoned and allowed to dilapidate. One of the four replacement manor houses still stands on the castle mound. Rebuilt in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, it is “one of the best timber-framed houses in the East Riding” (Pevsner and Neave, The Buildings of England, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, Penguin Books, London, 1995).

 

 

The Kirk family, market gardeners, in 1892 outside their home, the16th-century Manor House. CLHS archive, GB 166

It is Cottingham’s oldest domestic house, followed by Southwood Hall, a superb, Grade II* listed brick dwelling of about 1660, built by John Bacchus, a Hull merchant.                                 

Southwood Hall in 2018.  Photo by Katrin McClure        

          ‘The Duke’ in 1991. CLHS archive, GB 374.                                                                    ‘The Duke’ and the cottages in 1975. CLHS archive KG 124.

The ‘Duke of Cumberland’ in Market Green is Cottingham’s oldest inn. With its distinctive Dutch gables, it was built as a private residence in the late 1660s before being turned into an alehouse in the early 1700s. One of The Duke’s regular customers fifty years ago was Philip Larkin, the poet and Librarian of Hull University. Next to The Duke is a tripartite, single-storey brick cottage with a steep-pitched, pantiled roof. It was built for the retiring landlady of The Duke in about 1740 and is Grade II listed. Since December 2008 it has been owned by the Parish Council, which uses the easternmost dwelling as its office. Cottingham once had many cottages of this date and style, of which this is a rare survival.

19th–20th centuries

In the nineteenth century, the character of Cottingham began to change radically. Its closeness to urban Hull, which was growing wealthy as Britain’s third largest port, with all its associated industries, made it an increasingly attractive place for Hull’s professional and middle classes to live, especially after the coming of the railway. At the same time there was a profound change in the ownership and exploitation of Cottingham’s agricultural land, which created a strong commercial link between the two communities. Enclosure or privatisation of land formerly held by the lord(s) of the manor(s) or in common was not unusual in post-medieval Cottingham, but it was piecemeal until, in 1771 and 1793, most of Cottingham’s medieval common lands were enclosed by prior Acts of Parliament. This led to the private ownership and draining of common pasturage and meadows to the east of the village and to the selling off of the common arable land in the West Field as privately owned single farms or estates. Most of the trees of the South Wood and the North Wood were also gradually felled to increase the amount of arable and grass.

The loss of the old medieval system of common tenancy of productive fields precipitated a major change to life, work, population and housing. The land was now mostly owned by rich Hull businessmen, who, well before the Enclosure Acts, were buying up plots of land in Cottingham and building themselves large houses, especially in Thwaite (Street) and Newgate (Street). These were the people who now ‘ran’ Cottingham. They could introduce new farming practices at will, tenanting out their lands to arable and dairy farmers and to numerous market gardeners, who used Hull’s animal and human waste to fertilise fields of vegetables, flowers and soft fruit for the Hull market. It was highly profitable and Cottingham grew more prosperous than ever, but the market-driven economy also had its human casualties.

New Village. One consequence of the enclosures and loss of common lands was an increased number of able men who, without land or a job, could not provide for themselves and their families. In 1819 Thomas Thompson was responsible for persuading the parish to create a set of 20 allotments on church land to the east of the village between Endyke Lane and Middledyke Lane. Each had enough ground to support a destitute family, who would build their own cottage there, grow their own crops and keep chickens, a cow and a pig. The ‘Paupers’ Gardens’ or ‘New Village’ saved these families from being housed at the parish’s expense in the village’s workhouse. This had been built in 1729 on Church Walk and is now a private dwelling called Church House. Until 2012 one of the pauper’s cottages was standing more or less intact on Endyke Lane, close to New Village Road, but the rest were pulled down a good many decades ago or were radically re-built.

James Coupland and his wife, in about 1900, in front of their Endyke Lane cottage. CLHS archive KG 535

The Railway. The opening of the railway station in 1846 tied Cottingham closer to Hull. Extra housing was built for a growing population of commuters, including the development of new streets off New Village Road (Exeter Street, Devon Street, Cornwall Street) and Northgate (Linden Avenue). The railway line, one branch of which ran from Hull to Bridlington and Scarborough, created a wholly new opportunity for seaside outings and holidays. It also provided a goods yard for delivering coal, stone and timber. The station and the stationmaster’s house survive, as does the line to Bridlington and Scarborough, despite numerous threats of closure since the 1960s. The lines to York and to the coastal resort of Withernsea were axed, following Dr Beeching’s report in 1963

Cottingham station in 1962. CLHS archive KG 826

The Gas Works. From 1856 until 1902, Cottingham had its own gas works, situated off Northgate by the railway, supplying gas to businesses and homes. This industrial site to the west of the railway station and sidings was later occupied by Paley and Donkin (makers of oil press cloth and carpets), a Danish Bacon factory, a professional cycle business and a printing company, all of which have now gone. An MOT firm, a plant and machinery hire firm and a timber merchant are still there.

 Urbanisation. So it was that from the mid-1800s the centre of Cottingham developed into a small town, in the urban sense of that word.

Market Green c1922–24, CLHS archive GB 186.                                         Police station c1913 CLHS archive KG 700

From 1894 until 1935 it had its own Urban District Council (its Council Offices of 1910 still stand at the back of Market Green), its own police force and police station (built in 1878 in Finkle Street and now converted to apartments), its own fire brigade and fire station (in the north end of the Council Offices but now converted into public toilets), its own post office, telephone exchange and Board School. The buildings are still with us, but only the post office, telephone exchange and school remain as local services, though in later buildings.

In Hallgate and King Street some existing houses, many eighteenth-century in origin, were converted into shops, whose goods and services expanded throughout the twentieth century, catering for all the usual needs for fresh food, sweets, clothes, boots/shoes, medicines, joinery, ironmongery, plumbing, housing, banking, funeral undertaking and so on.

Early on, stationers-cum-hairdressers published their own postcards, which has given us a wealth of photos of late Victorian and Edwardian Cottingham, some of which can be seen in the [GALLERY]. William Knaggs was one of Cottingham’s prolific producers of postcards, including the one on the left, showing King Street looking north and Hallgate looking east. The one on the right pictures him in his Hallgate shop doorway in about 1905. He moved with his family from Hull to set up his business in Cottingham in 1899.

Cottingham in c1906, CLHS archive RM 0255                                                           

William Knaggs’s shop in c1905, CLHS archive KG 84

Education. This has been a key factor in changing the life chances of Cottingham people. There have been numerous private schools in Cottingham since the seventeenth century. In addition, a free school, endowed by a Cottingham-born Hull merchant, Mark Kirby, was set up in 1729 next to the St Mary’s Church, a National School in 1836 near the Market Green and a Wesleyan day school near the Methodist chapel in 1871. In 1892–3 these were replaced by a Board School (opposite the Church in Hallgate), whose buildings have recently been converted into residential apartments.

Hallgate Board School and pediment.

CLHS archives, BS CLHS-000559 and BS Pic 022

In the second half of the twentieth century Cottingham acquired its own secondary school, which became comprehensive in 1973, and it now has seven feeder primary schools, four of them in Cottingham, including Hallgate School, the successor to the Board School. Cottingham also once had its own literary institute on the south-east corner of Market Green, later known as the Reading Rooms (1855–1963, demolished in 1967).

Horses and machines. Despite its growing urbanisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Cottingham long remained a farming and market gardening community, which, before the coming of the railway and later the combustion engine, had depended for transport and pulling power on horses, carts and wagons, as indeed did anyone who could afford to travel by other means than on foot. Blacksmiths, farriers and wheelwrights provided essential services. Until the end of the First World War Cottingham had its own horse-bus companies, taking passengers to and from Hull, and the fields were still ploughed and harvested by horse and by hand. After that came motor buses, taxis, tractors and combine harvesters. The Cottingham Horse Show, started in 1854, used to be a regular annual event, with show jumping becoming such a major attraction after the Second World War that the British Olympic team (Pat Smythe, et al.) competed at it in 1955. A stud farm once existed in the grounds of Kingtree House. It bred Merry Hampton, which won the Derby in 1877. Horse-riding remains a local leisure activity, though sharply reduced in recent years.

Haymaking at Burn Park Farm, Park Lane, in 1913. CLHS archive KG 301

These three steam cars belonged to Arthur Rollitt, a well-to-do Hull solicitor, in a photo taken in about 1915–16. They were must-haves for families of wealth before the petrol-driven internal combustion engine became the norm. The setting is the stable yard of Rollitt’s grand house, Browsholme, built in the early 1870s on Harland Way for William Tall, a Hull oil broker and seed crusher. Rollitt probably still kept a coach and horses, but the photo shows that three of the coach houses have been converted into garages. The original house, in the Queen Anne style, proved too gloomy and antiquated for modern living, and it was pulled down in 1964, but the stable yard still exists, with plans to convert the buildings into apartments.

CLHS archive, KG 478

Cottingham at war. In the two world wars, Cottingham residents prepared for the worst. Hull was constantly under threat of attack from the air and suffered huge damage in the Blitz of 1941, when some bombs also fell on Cottingham. Anti-aircraft guns were positioned in parts of the parish.

A few of the concrete air-raid shelters still exist and an air-raid siren on the side of the Council Offices is a reminder of those grim and scary days. CLHS archive, KM P1070823

A memorial cross in St Mary’s churchyard and the Memorial Gardens in Hallgate display roll-calls of Cottingham men who lost their lives fighting in the wars.

On the upside, during the latter stages of the Second World War, French and American soldiers were quartered in Cottingham, leading to some unforeseen romances and transatlantic marriages. There is a poignant reminder of the hospitalisation of WWI soldiers in Flanders in the house called [POPERINGHE] (nos 50–52 South Street), which from 1936 to 1962 was Nurse Russell’s and then Nurse Sutton’s much-loved maternity home, where several thousand Cottingham-born people came into the world.

New uses for old houses and their grounds, and the role of Hull University. From the 1960s, economies of scale and outside competition in the supply of food has placed great pressure of the viability of dairy and arable farms and market gardens, while population growth has led to a demand for new housing, shops and public amenities. A number of gentry houses and farmhouses were sold for re-development or demolition. Typical was the 1960s replacement in King Street of Kingtree House (built in the 1750s) and its grounds by a shopping parade, flats and houses, east of Market Green.

 Cottingham Grange (built about 1801) on Harland Way is now the site of Cottingham High School and the University’s Lawns halls of residence. The Gothic-inspired ‘Cottingham Castle’ (built 1814–15, burnt down in 1861) and its grounds at the west end of the former West Field are now the site of Castle Hill Hospital. Those houses that remain are a distinctive feature of the village’s landscape, including some that have been adapted to commercial use. Westfield House (1770s) is now a pub called the Fair Maid after the nickname of Joan, Countess of Kent, wife of the Black Prince and heiress of the Wake’s manor of Cottingham. Hallgate House (also 1770s) is now a row of retail units, above which is a dentist’s surgery. Some of the old gentry houses are still standing as private houses, especially along Thwaite Street and Newgate Street.

Cottingham Grange and the Holderness hunt, early 20th century. CLHS archive KG 475

After the two world wars, large estates of council housing were built on land belonging to Southwood Farm, Bacon Garth Farm and West Bulls Farm, the name of which is remembered in the pub that stands on the corner of Hull Road and Bricknell Avenue. From the 1950s Cottingham also became home to increasing numbers of students at Hull University, which saved a number of gentry houses by converting them to student accommodation. One of these was Thwaite House, built in about 1803 for John Hentig, a Hull ship owner and merchant, with extensive grounds of about 31 acres. These grounds were greatly developed, including a lake, by the next owner, Charles Henry Wilson, another Hull shipping magnate. It was renamed Thwaite Hall by the University, and its grounds have been listed by English Heritage as a Grade 2 Garden of Special Historic Interest. The future of Thwaite Hall and its gardens remains uncertain. There is planning permission for conversion of the Hall into apartments and the building of houses and the hope of local people that the gardens might become a public space still hangs in the air.

 In the 1960s the University built a Grade II* listed complex of student halls at the Lawns in Northgate, formerly part of the Cottingham Grange estate, which occupied part of the medieval deer park. From then until the early 2000s Cottingham was thought of as “the University village”, but the University has recently withdrawn student accommodation from Cottingham, which has meant selling all of its properties here to private householders or to developers. Only the Lawns remains unsold in 2024.

The future of Thwaite Hall and its gardens remains uncertain. There is planning permission for conversion of the Hall into apartments and the building of houses and the hope of local people that the gardens might become a public space still hangs in the air.

 

The University of Hull’s Lawns halls of residence in 1999. CLHS archive WS/MS 03-123

 

Employment, trade and public services. During the twentieth century Cottingham’s speciality in market gardening was given a boost by the arrival in the 1930s of migrant Dutch nursery men, growing tomatoes and other salads in greenhouses fitted with Dutch glazing. Although most of the old market gardens have disappeared, salad production remains a principal industry in Park Lane and Dunswell Road.

Castle Hill Hospital, to the west of the parish, and Swift Group (caravans), on North Moor, have also become major employers, and Cottingham still has regular bus and rail services to Hull and Beverley.

One of the distinctive sights in Cottingham used to be the round-topped buses built for East Yorkshire Motor Services so that the buses could squeeze under the ancient North Bar in Beverley without hitting the brick arch. This photo of one of the buses at the Thwaite Street railway crossing was taken in the 1960s [CLHS archive BS 082].

But, as in so many places, most of the older local trades in Cottingham have severely contracted or disappeared in the face of competition from out-of-town shopping centres, the internet and other changes in life-style. All the bank branches have gone but not the main Post Office, which runs a banking hub, one of the first in the country, providing basic access to a different bank each day of the week. Cottingham still has its Public Library (behind the Council Offices in Market Green). Two of its pubs have recently closed (The Railway and The Black Prince) but eight survive, chiefly through selling cooked food. Restaurants, cafés, takeaways, bistros, charity shops, nail and beauty salons, opticians, hairdressers and a tattoo parlour typify the shift in modern life style choices. CLHS archive, BS 032

The names of two of its oldest retailers can still be seen in Hallgate in 2024, although they have not been run by family members for several years. Frank Pullan’s butchers, was founded in 1895 by a young lad from a beef farm near Otley in the West Riding. It closed in May 2024. Barker’s stationers was founded in 1922 by Albert Barker, son of an East Riding shepherd, after he returned from the war, during which he was held as a prisoner in Germany and in Switzerland. His first shop was at no. 139, near the junction with King Street, but in 1934 he moved to larger premises at nos 157–159, where he also sold sweets, tobacco and toys, and provided hair-cutting.

Photos: right, Frank Pullan with a steer outside his beef butcher’s shop in about 1912 (CLHS archive KG 828B).

Below is a coloured postcard of Hallgate in the 1950s, sold by Frith (CLHS archive RM Hallgate4) and a photo of Albert Barker in 1922 (CLHS archive, MB Wedding Group).

Cottingham at leisure. Typical of a small town has been the growth in Cottingham of all kinds of charitable and leisure activities, of social and sporting clubs, of orchestras, choirs, scouts, guides, boys’ and girls’ brigades and so forth, too many and too varied to do them justice here individually. In recent years a lot of them have declined or folded. The loss of the prize-winning Cottingham Brass (later Silver) Band in 2010 is especially sad. It got its first mention in 1846, when it played at the opening of the railway station.

Cottingham Brass Band in 1904. CLHS archive, DC Cottingham Band 3                    The Coliseum Picture Theatre in King St. c1914. CLHS archive GB 203b

Briefly in the early 1900s Cottingham had two cinemas. The Don Picture Palace, seating 400 people, opened in 1913 by Robert Donkin in one of his cloth-weaving sheds at Station Mills, by the railway sidings off Northgate. In that same year a 600-seat cinema, the Coliseum Picture Theatre, was being built in King Street. It struggled financially and closed in 1929. Its auditorium now forms the rear of a discount store. The Cottingham Cricket Club (from the 1880s), Cottingham Lawn Tennis Club (from 1897), and Cottingham Bowling Club (from 1920) are the oldest surviving sports clubs. The village’s public wild-life area and playing fields on Northgate (currently home to the East Riding Rangers junior football club) came from the sale of the grounds of one of the gentry houses, Park House, in 1930. Since 1981 Cottingham traders have provided a dazzling display of Cottingham Lights in Hallgate and King Street before and after Christmas, while the Parish Council (created in 1999) organises a Cottingham Day (the first Sunday in July) and a Christmas Festival, whose fairground rides and food stalls attract visitors from all over.

As for indoor activities, Cottingham Little Theatre (from 1920), Cottingham Memorial Club (1924), Cottingham Local History Society (from 1952) and Cottingham Women’s Institute (from 1985) are still thriving, along with a number of other recently formed groups, such as the U3A, Friends of Thwaite Gardens and an East Riding Association of the National Trust. Continuous growth in the population of Cottingham (mainly from Hull) after the Second World War meant that Arlington Hall (built in 1850 as St Mary’s Church Vestry Room) and the Darby and Joan Club (opened in 1954) could not cope with the demand, and it led to the building in Market Green of the Civic Hall in 1965 by Haltemprice UDC. Since 2017 the Civic Hall and the old Council Offices have been leased by the East Riding of Yorkshire Council on a pepper corn rent to the Cottingham Village Trust, which has turned the hall into a vibrant community centre for film and stage shows, concerts, exhibitions, charity events, religious meetings, talks, keep fit classes, blood donations and much more. The old Council Offices house the Village Trust’s offices and the Cottingham Local History Society’s History Room.

The home of the Cottingham Memorial Club is Elm Tree House, a Grade II listed building in South Street. It was built in about 1820 for John Hebblewhite, a Hull draper’s merchant and shipping agent, and for the next 100 years was lived in by a succession of merchants. The last of these was a German coal merchant, Gunter Lutze, who because of anti-German feelings during WW1 changed his surname to Lacey. In 1949 the house was bought by the Cottingham branch of the Royal British Legion (known since 1924 as the Cottingham Memorial Club), replacing the former Angel Inn in King Street as their club house. In its new premises it provided food, drink and snooker for its all-male membership. During the 1970s and 1980s it was one of the watering holes of Philip Larkin, the poet and Head Librarian of Hull University. It was only in 2008 that its constitution was changed to allow women to become members.

The Cottingham Memorial Club in 1978. CLHS archive KG 754.

Climate change and flooding. In medieval times, eastern Cottingham was not infrequently flooded from the rivers Humber and Hull, but in modern times, thanks to extensive draining of the land, this source of calamity was eradicated. In June 2007, however, prolonged and intense rainfall led to flash flooding down the dip slope of the Wolds and large parts of Cottingham were inundated. Houses and gardens were under water and manhole covers were forced open, as shown here in Crescent Street. In 2008 Cottingham Local History Society published The Cottingham Floods of 2007, a pictorial description and analysis of the flooding, its history, residents’ personal stories and a set of recommendations to reduce the risk of it happening again.

Water-retention ponds have now been dug into the valley sides, so that the flow of water into the sewerage system can be controlled. In spite of some recent recurrences of heavy rainfall and waterlogged ground, no serious flooding has occurred since then.

CLHS archive SW Flood-07 (04).

 

Is Cottingham a town or a village?

Despite its urbanisation and its role as a dormitory town for Hull, its residents have steadfastly insisted on Cottingham’s ‘village’ identity within the East Riding. This has something to do with the fact that between 1882 and 1935 Hull was allowed to take substantial parts of historic Cottingham into its city boundaries and local governance. Several further attempts to incorporate all of the village within Hull have been met with furious resistance, but it is only by the merest whiskers of chance that Cottingham has remained separate from a greater Hull.

                               

 

Thwaite Street c1920. CLHS archive KG 005                                                                 West Green c1905. CLHS archive, RM West Green                            

Cottingham’s independent-mindedness has a long history. In 1904, Cottingham Urban District Council acquired two decommissioned 40-pounder guns, that had seen service in the Boer War, and placed them in strategically defensive positions. They came by train to Cottingham Station and were then horse-drawn to West Green. One was placed on Thwaite Street, on the Cottingham side of the railway line, facing eastward along the road to Hull. The other remained on West Green, facing west towards the road to Beverley. There could hardly have been a more brazen declaration of independence from its nearest major rivals. But the guns rusted and the devastating experience of the 1914–18 war may have tarnished the image of these symbols of military glory. The one on West Green was removed in 1921, as it became “a source of danger to the children”, according to the Council’s minutes. The one on Thwaite was removed not long after.  

England’s ‘largest village’ is still growing. In the 1960s–70s and in the 2020s a great deal of new housing was built in fields and larger gardens all round Cottingham. There is pressure to build more, but where to put them? Cottingham villagers are determined to keep green fields between themselves and Hull. They also want to preserve the varied and much-loved character of their historic streetscape. That’s where Cottingham Local History Society plays a vital role, through its regular talks, its journal, its books and exhibitions, its facebook, instagram and website. Please [Join Us] if you can and feel free to [Contact Us] at any time.

                                                                                                                                                                                  Peter McClure, 2024