At a hearing held last month, it was alleged Cllr Denis Healy used his position to bully, intimidate and undermine some Lib Dem councillors, staff and party volunteers.

It was also claimed he used his authority to “pressure and criticise” people and publicly escalate minor disputes which led to a breakdown in working relations within the main opposition group at County Hall.

The three-strong panel ruled his actions had brought the party into disrepute, concluding: “He seems to have no insight into the problems his behaviour has caused and is continuing to cause.”

However Cllr Healy has hit back, telling The Hull Stack: “I strongly dispute the panel’s conclusions and have lodged a detailed appeal.”

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In upholding complaints submitted by at least two party members, the panel concluded:

“The respondent did bully other members of the party, fellow officers on the executive and the paid employee.

“He showed no insight into the damage his behaviour was causing to individuals or the functioning of the team.

“He refused to engage in an independent mediation process but blamed the complainants for not wanting to join one for which he had selected the mediator and determined his desired outcome.

“He decided to ignore the clear ruling on confidentiality by sharing the details of the complaints with his councillor groups so that they could write letters of support.”

The panel heard claims that anyone who questioned Cllr Healy’s conduct were accused of being disloyal.

The panel also upheld a complaint that he authorised the external design and printing of a campaign leaflet without the required prior approval of the group executive.

The panel’s findings report said that giving evidence to hearing, Cllr Healy insisted his behaviour was not bullying but instead showed “robust leadership”.

“He has changed his style is now much more ‘collegiate’,” it added.

“There is no doubt the respondent has given many years of his life to serving the party as leader of the council (group) and in other roles. However, he seems to be unaware of the problems his management and leadership styles have clearly caused.”

Asked by The Hull Stack to respond to the panel’s findings, Cllr Healy said: “I am surprised to learn that you have obtained a copy of the complaints panel decision, as it relates to what was intended to be a confidential internal party process

“The matter is not concluded. I have formally appealed the panel’s decision and that appeal is currently under consideration.

”I strongly dispute the panel’s conclusions and have lodged a detailed appeal.

“My appeal sets out a number of concerns, including that the decision contains material factual inaccuracies, fails to engage properly with significant evidence presented in my defence and does not adequately explain how the findings were reached.

”Among other matters, I contend that several findings are unsupported by evidence before the panel and that relevant contradictory evidence is was not properly addressed.”

The panel decided against suspending or expelling Cllr Healy “in the light of his continuing service”.

Instead, it said he should undertake training “in the hope that he can learn to use a more appropriate range of leadership styles and management skills”. It also agreed to impose a caution.

However, it’s believed the proposed sanctions have been put on hold pending the outcome of Cllr Healy’s appeal.

The ongoing issue is likely to be seized on by other political groups on the council as they prepare for next year’s all-out elections.

The Liberal Democrats currently have 20 seats on the council, three behind the Conservatives who are the largest group.

Having worked as local journalist for the last - checks notes - 46 years, I do wonder where the trade is heading.

The collapse or hollowing out of traditional weekly and daily local newspapers and, to an extent, local broadcasting journalism has created news deserts.

Here in Hull and East Yorkshire, it feels like we’re in the middle of the Sahara.

Some weekly titles such as the Holderness Gazette and the Driffield & Wolds Weekly still manage to deliver the goods against the odds while my old pals Simon Bristow and Rick Lyon are doing a great job with their monthly newspaper The Hull Story.

However, the surviving daily offerings are shadows of their punchier former selves.

While never perfect, my old paper the Hull Daily Mail did fulfil the historic role of the Fourth Estate by acting as a local counter to various powers-that-be, such as councils, the police, other public bodies such as the NHS and even occasionally private companies.

Investigations, campaigns and critical leader columns are now things of the past. Holding the great, the good and the not-so good to account in print on a daily basis no longer happens.

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So here’s something different. A throwback to those days courtesy of a fellow old school journo Barry Stockdale, formerly of Radio Humberside.

Today Barry keeps busy with his own hyperlocal platform The Pocklington Bugle and retains an inquisitive interest in the newish Hull and East Yorkshire Mayoral Authority.

His latest piece on Mayor Luke Campbell’s much-hyped Community Fund is featured below.

It’s a subject I touched on recently here and Barry’s story delves deeper, asking exactly the sort of questions never raised by what remains of the legacy media.

Needless to say, an update on the fund has yet to surface elsewhere.

I’m glad journos like Barry are still around.

“A year ago this weekend, on Sunday, 16 August 2025, Hull and East Yorkshire Mayor Luke Campbell launched his £1 million Community Fund, promising to support projects that would make a lasting difference to communities across Hull and East Yorkshire. This was not a one off and there would be £1m a year for the next four years.

Residents were invited to put forward ideas about how the money should be spent.

In September 2025, the Mayor told the HEYCA Executive Board that “over 700” people had responded, with many suggestions focused on helping young people get into sport and establishing youth clubs.

But according to the Mayor’s office, the 719 responses were not grant applications. They comprised 218 general ideas or comments, 243 more specific proposals and 258 malicious or non-substantive responses.

So, almost a year on, the obvious question is: how much of that £1 million has actually been allocated?

Where has the money gone?

The latest information publicly available on the HEYCA website lists six funded initiatives:

• Coniston Village Hall – £5,000

• Rewilding Youth CIC – £10,000

• Ladled with Love – £5,000

• Kingston Amateur Boxing Club – £5,000

• Hessle Rangers – £5,000

• Park Street Performing Arts Centre – £8,000

That totals just £38,000 all of it going to groups in Hull and its suburbs.

The Mayor’s office now says the actual figure is considerably higher although there is currently no corresponding information about this figure on the authority’s website. Transparency does not seem to be a priority for the Combined Authority.

It says a manual reconciliation of its live Community Fund records puts the amount awarded or approved in principle at £134,014 as of 12 August.

Even on that figure, almost £866,000 of the original £1 million has yet to reach approval in principle and remember the Mayor said he would allocate £1m a year for four years.

The formal application sequence has now reached CF-084, although the Mayor’s office stresses that this does not mean 84 applications are sitting on a desk awaiting decisions. Applications are at different stages: some are being assessed, some are awaiting further information, and others remain at the pre-application stage.

The Mayor’s office says there is now one core Community Fund application form and that safeguards are necessary to protect public money, particularly where larger or more complex grants are involved.

The fund is being administered by a relatively small team within a Combined Authority that is still developing its permanent systems and capacity.

The Mayor’s office rejects the suggestion that the Mayor “cannot give the money away”, pointing to funding already approved and applications progressing through the system.

But the figures tell their own story. On the present performance there is no way this fund will process £1m worth of grant applications in the next 12 months let alone £4m before 2029

Was the fund launched too soon?

The Mayor’s own office acknowledges that the early arrangements were “more convoluted” than intended and the machinery for turning ideas into properly assessed grants was not yet fully established.

There is nothing wrong with seeking ideas from residents before designing a scheme. In fact, that can be good practice.

But there is a significant difference between asking people what they would like to see funded and publicly announcing an annual £1 million Community Fund for four years.

Once public expectations have been raised, the authority needs to have a clear route from an idea to an application, from an application to assessment and, ultimately, from approval to payment.

Due diligence, financial controls, assessment criteria and proper governance are essential safeguards when spending taxpayers’ money. They are not bureaucratic obstacles.

The Mayor’s office says those arrangements have now been strengthened and that speed cannot be the only measure of a responsible grant programme.

But it does not remove the question of whether some of the confusion, delay and frustration could have been avoided if the scheme had been properly designed before the £1 million headline was announced.

The whole episode leaves the impression of a Mayor whose intentions may have been good, but who announced an ambitious £4 million scheme without first having the machinery, processes and safeguards in place to make it work effectively.

The Community Fund is only one part of the Mayor’s responsibilities.

If a relatively small community fund has taken almost a year to develop into a functioning grant programme, it is reasonable to ask how the Combined Authority is performing on the much larger and more complex challenges it has been tasked with tackling — including attracting investment, housing and transport.

Those are areas where the sums involved are vastly greater and where the consequences of getting things wrong are considerably more significant.

It is also a test of the Mayor’s ability to turn ambitious announcements into properly designed transparent and deliverable programmes.”

You can read more of Barry’s stuff here.

The accompanying siren certainly made me jump but the subsequent meltdown it triggered among some folk on social media was just embarrassing.

Emergency alerts are common in other countries yet it seems a sizeable number of stiff upper lip Brits just can’t cope with them.

Ukrainians dealing with daily alerts about incoming Russian ballistic missiles must have been laughing their socks off at some of the hysteria generated here about a safety message on the use of disposable barbecue kits and outdoor pizza ovens.

I thought the wildfire warning was timely and hopefully did a job but it got me thinking about another piece of the jigsaw - how do you actually report a local increased risk of fire during prolonged dry spells similar to the one we’ve experienced this summer?

I ask because of an incident I came across 24 hours before the government alert momentarily set my heart racing.

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I was out on my usual evening walk with the dog when I spotted a couple of young kids hunched around what looked like a camp fire in some woodland which borders a local park.

They were about 75 metres away and as my dog isn’t exactly people-friendly, I knew approaching them would be impossible. Instead, I decided to make a precautionary phone call to the authorities when I got home. The problem was, who was I going to call?

It wasn’t a raging, out-of-control blaze so I ruled out a 999 call to the fire service and instead opted for the police on the non-emergency 101 number.

“You need to call the fire service,” I was told after wading through various options to speak to a human being.

I explained again. It wasn’t an emergency or an unchecked fire, just some kids probably having a makeshift barbecue in a cleared patch of bone-dry woodland.

It also happened to be near where a large number of felled trees had been laid earlier this year as part of project to create a new wetland flood storage area. Ironically, this wetland habitat was also now bone-dry.

“You need to call the fire service,” the 101 call handler repeated.

“The fire service aren’t going to come out to extinguish a barbecue or a camp fire,” I replied. “I think it just needs a police patrol to pop down and have a word.”

There was a long silence. Then the same monotone voice. “I’ll put you through.”

I was put on hold. Eventually, an automated option to request a call back kicked in. I was in a queue, position unknown.

By now it was getting late. I hung up. I’d tried to do the right thing. Maybe I should have pressed 1 for a call back.

The next morning the woodland was still there complete with a small, scarred patch of blackened land where the kids had been the night before. A narrow escape.

Despite the record number of fires and the terrible scenes at Stourbridge, I think things could have been a lot worse this summer.

The numbers of kids mucking about outdoors these days are nowhere near what they were when I was a kid doing exactly that in the 1970s. Even more significantly, when I was growing up casually discarded smouldering cigarette ends were everywhere. Not so much today.

As patrolling police officers seem to have largely disappeared off our streets in much the same way as cigarette butts, I guess we will just have to get used to more emergency alarms from the government in future.

I’ve read you can opt out of receiving a future alert or even tinker with your phone settings to achieve the same result.

I’m not sure an alternative voluntary opt in system would work. You can already sign up for flood alert texts from the Environment Agency but despite extensive publicity about it in recent years the take up rate has remained stubbornly low.

As such, a sudden and unexpected national emergency alert is OK in my book as long as someone lowers the volume for the siren on the next one.

It wasn’t the red-cheeked man slumped in a doorway shovelling what appeared to be donated kebab into his mouth.

Instead it was the sight of rubbish strewn all over a side street off Newland Avenue that did it.

None of this was particularly new.

Sadly, bedraggled souls looking far older than they probably are have become a familiar sight on the street, carrying the legacy of too much alcohol or too many drugs etched on their faces like cracks on a paving stone.

Litter clogging up footpaths, front gardens, ten-foots, narrow alleyways and roadside gullies has also been commonplace for some time.

But the scenes I saw in Lambert Street near the junction with Newland Avenue the other day tripped a switch for some reason.

Overflowing commercial waste bins, torn bags of discarded food infront of them, abandoned grimy bed mattresses piled on a traffic island and an unattached trailer with a flat tyre filled with whatever anyone could dump inside it. All within 20 yards of each other. Thanks to the summer heat, flies were everywhere.

On a previous visit, I wondered why one of the aforementioned bedraggled individuals was merrily munching on a bread roll as we passed each other in Lambert Street. Seconds later, I clocked a pile of mouldy bread perched on the mountain of rubbish in the trailer.

All these eyesores had been getting progressively worse over the last month until the city council finally intervened earlier this week.

The mess around the bins is no more and the mattresses are gone but the trailer remains. Give it a couple of weeks and I expect it will all return.

Again, this isn’t new.

Several years ago I accompanied a local councillor on a patch walk around the area, taking in numerous streets either side of Beverley Road and up to Newland Avenue.

Our journey took in fly-tipping hotspots and ended at a house in a small off-street terrace which would soon be the subject of a temporary closure notice. The back yard was waist-deep in rubbish and the neighbours were being driven to distraction by constant late-night noise and disturbance.

We also came across a middle-aged chap hauling a big black plastic bag over his shoulder. In it were dozens of discarded beer cans he’d picked up in the street.

He told me he did four collections a week, making a bit of money by trading each haul at a local recycling centre. He was never short of work or a bob or two.

Then, as now, the issue was houses in multiple-occupation, commonly known as HMOs, and so-called supported housing.

The terraced streets off Newland Avenue and Beverley Road were built in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Before then, it was open countryside and the odd farm.

By the time I came to Hull in 1980, those streets were still largely full of generational families settled in different neighbourhoods. The exception were a large scattering of students from nearby Hull University and the occasional unemployed aspiring pop star like Paul Heaton.

Coincidentally, last Saturday’s all-night BBC2 extravaganza on Heaton, The Housemartins and The Beautiful South featured some delicious mid-1980s clips of Newland Avenue and surrounding area.

This eclectic mix established the Avenue’s credentials as the city’s most cosmopolitan area, a title it still holds today.

However, in the four decades I’ve lived nearby I’ve seen the fabric of this relatively stable community slowly fall apart.

First, the students started to drift away into different areas. Then, the families fragmented and, in some cases, literally died out. At the same time, first-time buyers began looking elsewhere, the lure of new greenfield developments such as Kingswood eclipsing the fading charms of two-up two-down inner-city Victorian terraced housing.

Landlords found themselves with surplus property on their hands and no rent coming in. Unchecked at first, what had been traditional family homes were cheaply converted into HMOs.

The boom in supported housing would soon be filling some of these properties.

Drug users, alcoholics, people with mental health issues and ex-homeless moved out of hostels and sometimes prison and into HMOs where support workers from private providers funded from the public purse via benefits payments were meant to visit regularly to help people rehabilitate back into the community.

At least, that was theory behind supported housing. In reality, while good providers did what it said in the tin, the bad ones earned a fortune by doing very little. It’s been an under-reported scandal for years.

At the house I visited on the patch walk with the local councillor, support workers had been too terrified of the chaos to venture inside. In another supported housing story I covered at the time, a woman relocated to mixed-sex household off after suffering domestic abuse hadn’t been visited by her housing support worker for six months.

Since my patch walk, I would suggest the decline in the area has accelerated.

These days Newland Avenue is even more of a multi-cultural melting pot, probably boasting the kind of global representation you only see every four years at the Olympics.

Personally, I like the buzz this brings to the Avenue itself and, in general, everyone seems to get along just fine but I’ve got to be honest when I say some of the side streets are less pleasant.

Different folk from different places around the world inevitably bring different attitudes and behaviour patterns with them. In some cases, this appears to include taking little or no care of their immediate surroundings.

I suspect a lot of it has to with poverty.

Earning peanuts in a job which might or might not be legit while living in a basic, no-frills HMO owned by a landlord who would probably struggle to find Hull on a map can’t be much fun and doesn’t exactly engender community pride.

Day-to-day survival will always take priority over maintaining a tidy front garden.

It’s also the perfect breeding ground for crime and it’s not just in Newland Avenue.

Earlier this week I watched someone nonchalantly stroll out of a supermarket in Hessle Road carrying a shopping basket full of items he hadn’t paid for.

I see something similar just about every week and if you happen to live or work within a certain radius of the city centre you probably do too.

It’s almost become the norm and, as such, it’s easy to stop noticing.

For example, it took a social media post by a friend to alert me to something new I hadn’t even spotted on previous visits to my nearby Sainsbury’s Local. At every branch, staff on the tills now work behind screens in a locked cubicle while wearing body cameras. Working in retail these days requires nerves of steel and decent knowledge of self-defence.

Tip-toeing my way through broken glass, dirty nappies and pools of strange-looking liquid, I reminded myself to arrange a catch-up with Norman Elwick to find out whether he is still chairman of the Newland Residents Association.

Over the years we used to bump into each other at numerous licensing and planning committees where Norman would attempt to stem the tide of new bars and extended drinking hours along Newland Avenue.

He wasn’t a killjoy, just someone concerned about the changing nature of the Avenue and the inevitable impact on the residential streets off it.

Norman lost more battles than he won but I admired him for making a stand. He also produced a brilliant regular community newsletter which I hope is still going and, through the Association, organised a series of seasonal street decorations which continue to this day.

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The designation of a Cumulative Impact Zone covering both Newland Avenue and Beverley Road in 2018 was, in part, down to his dogged campaigning. In a nutshell, it made it harder to secure new licences if the immediate area of a premises address had a high crime rate.

If Norman is still around, I’m sure he’s aware of the recent spike in crime on the Avenue too. Earlier this week, one fed-up restaurant owner even hosted a public meeting to highlight concerns over the issue.

So what can be done?

Contractors for the city council recently completed a pilot scheme in De Grey Street involving 19 privately-owned properties which featured improvements to boundaries and front garden areas, replacement guttering, repainting frontages and upgrades to communal footpaths serving court terraces.

The finished work does look smart and similar plans with funding already attached are in the pipeline for Lambert Street, Grafton Street and Princes Road.

It’s a decent start but still feels like a sticking plaster being placed on a broken leg.

The council shouldn’t be expected to come up with all the solutions and to those who criticise the authority for not cleaning up scruffy neighbourhoods quickly enough, it’s important to remember the council doesn’t have automatic legal access to private land or property. Thanks to successive government funding cutbacks, it’s also got far fewer resources to deploy than a decade ago when those same legal obstacles have been cleared.

The bigger question is whether a kind of tipping point has now been reached and whether there is any coming back from it.

The fact that few vacant commercial units stay empty for long suggests Newland Avenue itself remains a popular spot for many and it’s still one of my favourite destinations in the city.

However, I do think some parts of the wider neighbourhood are coming close to that tipping point. What happens beyond that is anyone’s guess.

Earlier this week I spent a few hours travelling up and down on the East Coast Main Line taking in the views of a parched landscape.

In case you somehow missed it, last month was the driest July in England and Wales since Met Office records began 190 years ago.

There hasn’t been recordable amounts of rain in Hull since mid June and current forecasts suggest it will stay that way for a while with another heat-spike is expected next week with temperatures back up to the mid-30s.

Through my train window I gazed at fields of gold, many with crops already harvested weeks earlier than normal.

The traditional agricultural calendar has always been subject to variation courtesy of the weather but not like this.

According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, it’s the earliest harvest since the board started collecting data in 2006 with work starting two to three weeks ahead of the long-term average.

Anthony Hopkins, the AHDB’s Director of Cereals and Oilseeds, said:

“Across much of the UK, combines have been rolling earlier than usual this year, with many farmers working through the night to avoid the most extreme daytime temperatures.

“While it’s encouraging to see oilseed rape yields improving on average, cereal yields have generally been below the 10-year average so far, with some farms experiencing significant reductions.

“Following successive years of difficult weather and rising costs, the financial pressures are becoming increasingly acute for those businesses hardest hit.”

The National Farmers Union is warning there could be a shortage of certain food products if the record-breaking dry spell stretches into early September.

Speaking to the BBC, NFU president Tom Bradshaw said yields of wheat and oats were "very, very poor" this year and warned livestock farmers have had to use their winter feed rations because they have been unable to grow grass.

“We have to recognise that water security is a critical part of our food security and food security is our national security," he added.

The local pea harvest has been among those hit.

Last year pea growers on either side of the Humber estuary saw a 30 per cent drop in the number of peas picked and processed because of a lack of rainfall.

This year that figure is likely to be at least the same if not worse.

Dry hot weather stresses crops like peas, forcing them to mature at a faster rate. However, it also means just some of the peas in a pod will grow to their normal size while the remainder shrivel up and die.

That’s a big problem here in East Yorkshire where 250 growers usually harvest around 35,000 tonnes of peas for Birds Eye.

The harvest itself is starting point of a two-and-hour window in which peas are picked fresh in the field, loaded into lorries and driven up to 40 miles into a factory in Hull where they are cleaned, blanched, frozen and stored.

The tight logistical timeframe is all about maintaining the freshness and sweetness of the pea.

At peak harvest time it’s a 24-hour work cycle and the sight of illuminated, largely automated harvesters working in the dead of night on the sloping pea fields of the Wolds around South Cave is truly impressive.

However, the huge military-style operation is also dependent on the local environment.

A mild, damp martime climate and a chalk bedrock make perfect growing conditions. Except the climate around Hull over the last two growing seasons had been hot and bone dry.

Commenting after an unusually wet Spring in 2023, chair of the Pea and Bean Growers Association Stephen Francis said: “The peas, like us humans, are just wondering what the hell is going on with our weather.”

This year, Francis - who grows peas in Lincolnshire - reckons the English pea harvest is again down by a third.

Carrot farmer Rodger Hobson, whose family business farms over 6,000 acres near York, has a similar story.

“This year is the worse we’ve ever known. It’s heart-breaking and wallet-breaking,” he told The Guardian this week.

He usually produces about 30,000 tonnes of carrots annually, the equivalent to four cent of the total UK crop. British-grown carrots account for 97 per cent of those consumed in the country despite only being grown in a few regions that have the right required sandy soils.

“Any temperature over 25C and it goes into shutdown, anything over 30C and it pretty much starts to die. All we can do is keep pouring water on,” Hobson said.

Any shortfall in UK carrots this year will have to come from overseas. With shipping and transport costs factored in, they will cost around three times the amount of home-produced ones.

Spare a thought for local wheat growers too.

Twelve months ago the Vivergo bioethanol plant in Hull closed down. It had been a vital market for domestic wheat, buying up to one million tonnes annually from more than 4,000 farms, mainly in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

Local wheat farmers have not only had to find new buyers for their crops but have also been hit hard by this year’s exceptionally hot and dry weather.

According to one recent survey, 90 per cent of farms are below their five-year average for wheat yields. Add in reduced moisture levels and the increased risk of fire involving both machinery and crops and you’ve got a volatile cocktail of issues to deal with.

The NFU’s message is simple - we can’t produce food without lots of the wet stuff.

NFU president Tom Bradshaw said this week: “This is one of the most severe droughts many farmers and growers have lived through. Harvest yields are looking poor, farmers are struggling to access water to irrigate fruit and vegetables, and livestock farmers are having to use grass they cut this spring for their stores of winter feed for cattle as there’s very little grass growing now.

“The picture is even worse when we look across Europe to many of the countries we import food from, with huge wildfires across France and Spain.

“While retailers are used to managing variations in global supply, we’re not going to be able to trade our way through this potential crisis.

“If this summer teaches us anything, it is that we must prioritise food production. We have taken food production for granted for too long; we must create a more resilient food system to feed the 29 million households across the country, and we can’t produce food without water.

“This means urgent action to bolster our water security and ensuring our food security is treated as a vital part of our nation’s critical infrastructure.

“Central to this will be fast tracking investment and planning changes meaning we can build new reservoirs on farm. We need a common sense approach to water use, with water access prioritised for livestock, particularly poultry and pigs.

“More flexible abstraction rules are also needed so farmers can access water for irrigation. This would enable us to grow more of the food we can and should produce here ourselves, especially fruit and vegetables.”

These are eminently sensible and practical steps to at least start dealing with the issues of food and water security but I think we need to start thinking a lot wider and deeper.

Someone who already has been doing that for a number of years is Chris Packham, the wildlife campaigner and broadcaster.

Coincidentally, while on a train speeding through the East of England’s burnt countryside earlier this week I stumbled across a video of his recent speech from a joint press conference held with Green Party leader Jack Polanski.

Packham’s speech was measured, direct and ultimately a call to arms to address both the climate change going on all around us and the vested interest lobbying aimed at protecting an industrial status quo at odds with what we are now seeing with our own eyes.

“We’ve got to address the disinformation and we’ve got to do that with positive information campaigns – we’ve got to have people’s minds on the front foot so they know what’s true before they hear the lies.

“Then they will question the lies. Otherwise, you know what happens if you tell a lie frequently enough? It eventually becomes the truth and that’s what we’re suffering from.

“‘We can’t afford net zero’? We can’t not afford net zero, and we’re beginning to see that that’s the case,” he said.

His speech got little national media coverage. The bit that did was a line suggesting people should give up sausages and bacon for plant-based food. It made for a good headline but Packham’s point was more nuanced. Why do people not know they’re tucking into a carcinogen equally toxic as tobacco every time they enjoy a sausage sandwich or a bacon roll?

I was reminded of the old story about how the phrase ‘carbon footprint’ was invented by a PR firm hired by oil giant BP to shift focus onto individual energy consumption at home and away from the global impact of the industry itself. In other words, don’t blame us - it’s your fault.

So what next? Farmers will have to adapt and diversify as they have done through the ages, albeit at an unprecedented scale and cost.

For the rest of us, I would recommend searching for a local screening of the National Emergency Briefing campaign film which calls for the equivalent of a national wartime-scale response to the nature and climate crisis, starting a government-backed multi-channel televised address to the nation.

There’s already a 50-minute free-to-screen film available for communities to watch together. Campaign leaders say communal screenings helps people process information and share understanding of the issue through connecting with each other. If you can drag your local MP to a screening event, all the better.

The film includes the launch of the campaign last year and Chris Packham’s speech at the event.

The next local screening is on Thursday, September 10, at the Parkway Cinema in Beverley, starting at 7pm.

Whether the £20.4m restoration and redevelopment of Hull Maritime Museum has been worth the wait and the expense will be hotly debated over the next few weeks as visitors are welcomed back inside the venue.

I was lucky enough to be invited on a preview tour earlier today and I’m going to post a few official images on here to give you some idea of the old and the new sights on offer.

The project has doubled the museum’s public space and with around 1,300 objects now on display there’s plenty to see.

In a nutshell, you’re taken on a journey of more than 800 years of Hull’s maritime history, telling stories of trade, migration, fishing, whaling, Arctic exploration and the development of Hull as one of the UK’s major ports.

At times, it’s a fairly brutal trip. For most of those centuries, men set sail from Hull to kill and plunder as well as to trade with other distant ports.

For example, while the hunting for whales is well-known, the industrial-scale slaughter of Arctic seals which went on at the same time is largely forgotten.

However, given the available contemporary technology, the perils of the high seas, extreme weather and the often appalling working conditions they faced, the museum is also a testimony to the bravery of Hull’s seafarers.

Even today, I firmly believe the salty spirit of seaborne adventure is still part of the city’s DNA.

Highlights include a 40ft skeleton of a North Atlantic Right whale, internationally significant scrimshaw collections, objects from Shackleton's Endurance expedition (five crew members were from Hull), a stuffed polar bear and the Sirius figurehead from the first steamship to cross the Atlantic.

As you might expect, the upgrade has introduced plenty of new interactive elements. If you’re small enough, you can now crawl under the whale skeleton, navigate using a compass, operate a steam engine model and lift the weight of traditional harpoon.

Projected schools of fish swimming along one corridor and will, I predict, become a huge hit with visitors.

There’s also a brand new feature in the museum in the shape of a small planetarium. A ten-minute show recreates the night sky above Hull and the Northern hemisphere, putting yourself in the shoes of generations of sailors who navigated by the stars rather than man-made satellites.

For me, the main interest during the tour was the building itself. It was like meeting up again with a long lost friend.

It was built by the Hull Dock Company and opened in 1871. If you’re looking for somewhere that symbolises Victorian commercial power and prestige it’s this place.

Architect Christopher Wray’s design was chosen ahead of 26 others in a competition held by the company as it looked to expand and move from its already impressive offices in High Street which are still there.

Wray sought to make the most of the triangular plot of available land at one end the company’s huge dock which had generated healthy profits for nearly a century. His curved building reflects the constraints of the site.

His brief was to create a new head office for the company - a corporate palace of maritime magnificence. I think he succeeded.

Everywhere you look both inside and out, the sea is all around you.

Decorative mermaids, starfish, river gods, sea horses, dolphins, anchors, tridents, scallop shells, mermaids, fishing nets, seaweed, pearls and waves are all present and correct in stone, plaster and glazed tiles on walls, ceilings and floors.

On each of the three massive domes there’s a cupola covered with over-lapping tiles mimicking fish scales while even the cast iron railings surrounding the building - designed by Wray himself and featuring hundreds of gold-painted tridents decorated with tiny dolphin heads - are a work of art in themselves.

In the stunning first floor Court Room, sculpted cherubs sitting high up above doorways and either side of windows hold heraldic shields.

The cherubs represent the Hanseatic League, a Medieval confederation of merchant guilds and trading towns in Northern Europe in which Hull played a leading role.

The Court Room itself is 70ft long and was originally called The Proprietor’s Court Room. It was used for hearings to settle trading disputes between business associated with the dock.

The room’s ceiling is worth a lingering look because of its design. It’s divided into three identical sections, each one with a central light originally known as a sun burner.

Each one was actually a cluster of gas burners providing both light and ventilation. They were meant to draw air upwards and were commonly used in Victorian theatres.

The main ground floor exhibition space housing the whale skeleton and overlooking Queen Victoria Square was known as The Wharfage Office.

It was where visiting skippers and shipowners would have their papers stamped, work assigned and pay any outstanding fees and charges connected with business at the dock.

Standing in these rooms today it’s still easy to imagine what was going on in them more than 150 years ago.

Higher up in the building there are a couple of new innovations.

An entire new second floor of galleries are wrapped around a new central atrium which casts fresh light into the interior. There’s also a sleek spiral staircase on the same floor which takes you up into one of the domes where there spectacular views of the city centre can be seen through the windows. From here you also get a closer look of some of the decorative roof top details, including the aforementioned fish-scale cupolas.

Inside this new viewing area, I met Claire Humphrey, a senior conservation architect, along with her colleague Owen Plummer, an associate partner at York-based Purcell Architecture.

They’ve both worked on the museum’s re-design from the start and for Claire in particular it’s been a very special project having been born and brought up in Hull.

She told me: “I remember coming here on school trips when I was kid so I’ve got lots of happy memories of it. To be able to actually work on this has been amazing because I know how much the museum is loved by the people here, including me!”

Wray’s extravagant building cost nearly £90,000, leaving the Hull Dock Company in serious debt.

However, it wasn’t the debt or the building that eventually sank the company.

It was originally formed in 1773 by Hull Corporation, Hull Trinity House and a group of influential merchants and was Britain’s first statutory dock company. An Act of Parliament passed the following year allowed it to raise £100,000 in shares and loans to construct what was initially just called The Dock.

The impetus for all this was twofold. Until then, the shipping trade in Hull was centred on the narrow tidal River Hull with its age-old problems of silt being washed into it from the Humber estuary.

Another issue was the many private wharves along the river operated by merchants. As well as the lack space, they also provided cover for the more unscrupulous trader to dodge customs duties and other fees.

The new dock - the largest of its kind in the country - would provide a ‘legal quay’ where officials could easily examine and weigh goods being imported and exported.

The company’s monopoly over the shipping trade lasted over a century and saw it build other docks, including Humber Dock in 1809, Junction Dock (later known as Princes Dock) in 1829 and an extension, Railway Dock, in 1849.

However, monopolies also tend to stir up resentment and rivalry and the Hull Dock Company certainly experienced its fair share of both in its frequent clashes with Hull’s mercantile classes.

Having been challenged by a rival company, it built Albert Dock in 1869 and an extension, William Wright dock, in 1880 but five years later a new company, the Hull, Barnsley and West Riding Junction Railway and Dock Company, broke the monopoly by building Alexandra Dock.

The move led to price-cutting competition between the two companies for dock charges and combined with a gradual move away by shipping using the original dock to the newer ones lined along the Humber with easier access to and from the estuary.

The Hull Dock Company started recording regular financial losses and in 1891 its shares and debts were taken over by the North East Railway company in an amalgamation process that ultimately required new parliamentary legislation.

Twenty years after the palatial offices were opened, they were also transferred to the new owners and they became the administrative nerve centre for the working so both the railways and the docks for the next 70 years.

When it fell empty in the early 1970s, the city council acquired it and re-opened it as the Town Docks Museum in a series of phases starting in 1975.

Today, as then, admission is free and I can honestly say a visit is great way to fill a spare couple of hours. There’s even a new cafe inside if you need a break halfway round

Opening hours are Monday to Saturday: 10am to 4.30pm; Sunday: 11am to 4pm.

For those who missed it, Bush is now serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to 67 offences, including the prevention of the lawful and decent burial of 30 bodies discovered in various states of decomposition at his company’s premises in Hessle Road.

The sentencing hearing at Hull Crown Court was also told about grieving families being given the ashes of strangers rather than their loved ones, the fraudulent selling of funeral plans and the theft of donations meant for charities.

Even then, the charges Bush admitted to might only be the tip of the iceberg.

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Hilliard said no family who had used Bush’s business, Legacy Independent Funeral Directors, during the 14 years he ran it could be now be certain about his care for their loved ones.

“The awful truth is that anyone whose loved one went through Legacy at any time when it as operating can have confidence as to how they were treated or as to whose ashes they have, unless of course they were one of the 30 bodies recovered in March 2024,” he said.

Quite properly, the Humberside’s Police investigation into Legacy concentrated mainly on the unimaginably harrowing evidence discovered at the funeral parlour itself.

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Even in the early stages of the investigation, the police confirmed it was unrelated to a previous police probe involving another funeral company based at the same building two-and-a-half years earlier.

Last year I wrote about that investigation and the company’s owner Simon Woolston.

It started just weeks after Woolston’s sudden death in October 2021 and centred on allegations of fraud at his company, Heavenly Services.

The police had received numerous calls from people who had taken pre-paid funeral plans with the business only to discover it was now in liquidation. Many also found they had paid for non-existent burial plots.

In total, 370 customers didn’t get any of their money back. When the company folded it owed over £1m to creditors, including those with pre-paid funeral plans. Other creditors included Hull City Council (owed £58,000) and a coffin and casket company (owed £35,000).

In July 2022 the police announced no charges were being brought against anyone connected with Heavenly Services. As their main suspect had died, the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t come as a surprise.

By then, Robert Bush had been operating inside the former Heavenly Services premises in Hessle Road for seven months.

All of which leads to that unanswered question I mentioned at the start of this piece.

What links were there between Bush and Woolston before the latter’s death?

The issue wasn’t raised at this week’s sentencing and, as mentioned earlier, the police said in early 2024 the investigations into Woolston and Bush were unrelated.

Piecing a timeline together shows Bush opening for business in Woolston’s former base just over two months after the latter’s death.

Legacy branding appeared on the building in December 2021 and the company was trading from there in January 2022.

The property is understood to be owned by a London-based investment company so a new lease appears to have agreed very quickly once Heavenly Services ceased trading.

Being charitable, Bush might have seen it as an unexpected opportunity to expand his business.

A story in The Mirror published shortly after his arrest quoted a Legacy customer recalling how Bush spoke enthusiastically about “inheriting” a large 40ft fridge after moving into the building.

What other Heavenly Services assets also became part of Legacy’s fixtures and fittings remains unknown.

However, what is now known from the sentencing hearing is the condition of parts of the building at the time of Bush’s arrest.

“The premises at Hessle Road were in an appalling state,” Mr Justice Hilliard told the court.

“The premises did not meet industry standards for the provision of adequate facilities and equipment for keeping deceased persons.

“The conditions in the cold room appeared to contravene health regulations. Many non-public facing areas at the premises were in a lamentable state.

“Many of the rooms were suffering damp and mould. Some had ceilings that were collapsing.”

Given the relatively short period Bush had traded from there, I think it’s reasonable to assume the fabric of the building was much the same during Woolston’s tenure.

I don’t know whether the two funeral firm bosses personally knew each other but it’s likely they were at least aware of each other given that both their companies operated at the budget end of the funeral industry in the same city.

The coincidences of them both using the same building and both being the subject of fraud investigations relating to pre-paid funeral plans seem extraordinary but they don’t end there.

Like Woolston, Bush also owed a significant sum to Hull City Council in relation to cremation services. In addition, when I was investigating Woolston’s time as a funeral director I was told about rumours that he would occasionally store bodies in a fridge at a nearby pub he owned.

There’s also the equally extraordinary possibility that Bush actually oversaw Woolston’s own funeral service and cremation.

According to a Facebook post I’ve seen, this might have actually happened.

It was written by someone whose late relative was placed in the care of Legacy and Bush. (I’ve left the grammar as it appears in the post).

“A couple of months before all this came out I’d gone to visit my auntie who was resting at Legacy. I was talking to Bush and said did the previous owner die because there were rumours he’d done a runner. Bush said oh he was definitely dead because I myself put him in his coffin, he then went on to tell me how the previous owner had ripped loads of people off and that I wouldn’t believe the stuff that had gone on and that he was a conman, unbelievable that he was doing the same only a hundred times worse. It broke my heart on the day of her funeral, I kissed and held onto her coffin at the end of the service, now I actually wonder if she was in it or was it empty ready to put the next poor soul in it.”

What is clear is that the unregulated nature of the funeral industry allowed both men to exploit vulnerable, grief-stricken relatives.

Hopefully, the government will deliver on its pledge made in the wake of the Bush case to change that. On that issue, credit must go to local MP Emma Hardy who has led demands for new legislation from the start of this very grim story.

Both Woolston and Bush will forever be examples of why a sweeping review of the industry is necessary.

Someone who worked for one of Woolston’s many businesses before he set up Heavenly Services told me he’d never revealed any interest in becoming a funeral director when he knew him.

“About two years after I left he had set up a funeral service. Never in the years I knew him did he ever mention anything about it, not even in passing.

“I wonder how he even started Heavenly Services because he had no assets or cash. He used to sell and install security systems, then a sort of paranormal company, then a band booking agency, then a marketing agency and pubs.

“Every single one failed and then, out of nowhere, he had set up a funeral company which expanded so quickly.

“The concerns about the industry are right because just like Bush, Simon had no training or qualifications.”

Having been launched with a fanfare following a devolution deal for the region, the Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority (HEYCA) with Campbell at the helm was launched in May last year.

So how’s it going?

With new Prime Minister Andy Burnham promising greater spending powers for Metro Mayors and their authorities, the good ship HEYCA should be making waves.

However, all the signs are that it’s still struggling to limp out of dry dock.

It’s not just me saying it. At this week’s full meeting of East Riding Council, Councillor Phil Redshaw shared his thoughts on the matter by taking the opportunity to speak about a minute from a recent scrutiny committee.

To be clear, Redshaw is not a political bruiser who takes wild verbal swipes at opponents whenever he can. In fact, he’s about as thoughtfully-measured and mild-mannered as you can get.

He’s also got long experience of local government, having once been a member of Humberside County Council back in the day. In other words, he knows the mechanics of how publicly-elected bodies are meant work.

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As such, it’s worth reading every word he said.

“The latest scrutiny minutes make one thing absolutely clear: The Hull and East Riding Combined Authority (HEYCA) is now the main gateway for Government regeneration funding.

“This is not a technical adjustment. It is a major transfer of power — away from councils like ours, and directly into the hands of the Combined Authority and the Mayor.

“At the same time, East Riding is losing £32.2 million from its core Government settlement. That means our future investment — in transport, skills, regeneration and infrastructure — now depends heavily on HEYCA’s competence, its governance, and its ability to treat every part of this region fairly.

“And members should be concerned, because the early signs from HEYCA are troubling. Key strategies have been delayed. Governance has lacked clarity. Major decisions have slipped.

“Papers have been late. In public meetings, the Mayor has repeatedly relied on officers to explain basic responsibilities. These are not routine teething problems. They are warning signs of an organisation struggling to lead at the very moment it is being handed hundreds of millions of pounds.

“Political criticism is growing across the region. Council leaders, MPs, businesses and skills providers have all voiced frustration with slow progress, unclear priorities and limited engagement. Local media has highlighted confusion in meetings and a lack of strategic direction.

“And this matters, because HEYCA now controls the £400 million Mayoral Investment Fund, around £20 million a year for transport, the Adult Skills Budget, the Local Growth Fund and programmes like Connect to Work.

“If HEYCA fails to deliver, East Riding loses out. Our residents lose out. Our businesses lose out.

“As Liberal Democrats, we have always said that devolution must strengthen local democracy — not weaken it. It must bring decisions closer to communities, not push them further away and it must treat rural, coastal and market‐town communities with the same seriousness as the largest urban centre.

“It is essential that Mayor Luke Campbell, who currently appears to be working a three-day week, demonstrates genuine engagement, providing clear priorities and full respect for East Riding’s voice, because this authority cannot afford to become an afterthought within a Combined Authority responsible for hundreds of millions of pounds.”

Redshaw wasn’t the only one expressing concerns over HEYCA at the East Riding meeting.

Also chipping in was Councillor David Nolan, another political veteran now sitting as an Independent after switching between the Lib Dems and Labour in recent years.

Nolan is a more aggressive operator and he also spoke on a minute from the same scrutiny committee, highlighting an 85 per cent funding cut facing East Riding Council’s business support service.

Previously, financial support to run the service came from European Structural Fund until Brexit happened and we left the EU. The ill-named UK Prosperity Fund was meant to replace it but Boris Johnson’s government made sure you had to read the small print to discover the UKPF was only ever meant to last for three years.

Now a new pot of government cash is in place but there’s less to spread around and it’s going to elected mayors rather than local councils with mayors expected to devolve some funding to local councils.

As Nolan put it: “The government are saying economic growth is a priority and yet East Riding has seen its business support service funding slashed by 85 per cent.

“Furthermore, delays in the Mayor passporting funding over to ERYC has made the problem worse. Staff don’t know whether they will have a job in six months and a round of voluntary redundancies is being triggered.”

Yes, that’s right. Council staff working to support the private business sector are potentially facing losing their jobs because funding is only in place for the next six months because of delays at HEYCA.

Long-standing critics of the devolution deal might say some local councillors in both the East Riding and Hull are only just starting realise what they voted for a couple of years ago - a seismic shift in responsibilities from local councils to a more democratically-detached body headed by just one individual.

However, even at the body in question, voices are now being raised over its current direction of travel.

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HEYCA’s executive board is the main decision-making body with Mayor Campbell in the chair, and the leaders and deputy leaders of the two councils as members. Also present are two non-voting board members, the chairs of the authority’s business and skills boards. Finally, there’s also a seat for the Humberside Police and Crime Commissioner, also as a non-voting board member.

Board meetings are normally held every two months and the most recent one in July lasted just 33 minutes, or at least the part which was held in public.

You might have thought that after 15 months, there would be more than just three main agenda items for the board to discuss during the public part of the proceedings but apparently not. Instead, we got tumbleweed.

Two regular fixed items - new announcements by the Mayor and questions submitted by the public - came and went without any new announcements or any questions about anything which might have happened in the previous two months.

Not exactly a great sign of the buzzing activity Andy Burnham probably expects to see from Metro Mayors

As for the three main items, a decision was deferred on one after councillors raised concerns over an accompanying report while another decision was also put on hold because councillors were unhappy that proposed changes to the authority’s constitution had only been set out verbally at the board meeting rather than in a formal written report.

The latter included details of an unsuccessful and increasingly drawn-out attempt to appoint an independent person to chair the authority’s governance and audit committee as required by HEYCA’s own constitution.

Apparently, over a dozen people have so far turned down the role after being informally approached.

Why such reluctance to join the good ship HEYCA?

“There’s not one answer. There’s a lot of responsibility in being the chair and that’s been an issue. It’s just a really hard skill set to find,” explained interim monitoring officer Tony Maione.

While neither of the deferred items involved anything particularly earth-shattering, the inability to get the administrative basics right in the decision-making process was eye-opening.

Just a reminder, we’re already 15 months into this. Like anything new, I’d factored in a few early teething problems as the authority bedded in but not at this stage in the game.

The one item that did get signed off was a report on HEYCA’s financial position covering the first full year since its inception.

Again, little of it was controversial but the report did feature something of a running theme as noticed later by Councillor Leo Hammond, who was present in his role as the Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner.

He picked up on the proposal to substantially increase the allowance for the vacant independent chair’s role in an attempt to make it more financially attractive proposition.

He said: “I’m just concerned about the spend on the office and function of the combined authority compared to spend on public services because when we look at the financial report, there is considerable spend on the office but a considerable underspend on the stuff the office is actually meant to be doing.”

The underspends (budgets where earmarked money wasn’t actually spent) included the authority’s main investment fund and nearly all of the £1m set aside for grants from the Mayor’s much-hyped community fund.

Finally, there is one interesting thing that has happened at HEYCA over the last year which has so far gone under the radar as far as I’m aware.

When it was first launched, the authority’s website prominently featured its four core aims to boost the local economy - delivering a sustainable future, increasing productivity, promoting inclusivity and enhancing connectivity.

Under each heading was an accompanying paragraph of explanation. Three of the four priorities included specific commitments to promoting clean energy, transitioning to a net-zero economy and creating a low-carbon transport network.

Fifteen months on, the website now features four very differently worded priorities with four much more simplistic accompanying paragraphs.

The current quartet includes good jobs, better transport and digital connections, promoting fitness and health and ensuring an increased supply of affordable housing.

All very laudable but there’s no longer any mention of clean energy, net zero or low carbon.

Since his election, Campbell has attempted to offset his own and his party’s aversion to anything net zero by insisting he’s in favour of clean, renewable energy but not that keen on using net zero as a target for industry to aim for.

Now it seems HEYCA’s core priorities have been quietly changed to reflect his and Reform’s views rather than, say, other members of the board who endorsed the original priorities as part of the authority’s launch.

Maybe this policy switch could be added to the agenda of the next board meeting. After all, there doesn’t seem to be much else to discuss at the moment.

Energy Works, in Cleveland Street, closed in 2024 after legal and financial issues following lower-than-forecast waste processing results.

In the previous year the facility handled just 31,000 tonnes of waste despite having a total capacity of 240,000 tonnes.

The idea behind Energy Works had been simple if technically ambitious - divert mountains of non-recyclable municipal and commercial waste from landfill using an advanced gasification process to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 43,000 homes and drive down carbon emissions.

The tricky bit was getting the gasification system - previously untried on this scale in the UK - to work properly. It never did.

Equally, an initial green dream of bringing some of waste to the site by barge up the River Hull never materialised although rooftop solar panels did contribute to its eco-friendly credentials.

First announced in 2011 and scheduled to open in 2018, Energy Works finally started operating a year later but quickly ran into problems, suffering a major fire in 2020.

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I wrote about some of these woes in March last year by which time the company behind it was in administration after its pension fund owners pulled the plug.

At the time, the plant was being put up for sale and I wondered who might step in as a potential buyer.

Well, according to reports in the specialist waste recycling media, the answer to that question is the Pocklington-based Ashcourt Group which has acquired Energy Works via a new investment holding company called Ashcourt Group Capital Ltd.

Ashcourt already had a working knowledge of the site, having previously secured a contract to manage the day-to-day waste produced in the facility.

By then, Energy Works had switched from gasification to using refuse-derived fuel to process the limited amount of waste being brought to the site. This RDF was being supplied by Ashcourt from a depot in Newton Aycliffe.

With Ashcourt’s main site in Hull just a stone’s throw away in Foster Street and with the relatively recent completion of the £5.25m acquisition of the 33-acre former National Grid site off Clough Road, the group now has an extensive footprint in that neck of the woods.

As yet, there’s been no formal announcement about the Energy Works acquisition by Ashcourt. However, the specialist media reports appear to be well-sourced.

They state the deal also included the purchase of freehold land with the intention of bringing the plant back into operation with the existing gasification technology remaining in place.

The reports also say Ashcourt has engaged PX Group - owners of the Saltend Chemicals Park - as operation and maintenance contractors at Energy Works.

Having followed the saga from the start, I’m pleased there now seems to be renewed momentum in getting Energy Works to actually work. When I recently passed the site, the staff car park was full again so it appears to be gearing back up for business.

According to the same media reports, a return to operation was slated for the first half of this year. I don’t know whether it has started processing again but a couple of months delay is probably understandable given the recent history.

I also note there’s currently a business case being worked up to support a bid for investment funding for Energy Works from the new Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority.

Details of this are thin on the ground as recent minutes from the authority’s investment board not only show the item was discussed in private but that the HEYCMA has entered into a binding non-disclosure agreement with what the minutes describe as “the promoter” of the proposed scheme at Energy Works.

If this all sounds a bit cloak and dagger, it is and it isn’t.

Making agenda items exempt and discussing them behind closed doors with the press and public excluded is standard local government practice and legally permissible if the subject matter involves the financial affairs of a private company or organisation.

In this respect, the Energy Works funding bid is no different to other current bids by Goole’s College, Hull KR and the East Bank Village development project in Hull which are also going through the investment board’s decision-making process.

An NDA is, however, fairly unusual and perhaps reflects the commercial sensitivities around some of the technology installed in Cleveland Street.

If so, I’m reminded of a visit to the Siemens Gamesa factory in Hull not long after it opened when company officials politely ushered us away from certain areas of the building where the giant offshore wind turbine blades were being manufactured. No photos or filming were allowed in these zones just in case a competitor was watching and taking notes.

The funding bid is likely to be determined soon and, if it is, the decision needs to be publicised. Call me old fashioned, but when public money is being pumped into a private venture I think a degree of transparency is the least we can all expect.

As it is, I wish the new owners and operators well.

Turning what became a malfunctioning carbuncle into an efficient, environmentally-friendly way of converting unwanted rubbish into useful clean energy has to be a good thing.

I’m also sure they will want to avoid some of the problems of the past.

Remember the fire at the plant in 2020 which I mentioned earlier?

Last month the Environment Agency announced it had secured a legally-binding payment of £30,000 from the previous owners of Energy Works after they failed to comply with a fire protection plan in breach of its environmental operating permit at the time of the blaze.

As a result of the payment, three local charities - Dove House Hospice, Hull-based Environmental Management Solutions and Conservation Volunteers Humber and East Yorkshire - will each receive £10,000.

In addition, all of the costs of the EA investigation will also be paid by the previous owners.

The EA often gets a lot of stick over its enforcement record (the long-running saga over the stench from the tip at Willerby springs to mind) but in this case three local charities are the beneficiaries of its dogged spadework which is another positive.

The Energy Works payment was one of four announced across Yorkshire following separate breaches of environmental permits by different companies. The total payment secured by the EA was almost £470,000.

One of the other cases involved the unauthorised operation of an anaerobic digester tank at a biogas plant at Kirkburn, near Driffield, in 2023 with site operator GWE Biowise’s £22,000 payment being passed on to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

Martin Christmas, the Environment Agency’s Area Environment Manager in Yorkshire said:

When companies fall short of their environmental obligations, we will take action.

Enforcement undertakings are an effective tool to ensure that money goes directly into the local environment, delivering improvements for wildlife and communities.

These four cases show that whether the harm comes from industry, construction or energy facilities, we will hold those responsible to account.

Unlike the one which inspired Paul McCartney to write his memorable song, this particular route isn’t flanked by Scottish lochs or distant mountains.

However, Park Lane does manage to conjure up an almost otherworldly atmosphere of its own; a place of distant horizons, big skies and echoes of ancient landscapes along with an inescapable shadow of the future slowly transforming the surrounding environment.

For those unfamiliar with the local geography, Park Lane runs from Northgate in Cottingham to the southern end of Long Lane near Woodmansey. While the latter lane lives up its name, it’s also largely straight. Park Lane, on the other hand, twists and turns for some considerable distance like an angry snake.

At the Northgate end, you might think it’s just another enclave of 1950s/60s suburbia.

But follow the lane until the first of its many sharp 90 degree bends and you suddenly move into different terrain.

The first hint of what lies beyond are the glasshouses of Glen Avon Growers, specialists in cultivating cucumbers and tomatoes.

The business was founded in 1938 by a Dutch fruit and vegetable exporter who moved his family across the North Sea to Cottingham, part of an exodus of growers from Holland who made East Yorkshire their new home over the years.

It’s one of the few remaining traditional family-owned local market garden operations in the area. At one time, Cottingham was surrounded by them. One neighbouring business closed a few years ago, replaced by a 56-home development called The Vines in a nod to its past history.

The Glen Avon glasshouses cover more than ten acres but you wouldn’t really know it because the route at this point is flanked by towering high hedges and trees.

Then, all of a sudden, the lane enters open countryside with an accompanying rush of space and light. It’s akin to what I would imagine it’s like being blasted from a cannon, not that I ever fancied experiencing that particular circus trick.

Fields stretch out across the land on either side of the lane. Ahead, the odd detached building stands aloof and alone.

My inspiration for making this journey for the first time in a while earlier this week came as a result of seeing an image of Poplar Farm, one of the dwindling number of remote farmsteads along the lane.

It wasn’t a pretty picture. Smashed windows, missing rooftiles, big splashes of graffiti daubed on some of the walls in incongruous blue paint tell their own story.

There’s been a farm here since at least 1805 and probably much earlier.

Records from 1775 show there were 15 farms with holdings of between 50 and 200 acres in the wider area known as Beverley Parks between Beverley and Cottingham. Poplar Farm, towards the southern boundary of the Parks, would have almost certainly been one of them.

At the time they were all tenanted farms as the Parks was owned by the Wharton family. Then, as it is now, the area was sparsely-populated.

According to A History of the County of York, East Riding: Volume 6, the Boroughs and Liberties of Beverley, at the start of the 19th century Poplar Farm comprised of 98 acres probably used as a mixture of pasture land, meadow and arable crops.

In 1805 it was bought by a William Wilson who owned it until his death in 1831 when it was passed to a nephew. The farm changed hands twice more in a relatively short space of time before being acquired by William Ringrose in 1853.

Standing next to the farm today, it’s about as remote as you can get considering the city of Hull is just a mile or so away. Back then, it must have felt even more isolated.

Mechanisation would have slowly changed the way the land was worked but even then the extent of permanent grassland and pasture in the Parks stayed much the same for the best part of 150 years.

Ringrose, who lived in a Georgian mansion on a site where Cottingham High School stands today, was a notable landowner. At one time, his family owned 1,200 acres of farming land mainly to the north of the village.

Poplar Farm remained in the Ringrose family for over a century until it was sold to the Freear family in 1984. Three years ago it was sold for £2.3m when its second-generation owner retired. Since then it’s been unoccupied and has inevitably attracted some unwanted recent attention as a result.

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The image of the farm’s dilapidated condition came courtesy of historian Dr Robb Robinson, who happens to live at the Cottingham end of Park Lane.

A keen cyclist, Robb points out the farm also lies on the path of National Cycle Track Route One, which runs from Dover to the Scottish Highlands.

He said: “The farm is passed every year by bikers from all over the UK and abroad as well as many walkers. It’s currently hardly a good advertisement for this stretch of the East Yorkshire countryside.

“Since the farm stopped working, the buildings seem to have been empty and just recently appear to have been subject to extensive vandalism. It seems unprotected.

“Although the buildings are a good age, they don’t seem to the listed and as it doesn’t seem the place will be lived in again, the decay of the site will no doubt continue.

“It’s a pity as it’s very much part of the historic fabric of this piece of East Yorkshire which is currently undergoing a great deal of change.”

The change Robb is referring to is the massive infrastructure slowly being slotted into place to bring power being generated by North Sea wind farms onshore.

Via underground cables running from the coast, power will eventually arrive at a brand new electricity substation as well an existing substation long known as Creyke Beck but now in the process of being re-named as Wanless Beck.

The new substation - known as Birkhill Wood - was given the planning go-ahead in February and compulsory purchase powers to acquire the necessary land were granted shortly afterwards. Once built, it will stand adjacent to the existing substation.

There’s also a newly-built convertor station nearby and a battery storage facility opened in 2022 after a £75m investment. At the time it was billed as the biggest storage project of its kind in Europe, capable of storing enough electricity to power 300,000 homes for two hours.

When completed, the National Grid will transfer some of the extra power arriving at the site to the rest of the Grid.

Last summer I wrote about what villagers in nearby Bentley thought about being encircled by these new renewable energy projects.

Within a few years, every time you flick a switch at home or work this place will be largely responsible for what happens next. It’s a slightly mind-boggling thought.

As Poplar Farm is literally next door (you can see how close in the image above), I had assumed its sale a couple of years ago might be connected with the huge National Grid upgrade.

However, my sources in Cottingham tell me they’ve heard a local business now owns it with the backing of some investors.

If true, it will be interesting to see what they have in mind for the farm because in three to four years’ time the site is going to be overlooked by the new substation complex.

Short of opening as an Airbnb for hardcore fans of electricity pylons, it’s difficult to imagine a viable future for it.

Reading through the publicly-available documents relating to the compulsory purchase orders required for the Birkhill Wood substation adds another perspective to the current chapter Park Lane’s story.

Most of the parcels of land earmarked for the development have been acquired not from individual long-established local family owners but a farming, real estate and investment group headed by an Italian aristocrat.

You’ve probably never heard of Count Luca Padulli di Vighignolo or his Albanwise group yet it owns and farms vast swathes of land in Norfolk and Yorkshire - nearly 30,000 acres in total according to one report - as well as an extensive estate in Ireland..

This tally includes lots of land in East Yorkshire and, in particular, much of the farmland between Beverley and Cottingham.

An ex-hedge fund manager, Padulli doesn’t court publicity but a brilliant recent public mapping project into land ownership in Norfolk gives some context to his portfolio there, placing him just behind the Eighth Earl of Leicester and King Charles III as the county’s third largest individual landowner.

Through his Albanwise group he also owns over 100,000 properties across the UK, typically buying up the freehold titles to leasehold properties and then charging the owners ground rents.

His properties include four country mansions in Norfolk and the North Yorkshire village of West Heslerton which was acquired in 2017 for around £20m. Not surprisingly given its agricultural landholdings, his group also includes a renewable energy subsidiary.

Unlike his historic predecessors, it’s highly unlikely you will bump into the Count on Park Lane but the journey through much of the land he owns around it will eventually bring you to Creyke Beck, an enormous forest of huge electricity pylons and all manner of other steel-framed gubbins which could be straight out of a sci-fi film.

You get a distant view of the substation from a both the A1079 and the Hull op to Beverley railway line but it’s only when you get up close that its sheer size becomes apparent.

The contrast between the surrounding flat farmland is hard to take in at first. The nearer you get, the more you expect sirens to go off and armed guards to start appearing from hidden bunkers.

As it is, the lane swerves around the site and keeps you on the right side of the boundary fencing which is dotted with signs warning of the risk of death should anyone be daft enough to climb over.

Just to underline the point, if you pause to take in the views you can also detect a gentle hum in the air near the site perimeter.

It’s not quite a Dr Frankenstein-style crackle and fizz of electricity but it’s enough to suggest interfering with any of the equipment there probably isn’t a good idea.

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The new yet-to-be-built Birkhill Wood substation is named after the only remaining chunk of old woodland in the immediate area.

Most of Birkhill Wood is actually a much newer plantation but was once part of the huge medieval Beverley Parks woodlands stretching between Cottingham and Beverley which was originally owned by the Archbishop of York. The Parks also featured an extensive deer park with upwards of 300 deer being kept there.

The woodlands were a vital source of timber. The deer park provided a ready supply of venison and a hunting ground for those wealthy enough to enjoy it.

In her excellent Wild at Hull blog, Hull University biologist Dr Africa Gomez takes a walk around this ancient landscape, noting how the north side of Cottingham is dotted with place names featuring the word ‘wood’ - Wood Hill, Norwood, Pillwoods, Jillywoods and Platwoods to name but a few.

With the exception of Birkhill Wood, none survive as woods these days - she calls them ‘ghost woods’ - although some woodland trees and ground plants can be found dotted around in hedgerows and alongside the winding tracks and lanes such as Park Lane.

Dr Gomez has also unearthed a lovely description of this particular corner of Cottingham parish, as featured in a 1797 volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle:

“The northern part of the parish, once overpowered by woods, which are now quite cleared off, is full of pleasing risings and watered with many fine springs and clear rivulets.”

The perfect place, it would seem, for the likes of Poplar Farm to flourish along with the later generations of small market gardening businesses.

It’s yet another reminder of changing land uses in the immediate area, a shift now seemingly accelerating like never before.

It would be nice to think Poplar Farm could be brought back into agricultural use but I don’t believe it’s ever going to happen.

Instead, being swallowed up as part of a sprawling but probably necessary energy cluster seems a more likely scenario.

The home to a rapidly-forgotten way of life gone forever.

Despite the bleak outlook for the disused farm I would highly recommend a journey along Park Lane if you fancy a change of scenery, a breath of fresh air and a close-up view of an unusual and largely unseen feature of modern life we probably all take for granted.

There’s also a footpath walk through Jillywoods worth taking if you get the chance, featuring an ancient sunken tree-lined lane covered in bluebells and flowering wild garlic depending on the time of year. The smell of the latter often perfumes the air on nearby Harland Way.

If you do manage either journey, you will be following in some very old footsteps. Enjoy them while you still can.

The venue was booked and the date and time was confirmed with a programme promising an overview of the vision for a new energy network in the region together with keynote speakers, case studies, a panel discussion and networking.

It was an opportunity to get my head around the ambitious plan to create the UK’s first regional hydrogen transport and storage network.

Then, just over a month before it was due to take place, the event was postponed.

In an email, the organisers said it would be re-arranged for “later in 2026”.

The delay, they explained, was to “realign our engagement with the anticipated publication of the Hydrogen Strategy by the UK government.”

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For those unfamiliar with Hydrogen Humber, it’s a partnership between National Gas, Centrica, SSE and Equinor.

They have joined forces to lobby the government over where the country’s first integrated hydrogen network will be built.

The partnership’s case for the Humber is centred on producing low carbon hydrogen, generating low carbon electricity from hydrogen and storing 420 million cubic metres of hydrogen - the equivalent to the amount of gas in Britain’s entire gas system on a peak day.

Much of the infrastructure required to deliver this vision is either going through the planning process or is already in place but requiring major adaptation. A large chunk of it is earmarked for various sites in Holderness where favourable geology is viewed as major plus point when it comes to storing the stuff underground.

Needless to say, funding it all requires a definitive signal from the government that it not only supports hydrogen as a vital piece in the UK’s future energy jigsaw but also that the Humber is the place to kick it all off.

Sadly, the postponement of the recent regional launch event will not have surprised those already heavily involved in this push.

Just over three years ago I sat in a room at the Saltend Chemicals Park listening to local energy industry leaders politely asking a junior government minister to get a move on with a national hydrogen strategy.

As it happened, I knew the junior minister from her days on the fringes of the Hull political scene. At the time, Dehenna Davison was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Levelling Up having been appointed during Liz Truss’ brief tenure as Prime Minister.

To be fair, Dehenna nodded along and said all the right things without making any firm commitments. To be honest she still looked like a student from her days at Hull University, way out of her comfort zone in a room full of experienced energy sector high-fliers.

What the men in suits thought of it all was hard to tell. They were equally polite but you could sense an unspoken frustration in the air.

History tells us Truss didn’t last long, Rishi Sunak came and went and Sir Keir Starmer then took charge of the keys to Number 10 with a new Labour government.

The hydrogen strategy somehow survived this political merry-go-round and was finally due to be published last Autumn but, as yet, it has yet to surface.

In addition, details on government decision-making processes for specific hydrogen transport and storage networks meant to emerge this Spring are still nowhere to be seen.

Now Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham is Prime Minister with a new-look cabinet in place. Perhaps the Manc Messiah and his new Energy Secretary Mitta Fahnbulleh can finally get cracking with it.

The delays have left everyone in limbo, leading some companies to trim back on staffing costs until a clearer policy picture emerges.

Among those casualties is a friend of mine who has lost his job amid the cutbacks.

He explained: “Everything is waiting on the government publishing its hydrogen strategy and the processes for hydrogen transport and storage networks.

“All the companies and projects are getting increasingly anxious and losing confidence in these projects happening unless something is published imminently.

“Because these things take a few years to go through planning and to get internal financial approval once everything is progressed, there’s a danger that any delays mean those decisions get made around the time of the next general election or just after and by then we could be in a very different political world where a new government could be cancelling such projects.

“So there’s a very narrow window right now to get things progressing. So far, the government has shown no sign of doing that.”

I’m told the movers and shakers in the region’s energy sector believe they’re between six to 12 months behind where they hoped to be thanks to all the delays.

“We will have to see whether our new PM pushes anything through but given that our main competitor is in the North-West, it’s probably not a good sign for the Humber.,” says my pal.

“Everyone is sick of waiting and it puts the whole thing at risk. Where possible, we have to carry on with the processes at minimal cost so we are ready to go if anything changes.”

On a brighter note, an email dropped into my inbox earlier this week announcing a re-scheduled date in September for the official launch of Hydrogen Humber.

“Working in partnership, industry leaders National Gas, Centrica, Equinor and SSE are bringing forward their shared commitment to the Humber’s role as Britain’s hydrogen heartland through their bid to deliver the UK’s first regional hydrogen transport and storage network –Humber Hydrogen,” said the invite.

With the proposed hydrogen network’s huge potential for investment and the creation of high-skilled jobs, let’s hope someone gets their finger out sooner rather than later.

Aged four, I was probably too young to understand what was going on. Probably just as well as I think we were on holiday on Holy Island at the time.

There’s a photograph of my four-year-old self outside the only pub on the island that summer. It could have been the day of Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick.

If the pub did have a TV it would have almost certainly been tiny with a fuzzy black and white picture. We might as well have been on another planet.

1970

Forget the Panini one, the FKS World Cup Soccer Stars Mexico 70 was the must-have sticker album at my primary school. Playtimes were like a junior version of the London Stock Exchange with players being furiously traded and swapped.

England’s Henry Newton was particularly elusive as I recall.

On the stickers, most of the players’ national kits were also crudely photoshopped long before Photoshop had actually been invented. God knows what chemical colouring technique was used but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t environmentally friendly. Sweden’s lurid yellow and blue sticks in the memory.

As for the actual football, it was still black and white in our house despite Brazil’s exotic swagger.

1974

The lush green Wembley turf was an early highlight when colour TV finally arrived in the Young household. Unfortunately, a mistake by Norman Hunter on said turf and some heroics by a Polish goalkeeper dubbed “a circus clown in Gove’s” by Brian Cough ensured England’s exit in the qualifying group before the World Cup proper.

It was reported as a national disaster, akin to the loss of the Titanic with Sir Alf Ramsey cast in the role of the iceberg-prone Captain Edward Smith.

The option of following Scotland in the finals didn’t last long even though they returned home undefeated. Instead, I swooned over Cruyff and the men in orange.

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1978

Another England no-show meant we all briefly wanted to emulate Archie Gemmill’s famous goal against Holland as Scotland once again reached the finals.

Less well-remembered is the shot deflected off Wee Archie just minutes later which ultimately put the Dutch through at the expense of the Scots.

The flowing locks of Mario Kempes, pitches covered in ticker tape and a dubious 6-0 win against Peru (they needed to win by a four-goal margin to reach the final) would set the standard for Argentinian skulduggery for decades to come.

1982

“This Time We’ll Get It Right,” sang the England squad on their official song for tournament before flying out to Spain. Needless to say, they didn’t.

Still, the song - co-written by gravel-voiced Smokie lead singer Chris Norman - reached Number Two in the charts. Norman also co-wrote and produced Kevin Keegan’s 1979 single Head Over Heels in Love which peaked at Number 31.

Keegan was no Glenn (Hoddle) & Chris (Waddle), presumably because he never persuaded Trevor Brooking to team up as pop duo Kev & Trev.

1986

I watched most of the key matches in Mexico in a friend’s flat above a fruit and veg shop on Newland Avenue.

Celebrations for Lineker’s goals against Poland tested the flat’s dodgy flooring to the limit while Maradona’s Hand of God defied belief.

How could someone 5ft 5 ins tall out-jump a 6ft tall goalkeeper who spends much of his time leaping in the air to catch the ball?

1990

As someone born relatively close to Hadrian’s Wall, I will confess my affinity with England has often been, shall we say, borderline for purely geographical reasons. However, the more Geordies in the team, the more interested I became.

Cue Gascoinge, Beardsley and Waddle at Italia ‘90. What could possibly go wrong? A semi-final yellow card, a converted penalty and a missed penalty respectively.

Shearer would follow later, scoring but not able to rid England of an inability to win big games.

1994

In a way, I was quite glad England failed to qualify for the finals in America because the tournament proved to be an early warm-up for the dollar-soaked shenanigans we are now witnessing across the pond.

Lowlights included Oprah Winfrey as MC for the opening ceremony, Diana Ross missing a penalty half-way through I’m Coming Out, an event bring staged in a country without an active professional league at the time and a dull-as-ditchwater goalless final settled by a penalty shootout.

1998

Remember those scheming Argentinians?

A red card for David Beckham after he stupidly flicked a foot in the vague direction of dirty Diego Simeone and he was off to the dressing room faster than you say Spice Up Your Life.

A country’s misplaced hopes of glory soon headed for the exit door too.

Fun Fact: Despite not scoring in France’s successful journey to winning the trophy, Newcastle signed centre-forward Stephan Guivarch but he only played four games before being sold to Rangers. A typical Newcastle purchase in those days.

2002

Ever run out of puff while running up a hill? Once again, England fell short when it mattered in a quarter-final against Brazil.

“At the end we were not good enough but we will be,” said manager Sven Goran Eriksson in what was becoming a now familiar refrain.

2006

Did bribes influence the FIFA decision to give Germany the right to host the tournament? With FIFA president Sepp Blatter having the casting vote, guess which way the cookie eventually crumbled?

England’s campaign took its usual course, ending in another quarter-final defeat in Gelsenkirchen.

Sven apologised seven times in his post-match presser and resigned.

2010

I spent on hot day in June enjoying the delights of the beautiful Yorkshire Dales before settling down to watch Germany thrash England 4-1 in the sticky heat of South Africa.

If I’d had a vuvuzela to hand, I might have hurled it at the TV.

Instead, we headed to the village pub to drown our sorrows. By then it was largely deserted.

2014

To be fair, hopes weren’t exactly high with Roy Hodgson now installed as England manager despite coming across as your likeable uncle who always spills jelly and custard down his shirt at family parties.

Two defeats and a goalless draw with Costa Rica ensured a swift departure from Brazil before the knock-out stages got underway.

Uncle Roy was replaced briefly by Sam Allerdyce, who looked like a jelly and custard fan who never spilled a drop.

2018

Who could have guessed that Gareth Southgate would go from appearing in a Pizza Hut ad with a brown bag covering his head to an almost-but-not-quite national treasure for steering England to a World Cup semi-final? Not me.

After all the ups and numerous downs, over the years, being beaten by Croatia at the death almost seemed like a victory of sorts.

Getting pipped at the post would become Southgate’s legacy to a new generation unaware of his tomato and cheese-topped past.

2022

If anything symbolised the removal of the beautiful game from the reach of the ordinary fan it was the decision to take the World Cup to Qatar.

Staging it in November and December to avoid the summer heat just made it all the more disjointed.

England’s quarter-final departure was as predictable as the seemingly pre-written script in which Lionel Messi was presented with a traditional Arabic cloak by the Emir of Qatar along with his winner’s medal.

2026

I’m hoping Spain wins today’s final just to see current FIFA Peace Prize holder Donald Trump present the trophy to the same country he recently bad-mouthed at the NATO summit.

“I don’t want anything to do with Spain. They’re hopeless, bad people,” said the Orange Man-baby.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Germany a stonemason has received instructions for a new headstone for the Tuchel family family burial plot. The inscription reads: “72 min Konsa for Gordon”.

Splashed across the front page of the Hull Daily Mail that day was a quite remarkable story.

In stark white capital letters on a black background, the headline said: “Satan’s Evil”.

Below it, a sub-headline added: “Black magic lures young to perverts.”

In the accompanying story, child abuse campaigner Dianne Core wasn’t talking about boxes of Black Magic chocolates.

Instead, she claimed her Childwatch group had discovered that children as young as eight were being forced to take part in Satanic rituals before being sexually abused by groups of men.

Some, she said, were drugged and tied upside down on giant cross before being subjected to sex acts. Some were made to drink blood.

According to Core, photographs were taken at each ritual and were used as blackmail to buy the boys’ silence.

“These children have been through absolute hell,” she added. “This is the most horrific case I have been involved in. It has made me ill.

“The human suffering they have caused is immeasurable. I have seen more suffering, hate and pain in the last few months than ever before.

“The effects are terrible. It just takes away their lives. They become like little zombies, living in permanent fear.

“These men are scum - the lowest of the low. If it takes me till the day I die, I will get them one by one.”

Strangely, no location for where all this horror was meant to be happening was included in the story.

There must have been a reason why the Longhill estate in East Hull wasn’t mentioned but I honestly can’t remember why.

However, there was another glaring omission in the story. There wasn’t the slightest shred of actual evidence put forward to support Core’s shocking claims.

Instead, she was given a prominent platform to say what she liked without challenge. While the story did refer to her comments as ‘claims’, the headlines presented them as facts.

Was any of it actually true? A casual reader might have assumed it was. A more cynical one would have certainly raised an eyebrow at other details included later in the story.

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Core said she had first been alerted to the “black magic ring” six months earlier by a worried parent.

After Childwatch started investigating, she revealed they had been joined by “an American expert”.

The expert wasn’t named but Core spoke enthusiastically about how the issue was being tackled across the Atlantic.

“In America, the FBI is dealing with this sort of thing all the time,” she said.

In fact Core’s expert was Ted Gunderson, a former high-ranking FBI official who had previously headed the Bureau’s offices in Los Angeles, Dallas and Memphis.

By the time Childwatch brought him to Hull he’d long retired from the FBI and was working as a private investigator. He was also a fully-blown conspiracy theorist, convinced that Satanic cults were not only abusing and murdering hundreds of children in sacrificial ceremonies across America but were also part of a secret shadow government planning to take control of the United States.

Today there’s a wealth of material about Gunderson to be found online. As you might expect, some of it hurtles quickly down the same conspiratorial rabbit holes he mined decades ago.

Others, however, prefer to portray him as an increasingly paranoid far-right gun-for-hire peddling numerous unsubstantiated theories on a wide range of subjects, from the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Habour to the death of singer Sonny Bono in a skiing accident in 1998 (he claimed Cher’s ex-husband was murdered by a group of international arms dealers).

Fuelled by his own deep-rooted Christian fundamentalist beliefs, Gunderson became a self-appointed expert on the Satanic ritual abuse of children without ever conclusively proving its existence.

In 1988 - the same year as Core first went public with claims of ritual abuse and human sacrifice in Hull - Gunderson appeared as a guest on two episodes of the hugely-popular American daytime TV show Geraldo under the title: ‘Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground’.

Introduced as a “cult investigator”, Gunderson agreed with claims there were at least one million active Satanists operating in America. He also made his own bold allegation about the supposed existence of a mass burial ground for the victims of Satanic ritual murder in Washington state.

“They can’t possibly go out there and dig them all out because there are too many of them,” he said, suggesting any search to find actual evidence to support his wild claim was not really worth the bother.

Years later, the show’s host Geraldo Rivera, admitted being misled by some of the sensationalist claims made at the time.

A 2024 article on the show by US writer Marlena Williams places the Geraldo Satanist special at the centre of the era’s moral panic over child abuse.

Williams paints the picture of a perfect storm being whipped into a frenzy by the emerging 24-hour news cycle and the burgeoning movement of victim’s rights organisations often spearheaded by fundamentalist Christians alarmed at what they saw as an increasingly liberal society. Caught in the middle were concerned parents unsure who or what to believe.

“It didn’t matter that most acts of child abuse, including sexual abuse, are committed by relatives or friends, or that Satanism as an ideology has far less to do with violence and demonic worship than it does personal liberation and opposition to Christian doctrine, or that scant physical evidence was ever found to corroborate any of the Satanic panic’s most outlandish claims.

“Moral panics do not operate out of fact but out of ignorance and fear, mobilizing blatantly obvious fictions to keep the existing order safe.”

As for Gunderson, I found an article by American social activist Lucien Greaves particularly illuminating.

It’s worth pointing out Greaves is the founder of the Satanic Temple, which is officially classed as a church by the US Internal Revenue Service. Temple members say they don’t believe in Satan in a literal demonic sense but as a symbol of rebellion and opposition to authoritarianism and, in particular, the influence of extreme Christian nationalism in America.

Greaves’ piece was written well after Gunderson’s death in 2011 but he still doesn’t hold back, describing him as “a delirious source of unreliable information” and “a public paranoid for hire”.

“In theory, and at best (if one were to attempt to justify him), Gunderson practiced something of a criminological transcendental metaphysics, seeking the very source of crime itself in each individual crime he devoted his attention to, seeing them all tied to an all-pervasive network of evil.

“In practice, he was more of a ride-along observer to the shifting paranoid folklore panics of his times put forth by moral crusaders, modern witch-hunters, and outright con-men (and women) who benefited from attaching the prestige of a former G-man’s endorsement to whatever implausible conspiracy narrative they happened to be selling.

“Throughout the moral panic of the 1980s and the 1990s regarding Satanic cults thought to be subverting Christian-American lives, he would regularly appear on daytime talk shows warning of the insidious influence of Heavy Metal music and ubiquitous subliminal urgings being silently forced upon impressionable youthful minds.

“Ted Gunderson’s manufacturing of ‘evidence’ for claims of Satanic abuse have helped sustain an ongoing credulous conspiracist anti-Satanist panic.”

Core’s decision to invite Gunderson to join her investigation in a Hull council estate wasn’t a random accident. His visit was part of a wider influx of American Christian fundamentalists into the UK at the time, mostly involving well-funded lecture tours addressing sympathetic church groups, social workers and police officers with Satanic ritual child abuse as the main item on the agenda.

By then, Core and Childwatch had become nationally known thanks to their pursuit of Hull vicar Jan Knos, who died of a heart attack in prison while waiting to face trial on 28 charges of indecency against young children. I wrote about the case here last week.

After Knos’ death in late 1986 the group’s profile soared, helped in no small part by Core’s knack for generating publicity. There were more campaigns, more donations and even a charity single written and performed by pop singer Jim Diamond with former Police guitarist Andy Summers providing photographs from an accompanying video.

By the time the single was released in the summer of 1987, Core’s focus had shifted beyond child abuse in the UK to forging new links with emerging Christian fundamentalists beating the drum about devil-worshipping sexual predators in America.

In doing so, she was joined by ally and Childwatch trustee Geoffrey Dickens, the MP who had tried to name Jan Knos using the shield of parliamentary privilege before he had even been arrested and who campaigned to re-criminalise homosexuality.

Before long both Core and Dickens would help turn American Christian fundamentalist paranoia into Britain’s very own Satanic Panic.

Thanks to the pair’s Fleet Street contacts, events on a previously unremarkable council estate in Hull were soon making lurid headlines in the red-top national tabloid newspapers.

It all started with one family reaching out to Core over claims that their young son had been sexually abused by a man. Within a few months, Core believed at least 23 boys were part of a Satanic ritual abuse ring being run by a group of paedophiles.

She had spoken to all of the boys and told reporters she believed everything they said.

No-one seemed to raise a red flag over a group of suggestible children being interviewed at length by people apparently determined to find devil-worshippers in a remote corner of Hull.

Were young children being sexually abused by adults? Perhaps. Sadly, it happens and probably more often than most of us would like to think. Were they being forced to drink blood and take part in Satanic rituals? Yet again, actual evidence was thin on the ground.

The ring’s grim activities were said to have mainly taken place in a house and a garage on the estate. Core claimed some of the boys had also told her about being abused on trips to the coast.

Later, in her 1991 book Chasing Satan, Core goes into some detail describing how the garage was used as initiation venue where boys were sexually abused while lying inside a large pentagram drawn on cardboard laid on the floor.

From the garage they were allowed into the house where drugs were handed out like sweets.

The men, she said, would take photographs and films of the boys, making money by distributing them to a wider market of paedophiles. Some would make arrangements for boys to visit London or Europe where other members of the ring would be waiting for them. Today such activity would be classed as trafficking.

Core claimed this sinister ring had a name - Scorpio.

Despite having her faith in the police severely tested by their handling of the Knos case, she continued to pass on information gathered by Childwatch. However, the group’s investigation in Longhill would ultimately test that relationship to the limit.

After being alerted by Core, the police were obliged to investigate but found themselves having to conduct potentially sensitive enquires against a backdrop of hysterical tabloid coverage with both Core and Dickens making increasingly sensational allegations.

By now, Core was also collaborating with freelance national journalist Tim Tate who had previously investigated the murky world of child pornography and was now on the trail of devil-worshipping child abusers. Soon the pair would also be working with TV reporter Roger Cook on a two-episode special of his The Cook Report series on the supposed explosion of Satanic ritual abuse across the UK.

In her subsequent book, Core attempts to distance herself from the programme having originally worked as a consultant on it. She tells how she was forced out over a decision to invite American Satanist Michael Aquino to take part in the filming.

Aquino probably merits an entire Substack piece about him but, until then, here’s a thumbnail sketch up to and including his trip to the UK to play the part of Roger Cook’s pantomime villain.

A specialist in psychological warfare for the US military and an Army officer, he had served in Vietnam with the Green Berets and later worked as an intelligence officer. Alongside his job, he founded his own religious group known as the Temple Set in 1975, specialising in the occult and spiritual Satanism.

With Cook and Tate unable to find a British Satanist willing to take part in the programme, they turned to Aquino who had already appeared on a number of American TV talk shows, including the same Geraldo special with Ted Gunderson.

Accompanied by his wife, the couple appeared in The Cook Report wearing all black with Aquino sporting either a wig or a hairstyle identical to Bela Lugosi in his famous role as Dracula.

In the programme they appear wearing black cloaks performing a Satanic ordination ritual in the middle of a forest surrounded by swirling dry ice.

Viewers weren’t told the person supposedly being ordained was a leading member of the British branch of Aquino’s Temple of Set and already well-known to the couple. Equally, the extreme Christian fundamentalist backgrounds of several seemingly ordinary ‘witnesses’ said to be stalked by Satan and featured prominently in the programme weren’t mentioned either.

Watching it today, the only credible person involved appears to be Ozzy Osbourne who, in typical deadpan style, shrugs off claims that he’s in league with the Devil by insisting he’s just a simple rock star singing slightly daft songs.

Three years later, Core recalled in her book how the Aquinos’ presence triggered her sacking from the programme.

She said: “I introduced Tim Tate to victims and I did everything that I could to make sure the investigation was properly documented. We were dealing with serious stuff: children were being routinely tortured in the name of Satan and I wanted the public to realise that a thorough appraisal of society’s obligations to the innocent was a great matter of urgency.”

When Aquino was first approached to take part, Core thought it was because Tate and Cook wanted to quiz him on allegations made the year before that he had abused children at day care centre in San Francisco. Investigations by the police into the case were still ongoing.

However, when she discovered Aquino and his wife were being paid to visit the UK and appear in the programme by Central TV to perform a mock ritual ceremony, she hit the roof.

“What infuriated me with The Cook Report was the decision to pay the expenses for Aquino to visit Britain. Why did we need to import a leading Satanist? I strongly objected to the programme acting as host to a Satanist who was on the verge of being accused by his Army superiors of abusing a child. I publicly denounced the decision and I was, of course, promptly sacked as a consultant. My usefulness to the programme maker was now over anyway for the vital material was already in the can.”

As it turned out, the police investigation into Aquino closed because of a lack of evidence. It also turned out that a mother and daughter known to Core who also appeared in the programme were not quite who they seemed.

Both featured in another filmed ceremony, this time an exorcism performed on the girl and her younger brother by a friendly Satan-chasing Church of England vicar from Lancashire who was a leading figure in an extreme evangelical Christian group called the Reachout Trust. So extreme, in fact, that the same vicar had once campaigned to erect a large crucifix in Pendle Hill to counter its history as a hotbed of 17th century witchcraft.

In the scene, as the two children approach the altar, their mother tells viewers in a voice-over: “They’ve had ritualistic things done to them with snakes, crucifixes, they’ve been taught to pray to the Devil; they have in fact been brainwashed.

Their backstory wasn’t mentioned in detail except for the ‘fact’ that the girl (and her brother) were possessed by the Devil. At least, that was according to their mother.

Several years later, the girl - now in her 30s with a family of her own - put the record straight after contacting the not-for-profit Sub-Culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation (SAFF) after coming across a video on the group’s YouTube channel debunking all of the claims and most of the participants in the programme.

She confirmed the family had moved from London to Hull with Core’s help after initial allegations of Satanic ritual abuse involving the two children had surfaced while they were still living in the capital.

Speaking about her appearance on The Cook Report, she said: “As for the incident in the church, I was told by my mother that we were being ‘Christened’ to protect us from evil.

“The whole thing started when my father had been sent to prison for an assault on my mother while she was pregnant, I witnessed this, it’s one of my earliest memories. While he was in prison, my mother said I had to make allegations against my father and other people he knew. These ‘abuses’ were also said to involve my brother.

“At the time I was just turning four and my brother was two. I cannot remember this abuse. I remember missing my father terribly and only have good memories of my father from this time other than the assault on my mother. My father nor anyone else was ever charged with these allegations.

“We were then moved from south London to Hull aided by Dianne Core. I remember my mother had a lot to do with her and she became a key figure in our lives at the time.

“What you need to know was that my mother was mentally ill and I believe Dianne Core helped to feed my mother’s crazy ideas and enabled her.

“We were featured in at least two papers at the time and I remember being met by journalists. I know one was The Mirror, I think the other might have been The News of the World. We also featured in Tim Tate’s book.”

Tate had seen social services reports on the family while they still lived in London. In them, the girl’s two-year-old brother supposedly told how he had been anally abused with a crucifix. Tate included the story in his book.

The Mirror reporter was Fred Harrison, who penned a series of lurid exclusives on young children being allegedly abused by Satanic devil-worshippers. Harrison would later co-author Core’s book.

The woman told SAFF: “I grew up being told by my mother this (SRA abuse) had happened and obviously remember the questioning. I used to have nightmares frequently. My mother told me the things in my nightmares had happened to me but that she had made it so I couldn’t remember them.

“My mother went on to emotionally and physically abuse me throughout my whole childhood and would have frequent mental breakdowns. She was fixated on Satanic abuse and everyone was a suspect - my stepfather, Childwatch, my school.

“She even accused my friend’s family of abusing myself and my brother again in around 1994/5 and that we had witnessed a child being sacrificed. No matter how many times I told her this had not happened she would not accept it and would physically beat me by punching, kicking, biting and pulling me around by my hair.

“She carried this in for about two days until I ‘admitted’ it out of pure fear and wanting the abuse from her to stop. She made us give statements to the police about this but I was never questioned without her being present or watching via video so I was too frightened to tell them she had made it all up.

“My life from then on was horrific. I was mentally, emotionally and physically abused by my mother on an almost daily basis. She would also examine me on a daily basis for signs of sexual abuse. I was kept off school for long periods and alienated from everyone. We had no contact with family or friends and I felt totally helpless and hopeless.

“It was then that I started to wonder if the ‘abuse’ by my father really did happen or if it was a very vivid figment of my mother’s twisted imagination.

“I have documented proof that social services were constantly involved and recognised my mother’s bizarre and intimidating behaviour but did nothing to safeguard us. There are reports from neighbours of hearing my screams and cries and witnessing our pale and scruffy appearances. There’s even one report of Mum confessing to a friend that she heard voices telling her to drown us all yet we were left in her care.”

The manipulation of a vulnerable family’s appearance in front of an altar waiting for an exorcism to be carried out for the purposes of a TV show didn’t seem to bother Core who, along with Childwatch trustee MP Geoffrey Dickens, was now speculating up to 4,000 children a year were being killed by British Satanists.

Dickens aired his claims in the media and in Parliament. In an interview with She magazine which was immediately picked up by the national tabloids, he even claimed babies were being killed as offerings to the Devil. Conveniently, he explained evidence of this was hard to come by because “with witchcraft practices nothing is ever found.”

Core was also quoted in the story, repeating her claims that children were being abused while tied upside down on large crucifixes. She also stated children were more likely to be kidnapped by Satanists around the time of annual festivals such as the Autumn Equinox.

Around the same time Core also embarked on a lecture tour around Europe funded by American far-right political activist and arch-conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche who would soon be jailed for 15 years for fraud.

However, her involvement in allegations in Longhill was also becoming a major problem for the police and social services, not least because neither had found any evidence of Satanic ritual abuse.

Eventually, social services in Hull went to court to secure an injunction preventing her from contacting one of the boys because it was felt he was being harmed by her continued interference in his case.

The police’s frustrations with Core were eventually revealed in a report submitted to an inquiry into a separate multi-generational child abuse investigation in Nottinghamshire. As in Hull, initial allegations of Satanic abuse swirled around the case but, once again, no evidence was ever found. Ultimately, 11 members of an extended family were jailed for serious sexual assaults on 21 children.

Because of the similarities between the two cases, Humberside Police was invited to share its experience in Longhill as part of the inquiry and the resulting report, which was made public by the Hull Daily Mail in 1991, was damning.

Written by a senior detective, it said two ‘cast iron’ prosecution cases against two adults suspected of indecent assault in Hull had been effectively derailed by Core’s involvement with witnesses and a resulting contamination of evidence.

Core naturally disputed this in her subsequent book, pointing out that a third man had been convicted.

She also used the book to infer the unsolved 1984 murder of schoolboy Christopher Laverack was connected with her still-unproven belief of a Satanic child abuse ring operating in Longhill. She suggests only repeated warnings by her solicitor against naming names are the reason for her not doing so. However, she then makes several anonymised references to Christopher’s alleged killers using the plural tense. It seems a very deliberate move to imply that a group of people were responsible for the murder.

The claims prompted a senior detective in the Laverack case to emphatically deny any Satanic links to the murder.

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Undeterred, Core and Dickens went on the offensive and demanded an independent inquiry into the police’s handling of the Longhill case and they succeeded. However, when the team from South Yorkshire Police delivered their findings a year later, they backed the Humberside investigation and dismissed Childwatch’s complaints.

Even then, the saga dragged on as the South Yorkshire report was duly referred to the Crown Prosecution Service. It took the CPS until 1997 to announce there would not be any charges against the Humberside officers involved in the Longhill case, although there was criticism that several officers had refused to cooperate with their South Yorkshire counterparts. The CPS also categorically stated there has been no evidence of Saranic ritual abuse. In total, the inquiry and the CPS review cost £4m

By then, the SRA bubble was bursting after so many allegations and so little evidence.

In 1998 I reported on a case which, in hindsight, was the final nail in the Satanic Panic coffin. It involved the Court of Appeal quashing the conviction of a Hull man for serious sex offences against a young boy.

The court heard how the man, who was educationally subnormal, had readily agreed to suggestions put to him by the police and had signed a confession written for him while in police custody without having a solicitor present.

He was convicted on the strength of his confession after charges against two co-accused with dropped because of the unreliability of witnesses. If this sounds familiar it’s because he was the only person convicted as a result of the Longhill investigation - Core’s third man.

The court was told vital documents were not disclosed to the defence at his trial, including a full record of his police interview and the fact that witnesses had withdrawn their allegations against him. The missing information only came to light during the follow-up inquiry by South Yorkshire Police.

After his successful appeal, Humberside Police declined to apologise. “The appeal process is finished and we now consider the matter closed,” said Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Clark. Five months earlier, Dianne Core wound up Childwatch and quietly retired from public life.

Despite this, her one remaining ‘live’ conspiracy theory - that Christopher Laverack had been murdered by a group of devil-worshipping Satanists - lingered on for another 14 years.

In 2012 it was finally extinguished when Humber Police identified Christopher’s uncle Melvyn Read, who had died four years earlier aged 65, as the probable killer.

Previously jailed for sex offences against four young boys, Read was still serving his seven-and-a-half year sentence when he died from cancer in Hull Prison. Alerted by his convictions to a possible link to Christopher’s murder, detectives were poised to arrest him on his release.

A review of the case after his death used new forensic techniques to match pollen and plant material found on Christopher’s clothing with a water feature in Read’s garden. An ornamental brick believed to have been used to inflict serious head injuries found on the boy was also forensically linked to the same water feature.

The new evidence was set alongside already known facts about Read gathered in the aftermath of the murder. He lived close to the home of Christopher’s elder sister where the abduction had taken place. His van had been seen parked nearby on the same evening. He had been unable to give a satisfactory account of his whereabouts that night and was also familiar with Beverley Beck where the boy’s dumped body was found having once worked nearby. However, he had no record of sexual offending at the time.

Until his 2002 arrest for the offences he was eventually jailed for, police had been unable to find enough evidence to charge Read with the murder. Now, armed with his recent offending record and new forensic evidence, the material was tested by an independent QC who found the evidence against the dead man was “conclusive”.

Christopher’s remaining family accepted the conclusion. Detective Superintendent Ray Higgins, who had taken on responsibility for the long-running investigation, said: “Read was an evil man and a man wholly without remorse. I am satisfied that Christopher's family can have some sense of closure and understanding of what happened. The few officers still working on this case, between their other duties, have been determined to do all possible to solve the case and have simply refused to give up."

There was no mystery gang of Satanic killers involved. Christopher had been abused and murdered by his own uncle.

Today I see many elements of the Satanic Panic being repeated with the grooming gangs issue here and the Epstein case in America. Now that we are blessed with Internet, conspiracy theories are rife just about every topic you can imagine.

Could it all happen again? Sadly, I’m almost certain it will.

By the time The Devil Rides Out was aired in July 1989, his weekly Cook Report was one of the most popular programmes on TV.

Cook’s aggressive foot-in-the-door reporting style had become his trademark and viewers loved it.

His latest episode promised to reveal the supposed widespread extent of ritualistic Satanic child abuse in the UK. Hyped in advance by tabloid newspapers, it attracted an audience of eleven million viewers.

The programme’s main unchallenged claim was that young children were secretly being sexually abused and murdered by gangs of devil-worshipping Satanists somehow operating beyond the reach of the law.

Few of those watching would realise Cook’s revelations were, in reality, groundless fantasies. Even fewer would know the seeds of the Satanic Panic were first sown in Hull.

When I first joined the Hull Daily Mail in July 1984 one local story - an unsolved murder - dominated the headlines.

Four months earlier the body of nine-year-old Christopher Laverack had been found in Beverley Beck two days after his disappearance from his sister’s home in East Hull. His body was wrapped in a plastic bag previously used to carry carpet underlay and was weighed down by a brick in an apparent attempt to conceal it at the bottom of the Beck.

A post-mortem examination confirmed Christopher had suffered injuries consistent with serious physical violence. There was also evidence to suggest he had been sexually assaulted.

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Public speculation about the murder soon started to swirl but in those pre-Internet days it was mainly confined to Hull’s bars and clubs as well as newspapers.

Later in that same year, the Hull Daily Mail ran a number of short stories about an ex-social worker called Dianne Core.

She was one of the organisers of a fund-raising appeal aimed at helping a neighbouring family secure a life-saving liver transplant for their five-month-old son.

Core had appeared in the paper before. In 1982 she made the front page by staging a solo protest about public funding being given to Sir Freddie Laker’s ailing airline business. Wearing a sandwich board daubed with the slogan ‘Down with Laker mania!’, she took to the streets of Market Weighton to argue funding should instead be given to set up more centres for victims of domestic abuse and, in particular, children.

She was back in the headlines a few years later after writing her own cookery book featuring ideas for recipes on a budget. As part of the project, she wrote to the leaders of the country’s two main political parties inviting them to send their favourite recipes. Labour’s Michael Foot replied with a suggestion for cheese and potato pie but Margaret Thatcher’s office said the Prime Minister was not able to respond.

In the story, Core said she was “disappointed” with Mrs Thatcher. “She obviously doesn’t know any budget meals. I don’t know what she must have eaten when she was a grocer’s daughter,” she said.

It was an early sign that she had a knack for self-publicity, Core knew how to attract media attention. The fund-raising appeal for the toddler took off but she was also busy with another initiative as another Mail story would cover.

This time she told the paper she was planning to become an “agony aunt” for the children of striking miners. “Miners’ children must really feel cut off and unable to confide to even their nearest and dearest,” she said. “I would like them to write to me expressing all their fears and unhappiness. I cannot guarantee to write back to everyone but I will do my best.”

Becoming an agony aunt might have sounded like a random idea but it wasn’t.

At the time she was already giving talks in some local schools about children at risk of abuse, drawing on her own experiences as a social worker and founder of a family crisis centre when she lived in Lancashire before moving to Everthorpe near North Cave. She also acted as a fund-raiser for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Years later she would reveal her own father had sexually abused her as a child.

In April 1985 Core’s public profile increased significantly when she launched a new group called Childwatch in response to the ongoing inquiry into the case of four-year-old London girl Jasmine Beckford who was beaten to death by her stepfather.

Once again, the launch was covered in the Mail with Core giving a lengthy interview in which she lambasted “trendy Lefty social services” for being more interested in politics than protecting vulnerable children. She also blamed the break-up of the traditional extended family and “a lack of community spirit” for domestic abuse. It was time, she said, for a new moral crusade.

The article ran under the headline “A bid to end child battering”. Core herself used the phrase in the interview. “It takes the death of a child for the country to sit up and notice. We want people to be aware of what goes on all the time and to do something about it. As far as we are concerned, child battering is as big a social disease as alcoholism and drug abuse.”

In the local media, she was billed as a “campaigning housewife”. The catchy nickname quickly stuck.

The group published its own seven-point action plan. Most of it appeared uncontroversial if somewhat ambitious as just Core and a friend were involved at this point.

As part of its manifesto, Childwatch would start monitoring child abuse cases across the UK, compiling statistics, encouraging liaison between all organisations involved in child abuse cases and pledged to deliver a report to the government within 12 months putting the case for the creation of specialist teams of social workers in every town and city to deal with domestic violence.

However, one of the aims was more radical. The group intended to operate as “mediators” between child abuse victims, their families and social services. In doing so, Childwatch would encourage children and families to get in touch with them as well as social services and, ultimately, the police.

The potential for friction and conflict between the group and the agencies was not mentioned. Perhaps it was never envisaged by Childwatch. However, with the benefit of hindsight, the sudden presence of a third-party organisation gathering of its own evidence from victims presented obvious risks when it came to the statutory bodies relying on their own evidence when taking action in particular cases.

As the Beckford case had underlined, both the understanding of child-related domestic abuse and the way it was managed by social services and investigated by the police were still very much in their infancy in the early 1980s.

Initially, Childwatch’s activity followed a conventional path. A local Christmas appeal for soft toys generated hundreds of donations, a poster campaign was launched and a dairy business agreed to promote the charity on stickers attached to its milk bottles.

As the group started to find its feet, a small team of police detectives began investigating serious allegations of child abuse by the Reverend Jan Knos, a vicar on the Orchard Park estate in North Hull.

It was claimed that Knos had sexually assaulted an under-age boy at the church where he worked.

Soon, Dianne Core and Childwatch would also become heavily involved, befriending the family of alleged victim and offering them sympathetic support.

It was a subtle shift in direction for the group, which was also a registered charity. Until then, Core’s focus had been on child abuse in a family setting. This was something different.

Ian Halstead, who was the Mail’s crime reporter at the time, recalls the trigger behind the police investigation.

“The real story, which I don’t think we ever covered, was that Knos had been assaulted by the father of one of his victims in his vicarage.

“He answered the door, the bloke punched him in the face and when he fell, he caught himself on his pushbike which was leaning on the wall in the hallway. Tower Grange (the station where the local CID team was based) interviewed the attacker, and obviously immediately realised that the real story was something deeper and much darker.”

The origin of the police probe wasn’t the only unreported element of story. In fact, details about the entire investigation and its eventual outcome did not enter the public domain until some months after it was all over.

Legally, neither Knos or the family of his accuser could be named by the media. An alternative option of simply stating that an anonymous Hull vicar was the subject of a police investigation was also legally unwise because it cast a cloud of suspicion over the relatively small number of other vicars in the city.

Only the pressing of formal charges against him would put Knos’ name in the frame but that didn’t happen. To the shock of many close to the issue including Dianne Core, Humberside Police eventually shut down the investigation into Jan Knos.

Halstead, who established good relationships with the detectives in the case, says the decision left his CID contacts angry and frustrated.

“According to them, Knos was as bad as a serial abuser could be. Took kids from poor families and then used his position to fob off complaints.

“However, when the Detective Chief Inspector pushed the info further up the chain, he was told that the Assistant Chief Constable and/or the Deputy Chief Constable decided a prosecution would ‘not be in the public interest’ when to you, me, Dianne Core and everyone else it most definitely would have been.

“The DCI got the hump, moaned to the Detective Inspector and they got their Detective Sergeant to tell me about the video shop.” More on the video shop in a moment.

The suspicion - impossible to prove then as it is now - was that senior officers in the force who were known to be actively religious had secretly agreed to kick the matter into the long grass after being discreetly lobbied by the Church of England.

This feeling was underlined by something only a few people knew about at the time.

Remember the angry father who punched Knos in the face? He was arrested and charged with assault but just before the case reached court he was told the charge was being dropped. As a result, any publicity about the incident was avoided.

In reality, it’s likely senior officers were nervous of any case against Knos going to court without a rock-solid mountain of evidence against him. Non-familial child abuse prosecutions were still rare in those days. Ones involving a prominent public figure like a local vicar were even rarer.

As it was, no real explanation for the investigation into Knos petering out was given to the families. Again, it would take an extraordinary intervention some months later for an official reason to be finally put on the public record by the police - a lack of strong corroborating evidence to make a convincing prosecution case in front of a jury.

The story tip handed to Halstead was the CID’s way of firing one last parting shot across the vicar’s bows.

During their enquiries they discovered Knos also owned a video rental shop in Sutton which stocked a small selection of X-rated soft porn titles alongside more mainstream films.

While Halstead started writing the skeleton of the story I was sent to Sutton on a cold, wet November afternoon to see what was lurking on the top shelf of the vicar’s shop. One of Emmanuelle films and a few more suggestively-titled soft porn videos were all I could find.

As well as the top shelf material, the story covered a decision taken by Knos to quit his job as the parish priest along with his support for an overhaul of the Sunday trading laws which would allow him to open his video shop at weekends.

Approached by Halstead for a comment, the vicar told him: “Almighty God did not say you could not work on the Sabbath, he just said that you should keep that day holy. The Almighty said you should rest on the seventh day. He didn’t say which day that should be.”

He didn’t dispute the shop’s limited catalogue of X-rated videos but, after the story was published, contacted the paper again to say they had been removed.

We got a story of sorts (carefully avoiding any mention of the police investigation to keep within the law), the detectives got their consolation prize but Dianne Core and the family were left without the arrest and conviction they were hoping for.

“The family were angry and begged Core to help them, because the police and their local paper did nothing,” says Halstead. “They were desperate for help from someone.”

Local outage ran deep. Bob Webster, a deputy head teacher at a primary school on the estate, was so incensed at the police dropping the case that he became a trustee at Childwatch alongside Core and later acted as head of the group’s North Humberside branch.

Webster claimed the police had been too slow in responding to local concerns about Knos, missing the opportunity to put him under covert surveillance.

Halstead still maintains Core did not manipulate the situation in her self-appointed role as supportive mediator.

However, once the police investigation came to an abrupt end, she immediately started working with the family of the boy with a view to bringing a private prosecution against Knos and, aware of the corroboration issue, also began searching for other children who might have been assaulted by the vicar but had so far remained silent.

Some had already been interviewed by the police. Others came forward to speak to Core.

“Core realised that if others wouldn't act, Childwatch had to raise its profile and attract national attention,” says Halstead.

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To achieve that, she turned to another new trustee at the charity - the MP Geoffrey Dickens.

Instead of enlisting the help of a local MP, Core linked up with up with a controversial politician representing a constituency on the other side of Pennines who appeared to share many of her own views.

At the time, the Conservative MP for Littleworth and Saddleforth was a headline-grabbing self-publicist who had carved out a niche for himself as a child abuse campaigner, having once used parliamentary privilege to accuse a prominent British diplomat of being a paedophile.

Could Dickens use the same procedure in the House of Commons to name Knos ?

The outspoken MP was a favourite of the national tabloid press. He could be relied on to provide a controversial comment at the drop of a hat and became known for compiling his own dossiers on supposed VIP paedophiles which would often be touted as compelling evidence of their crimes.

In reality, Dickens’ dossiers often turned out to be nothing more than his own cherry-picked collections of newspaper stories, gossip, innuendo and pet conspiracy theories. Famously, one dossier on fellow Tory MP Leon Britain went ‘missing’ after being submitted to officials at the Home Office. Others hyped up by Dickens in often lurid tabloid stories would simply never materialise despite his threats to go public with them.

Happy to lap up his opinions and frequently unsubstantiated claims while providing him with the limelight he loved, few media outlets dug deeper into Dickens’ underlying motivations.

Had they done so, this alternative take on Dickens might have held more sway.

“Dickens was an intolerant right-winger of the ‘Hang ‘em, Flog ‘em and Stick 'em in the Army brigade. He specialised in getting attention based on the most provocative policies to pander to the worst kind of herd-instinct. A gift to the tabloid press he became 'rent-a-quote' for the unacceptable face of Conservatism during a period when the Tories were trying to move towards the political centre.

“He demanded castration for rapists, said that that AIDS victims should be forced to have their penises tattooed to warn prospective partners; and actually accused some gays of consciously using AIDS to kill others to get their own back on society. About one rapist he said: "If he was a dog he would have to be put down.”

The withering description is the work of the Sub-Culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation. The non-profit group was set up in 1988 to counter increasingly hysterical tabloid coverage around claims of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) with Dickens among those shouting about it the loudest.

The group was alarmed at apparent attempts by some to deliberately conflate SRA with contemporary Paganism, witchcraft and occultism. Since then, its densely-populated website has become an indispensable archive on the subject.

SAFF also noted two unsuccessful campaigns by Dickens to bring back hanging, his regular calls for homosexuality to be re-criminalised and his repeated demands that the Church of England sack all gay vicars.

Dickens was a Christian lay preacher with an entrenched religious outlook. In his eyes, homosexuality was a sin and all gay men and women were deviant criminals. For him, homosexuality had no place within the Church of England.

Publicly at least, Core was less initially open about her religious views but with her already well-documented comments on the apparent erosion of the traditional family unit and her distain for “trendy Lefty” social workers, she and Dickens seemed to be singing from the hymn sheet.

By early 1986 Core and Dickens were formulating a plan to put Knos behind bars. It would take the form of a pincer movement.

While Core began gathering her own evidence from other families whose children had encountered Knos, Dickens starting laying the groundwork to go public with the allegations.

Although regarded as a maverick backbencher by many of his own Conservative colleagues at Westminster, he could still use his political contacts and wield influence thanks to his reputation as someone prepared to name alleged offenders with the legal protection of Parliamentary privilege to bring pressure on the Director of Public Prosecutions.

It was agreed he would name Knos to force the DPP to act. If that failed, Childwatch would support a private prosecution by the family it was working with.

On March 14 Dickens stood up in the House of Commons and named an Essex doctor who was alleged to have raped an eight-year-old girl. The case had also run into a dead end with the local police unable to secure sufficiently robust corroborating evidence. Afterwards, Dickens publicly confirmed he was also considering naming “a Hull vicar” in relation to the alleged sexual assault of an 11-year-old boy.

This partial reference was enough to unleash the national media. The vicar angle was impossible to ignore.

Supplied with information about the case by Dickens, national newspaper reporters and photographers were soon camped outside the vicarage where Knos lived and stories about the police investigation started to appear in national newspapers. for the first time with Core prominently quoted in many.

The local media were more cautious. Mike Wood, who was my editor at the Hull Daily Mail at the time, wrote a front page comment piece on Dickens’ threat to name Knos and the developing national media coverage of the issue.

Wood said: “The principal tenet of English law is that a man or woman is innocent until proven guilty. It should be recited by all those who seek to damn people accused of crimes before the case against them had been heard in court.

“To publish unsubstantiated allegations against a named individual would be morally indefensible and legally dangerous since the laws of libel are designed to give the individual redress if falsely accused.

“Sexual abuse of children is an appalling crime and one which is belatedly receiving the attention it deserves. Public concern over these offences should not be used as a cover for witch-hunts.”

However, that didn’t stop him reporting on Dickens. I know because I wrote a story published on the day Dickens was due to go public, quoting the MP directly.

By then, allegations against Knos by other families backed by Childwatch were starting to appear in several newspapers. Even his ex-girlfriend gave an interview on condition of anonymity. She would later claim the quotes attributed to her in the Daily Star.

Meanwhile, Mike Wood’s concerns about witch-hunts were now being played out in Orchard Park as stones hurled from a distance smashed windows at the vicarage.

Caught in the crossfire, the Church of England announced the still-unnamed vicar intended to resign from his post after twice declining invitations to do so from senior church figures.

Core the told newspapers that she had briefly met Knos after he had telephoned her following Dickens’ initial announcement on his intention to reveal his identity.

She revealed they had agreed to a longer follow-up meeting to discuss the allegations.

“He is still trying to brazen it out and I’m sure he will deny everything,” she told reporters.

At this point, Knos hadn’t even been arrested let alone charged with any crime.

When the vicar suddenly cancelled their scheduled meet the next day on the advice of his solicitor, Core again went to the media to provide an update.

Three days after naming the Essex doctor, Dickens rose once more from his seat in the Commons having given prior notice of his intention to name Knos publicly for the first time.

However, his increasingly cavalier approach to parliamentary immunity was becoming a concern to many MPs. One senior Conservative, Norman St John-Stevas, wrote to Dickens complaining he had broken parliamentary convention by interfering in cases in another MP’s constituency. St John-Stevas, who was gay but never openly came out about his homosexuality, described Dixkens’ behaviour as “disgraceful”.

As a result, the Speaker of the House denied him the opportunity to speak on procedural grounds.

Undeterred, the focus switched to the office of DPP where, following instructions from Attorney General Sir Michael Havers, a review of police files from the investigation had begun.

Another twist in the tale emerged when it was revealed Humberside Police had not submitted the original files to the prosecution service for an opinion before shutting down its enquiry.

Some suggested it was confirmation of a local cover-up by senior police chiefs. Dianne Core described it as a “betrayal”, having believed information she had given the police at the time was passed on to prosecutors.

At the request of the DPP, the police re-opened the investigation. Officers were sent out to re-interview some of the witnesses they had already spoken to months earlier while Core continued to tell reporters she was convinced the children she had spoken to were telling the truth.

Within a month Jan Knos was arrested and charged with committing 28 indecency offences against young boys and girls between January 1983 and September 1985.

Some of the charges related to alleged sex assaults in the vicarage. Others were allegedly committed in a lay-by, at a caravan near Beverley and at a local outdoor trial bike racing track.

At his first court hearing in Hull he was remanded in custody for his own protection after stipendiary magistrate Neville White was told both Knos and his home had been targets for violence in recent weeks.

Even in custody on remand awaiting his trial Knos continued to attract lurid tabloid newspaper coverage. At one stage, Hull Prison governor Philip Wheatley was forced to dismiss claims in a national Sunday paper that Knos had started a “religious cult” inside the jail after setting up an altar in his cell.

A date for the trial at York Crown Court was fixed for early November 1986 but it never took place.

A week before the trial was due to start Jan Knos was found dead in his cell in Hull Prison. He had suffered a fatal heart attack.

In the eyes of the law, Knos died as an innocent man. He always denied the allegations made against him.

Without a trial, his innocence or guilt would never be determined although a year later a 13-year-old boy who claimed he had been sexually assaulted by Knos was awarded £3,000 after making a claim to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.

By the time of the CICB’s pay-out, Core and Dickens were becoming immersed in another police investigation in Hull linked to the as-yet unsolved murder of Christopher Laverack.

The era of the Satanic Panic was about to begin.

Next time: The Devil rides into Hull and Dianne Core joins Roger Cook on the trail of Satan.

The £21m cost of the Queen’s Gardens project and the time it has taken has been a major local talking point since the safety barriers first went up.

However, the sharp design and quality finish involved in the transformation of the city centre’s largest and most important green space is already winning plaudits from those who doubted it would ever be completed.

Covering a ten-acre site, the new-look Gardens represent a bold statement of intent by a city committed to countering tired and usually misplaced assumptions about its charms.

The re-opening also marks a key milestone alongside the £50m Hull Maritime project, an ambitious heritage-led regeneration programme spread across the city centre which involves a complete refurbishment of the flagship Hull Maritime Museum, the creation of a new visitor destination featuring a former 1960s fishing trawler permanently berthed in a dry dock and the restoration of a 1927 light ship once used as a manned navigation aid in the middle of the Humber estuary.

Now berthed in Hull Marina, the Spurn Lightship re-opened to visitors recently while both the museum, the trawler and adjacent visitor centre - designed as a Passivhaus building by project architects Purcell - are expected to open before the end of the year or in early 2027.

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First announced during Hull’s year as the 2017 UK City of Culture, the Hull Maritime programme has been jointly founded by Hull City Council and Heritage Lottery Fund.

However, the facelift of Queen’s Gardens has been largely funded by the council providing an enhanced connecting pedestrian and cycle route between the Maritime Museum which stands at one of the parkland and the new dry dock visitor attraction which occupies a former shipyard on the River Hull.

As such, the new-look open space also echoes its history when it was the country’s largest dock of its kind.

Opened in 1778 when it was simply known as The Dock, it heralded a huge expansion of trade in and out of the port city.

Originally partly excavated along the route of a defensive moat protecting Hull beyond its medieval walls, it provided a more spacious setting as previously vessels jostled for berths in the much smaller Old Harbour along the narrow, tidal and seriously congested River Hull.

Ships accessed the dock from the river through a series of lock gates and the land around it quickly became filled with yards, warehouses and taverns.

Re-named Queen’s Dock after a visit to Hull by Queen Victoria in 1854, the dock continued to be used for commercial shipping until the late 1920s when it became effectively obsolete and redundant. By then, larger vessels were using the docks built alongside the Humber estuary.

The dock’s decline coincided with the Depression and in 1929 a special council committee was formed to look at options for its future. The preferred solution was the creation of a new city centre park, providing mass employment in its construction.

The Gardens included 60 flower beds, two large rockeries and large lawns flanked by a mix of cherry, maple and pyrus trees.

A focal point at one end was a large bowl-shaped fountain complete with a state-of-the-art electrical system which controlled a 37-minute long sequence of water bursts and coloured lighting effects.

At the opposite end, the relocated Wilberforce Monument offered a visual counterpoint.

Beneath the flower beds, the lawns and the fountain, lay hundreds of tonnes of buried materials, including silt and sand from the construction of the city’s new docks and bricks and rubble from demolition projects. It took four years for workers to fill in the enormous space of the old dock with much of this physical labour done by hand.

Plans to re-build parts of Hull city centre destroyed during the Second World War later sought to modernise Queen’s Gardens, reflecting some of the new post-war architecture being developed around it.

This work was overseen by renowned architect Sir Federick Gibbert who had been hired to design the new college campus behind the Wilberforce Monument.

Gibbert commissioned modernist artists Robert Adams and Kenneth Carter to create concrete relief panels to line the old dock walls while water was re-introduced into the space with a series of new ponds complete with fish and fountains.

The Gardens re-opened in 1961 with new diagonal pathways linked to the original broad boulevard and they remained much the same for the next 60 years until the recently-completed re-design.

The latest facelift was triggered by long-standing concerns over the general neglect of the Gardens and, in particular, safety concerns over the unstable condition of the old dock walls.

City council leader Council Mike Ross explained: “This project developed into much more than was originally proposed when it was first set out.

“While the original plan just focused on improvements along the Guildhall Road side, as works progressed and the deteriorated condition of the historic dock structure beneath the Gardens was fully uncovered, it became clear that much more extensive work was needed throughout the site to properly repair it, secure the long‑term future of the Gardens and deliver an amazing high quality space Hull residents deserve.

“Addressing these challenges head‑on has ensured the gardens are safe, welcoming, and built to last.

“I would like to thank residents, businesses and visitors for their patience while this work was carried out. The result is a wonderful and inclusive city centre space that reflects Hull’s maritime heritage, while meeting the needs of a modern city.”

The team assembled for the project faced multiple challenges; from the need to understand all the previous work carried out there over the previous 250 years to negotiating the impact of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine on the global supply chain with some of the eventual additional expenditure being attributed to soaring prices for materials.

Another enormous task was respecting the early 1960s design template of the Gardens while giving it a 21st century tweak with new public art commissions and fresh ideas on promoting natural wildlife habitats and sustainable urban drainage in the shape of new rain gardens.

Hundreds of new trees have also been planted as part of a reimagined landscape after many older trees were removed.

Ros Southern, director at Southern Green Landscape Architects, said: “This project has not been about papering over the cracks.

“Hull has done a proper job, starting with the required engineering, making tough decisions such as removing unsafe trees, and then adding high‑quality design and materials to create a park landscape that will last for many years to come.

“Echoes of the original dock layout are now more strongly evident, and we have worked with some amazing artists to embed features rooted in Hull’s maritime heritage, including restored stone carvings, scrimshaw artwork and seafaring imagery featuring whales, belugas and seals.

“The planting is now more diverse, with a wide range of shapes and sizes including many British native species sourced from UK nurseries.

“The rain gardens not only look great but also play an important role in managing surface water. As the gardens mature, there will be open grassy spaces, shady trees to sit beneath, ponds and fountains, and plenty of flowers providing colour and supporting pollinators such as bees and insects.

“We feel very honoured to have played a part in this incredible project, and we know people in Hull have been incredibly patient while such a complex design and installation has taken place.”

Throughout the site, accessibility has been a key focus with new steps, ramps and pathways being carefully integrated into the Gardens. The boundary walls have also been re-built, new street furniture installed and even the lighting columns have been designed to mirror the shape of old ship sails, although I see them as re-imagined dockside cranes.

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Hull tour guide Paul Schofield has already added the Gardens as a new stopping point on his popular walking tours around the city centre taking in Hull’s many historical landmarks.

He said: “It has been a long wait but it’s been worth it. Queen’s Gardens look fantastic now. What I like abut the new artwork is that it’s informed by the fact that this was Hull’s very first dock.

“The first vessel to enter was a whaling ship called the Manchester and in the main central piece of artwork there are whales, a map of the Arctic region set in the stonework and a big compass pointing due north - the direction the ships from Hull would have sailed as they left port to go to the Arctic.

“The panels from the 1960s also look splendid. They’ve been restored and cleaned up and the whole place has an air of art from that time.

“Personally, I didn’t like the panels years ago but I’ve come to really admire them and they look really great in their new, pristine condition. They’ve even added a new one to the panels by Kenneth Adams because the old one went missing.”

I’m with Paul on the overall design and finish. Yes, it’s cost a small fortune and it will require a regular maintenance regime to keep on top of the inevitable litter and graffiti but it’s a now a spectacular space in the heart of the city centre.

It’s somewhere to breathe, to soak in the past and enjoy some expansive elbow room.

The good, the bad and the ugly are all invariably waiting to put in an appearance along the way.

A few weeks ago the ugly side of life was being played out in a street on our usual route.

It was just after 9am and a woman was banging on the front door of a house. She was also shouting loudly in a language I didn’t recognise.

Whatever she was saying, it looked like she wanted to get inside.

A small child loitered close by while a taxi driver parked opposite the house kept his engine ticking over.

With no sign of anyone welcoming her in the woman stopped shouting, took a few steps back and then launched herself forward aiming a karate kick at the door.

There was an audible gasp from a group of pensioners waiting at a nearby bus stop as boot thudded against uPVC. Memories of Eric Cantona flying through the air and into the crowd at Crystal Palace came flooding back.

Then she did it again. And again.

After the third kick a window opened in the upstairs front bedroom, a curtain was pulled aside and a topless man appeared, waving his arms like a windmill.

He started shouting back at the woman below. I couldn’t understand a word but I knew she wasn’t finished kicking the front door.

After two more kicks, I decided it was time to resume our walk. The topless man in the bedroom clearly wasn’t going to let her in and she had retreated back to the taxi along with the bewildered young child.

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Fortunately, such scenes are rare in the neighbourhood.

A noisy gang of pigeons are responsible for most of the sporadic local anti-social behaviour along with the occasional fox rifling through stray wheelie bins from time to time.

However, this time I sensed it wasn’t quite the end of the story.

Sure enough, three weeks after the ugly came the bad.

One night last week the dog and I approached the house again and saw a police patrol car parked at an angle across the driveway. The officers sat inside had either arrived in a hurry or their parking skills were a little bit rusty.

Either way, there was no sign of anyone home and by the time we reached them they were in the process of driving off.

Then last Saturday morning things escalated somewhat.

Once more accompanied by my four-legged friend, two police vans drove past as we started our normal walk. A few minutes later we reached the house where the two vans had joined two others already parked up.

As we got closer I could see the front door was no longer attached to its hinges. Inside the hallway stood a group of police officers in black uniforms.

They would end up spending most of the day there. When we checked back on our evening walk the vans were gone and the doorway had been boarded up.

Naturally, I made a few enquires.

It turned out the night before the police had received reports of “suspicious behaviour” at the property. As a result, a search was carried out and the police recovered what they later described in a statement as “large quantity of Class A, B and C drugs as well as a number of phones believed to be linked to the supply of drugs”.

In addition, I was told a 31-year-old man living at a nearby address had been arrested and charged with possession with intent to supply Class B drugs and possession with intent to supply nitrous oxide for “wrongful inhalation”.

He duly appeared before magistrates on Monday and was released on conditional bail until his next date in court.

Having seen a photo of him, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the topless man who I spotted gesticulating wildly from the bedroom window of the house a few weeks ago. Who that was remains a mystery.

What struck me most about the charges was the one relating to nitrous oxide, commonly referred to as laughing gas and routinely used as a painkiller in medicine and dentistry.

However, in recent years it’s also become used as a recreational drug with potentially dangerous side effects. In 2023 it was made illegal under the Misuse of Drugs Act. It’s officially categorised as a Class C drug.

Until now I hadn’t appreciated the extent of nitrous oxide’s entry into the world of illegal drugs.

A good example of this was revealed during a trial at Leeds Crown Court last year which ended with three men being jailed for illegally importing millions of cannisters of nitrous oxide through a string of fake catering companies.

Just over 91 million canisters were shipped into the country by trio between 2016 and 2018 despite them knowing a new ban had been introduced making importation illegal if they were likely to be used as a psychoactive substance.

An investigation by the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Organised Crime Unit found the men had set up a string of fake catering companies in the UK and Europe to facilitate importation and the laundering of up to £16.7m.

The fake firms were created as a cover because nitrous oxide was and still is legitimately used as a propellant in the catering industry to whip cream as well as an inert gas to fill snack and crisp packets.

What caught my eye in this tale was the scale of the mens’ operation.

Their total shipment of 91,350,000 canisters compared to the combined total of 3.8 million canisters used by two of the UK’s biggest coffee chains, Starbucks and Costa, over the same period.

A burst of nitrous oxide either directly from a canister or inhaled via a balloon filled with the gas is no laughing matter despite the initial euphoric buzz is creates.

Three years ago 25-year-old Natasha Woroch died when a car she was travelling in s a passenger crashed on the A161 at Belton in North Lincolnshire.

The car was being driven at speeds of over 80mph in a 30mph zone before the crash. CCTV footage showed the driver, Connor Malpas, from Doncaster, emerging from the wreckage with a balloon filled with nitrous oxide still in his mouth. He was also seen removing a removing a rucksack containing alcohol and nitrous oxide from the vehicle and giving it to another passenger to dispose of.

Malpas was initially jailed for ten years and sis months at Grimsby Crown Court in August 2024 after admitting causing the death of Natasha, who was his partner, and seriously injuring two other passengers. His sentence was later increased to 13 years and six months by the Court of Appeal after a referral by the solicitor general.

Speaking last November, Natasha’s mother Rachel Jarvis, said she felt “distraught” about young people using nitrous oxide to get high.

She added: “I just feel people don’t realise the effects of taking it, particularly whilst driving. If you could sit in my shoes for a minute you wouldn’t do it.

“I just thought at the time it might just be a passing craze and I really hoped it would be a phase for young people but clearly it’s not. It’s called laughing gas but it’s no laughing matter for us.”

After the ugly and the bad, what about the good?

Well, an arrest and a seizure of illegal drugs is a good result for Humberside Police and I will follow the case as it winds its way through the courts over the coming months.

Meanwhile, the dog and I will continue keeping an eye out on our daily walks.

Wearing a pair of outstanding pink sparkly ankle boots, host Rosie Millard introduced the project’s creative director Dave Lee who proceeded to sit on his tablet and, in doing so, managed to discombobulate the start of a short promotional film.

Once Dave got his seating arrangements sorted, the film and the rest of the afternoon went with a swing.

For those in the audience still wondering what it was all about, the stage was flanked by two giant banners featuring QR codes for Curiosity’s six different social media platforms.

For a moment, I wondered what Sir James Reckitt would have made of it all. I suspect he’d bloody love it.

In the grand tradition of Victorian industrialists, Reckitt was also a local philanthropist.

While he made a fortune by turning the family-owned business manufacturing household cleaning products into a national brand, he also ploughed much of his wealth back into the community.

A 600-home urban village for his workers built as a non-profit venture, a hospital and an orphanage were just some of his philanthropic endeavours. Establishing and endowing Hull’s first public library was another.

“The main object of a free library is not only in satisfying a thirst for knowledge, but to create a thirst where it is now absent,” he said at the time.

The James Reckitt Library Trust has been one of his lasting legacies.

Established in 1892, it was originally intended to solely support that first public library named after Reckitt which was built on Holderness Road close to the family business.

Today the library itself is sadly now an apartment complex but the trust is still very much alive and kicking. It’s a registered charity with locally-based trustees who oversee the original endowment to develop public library provision throughout Hull.

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While the city council owns and operates the city’s library service through its in-house company Hull Culture & Leisure, the trust’s independence gives it the flexibility to work with both the library service and other partner organisations on projects ranging from The Freedom Festival to the Children’s University.

When it came to considering how to mark the centenary of Reckitt’s death in 2024, the trust opted to do something bold.

It decided to breathe fresh life into that famous Reckitt quote mentioned above by championing a new mission to build a culture of curiosity in Hull, to make it a City of Curiosity.

Here’s an explanation of the move. Think of it as a manifesto.

There is a growing understanding that a city cannot be rebuilt, cannot be reimagined, through material things alone. New buildings, improvements to the environment, new jobs are all part of the journey, but it also needs community life, and community institutions to be built afresh, fractured communities to be revived.

Around the world, in societies where many of the building blocks of strong community life have been lost, where common shared spaces have shrunk, where technology has often isolated people or brought them into conflict, where trust in collective action and political processes is low, where people are fearful of change, where the boundaries between truth and falsehood have been blurred, the task of building strong, knowledgeable communities is vital.

The growth of a culture of curiosity is central to this; a defining characteristic of a ‘knowledgeable community’. A culture of curiosity exists where people remain genuinely curious about themselves, where they live and the world about them, are open to new knowledge, willing to listen, tolerant of different perspectives, slow to judge but also capable of discerning truth from misinformation. A culture where people feel empowered to keep asking questions and to assume agency in shaping their collective future. It represents a modern interpretation of James Reckitt’s desire to create a thirst for knowledge.

And so Curiosity was born.

A movement. A kaleidoscope of initiatives, events, activities, projects and organisations not tethered to a particular building but existing in the online world because, like it or not, that’s where most of us dwell these days, all brought together under one banner.

I was delighted to be asked by Dave to get involved early on before the whole thing took off. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

My brief was to “write the kind of stuff you do”. The key ask was to come up with a question which might interest people and then attempt to answer it in an informative and entertaining way.

I’ve been contributing ever since and I’m glad to say the Curiosity family has grown a bit since then.

These days alongside old geezers like myself, broadcaster Burnsy, historian Robb Robinson and legendary Hull tour guide Paul Schofield, a thankfully much younger and the more talented bunch have joined gang.

In fact, one of the big aims going forward is to get more people of all ages and from all walks of life and from across the city to have a go at writing, presenting, filming and even producing their own material.

Ambitious? Yes but consider this factual nugget for a moment.

Over the last 18 months, Curiosity’s social media channels have become the fourth most popular in Hull with only the city’s three professional sports clubs achieving higher engagement - and then usually on match days.

As such, Curiosity content is already embedded in the online cultural and social environment of Hull.

Years ago, I used to get a kick when someone mentioned reading one of my newspaper stories. I even enjoyed watching folk flick through a paper on a bus or a train, knowing there was good chance they would be reading something I had written.

Today, I get the same buzz when someone says: “I enjoyed that Curiosity story you did the other day.”

As someone who started their craft armed with a notebook, pen, non-electric typewriter and a bottle of correction fluid, I still sometimes have to pinch myself about how technology has advanced since then.

They might have read it on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a TV screen.

Typically, I’m told my Curiosity story got them thinking, got them wondering about things they never knew or might have once known but had forgotten about. Job done.

What makes it even more satisfying if that unlike my old newspaper days when my printed words invariably ended up being wrapped around a portion of fish and chips before being thrown in the bin, my bits for Curiosity as well as all the other fantastic contributions are there forever - or at least until someone switches the Internet off for good.

Not only that, each daily dollop of Curiosity comes with handy reference points for people to follow for more information about each particular topic, typically via their local library.

It’s like a doorway to another world.

As trustee Graham Chesters puts it: “Hull is not lacking in passion and imagination, nor in a belief in the power of community, and we are confident that the curiosity is there to be unleashed.”

At this week’s event held at Hull Truck Theatre, the city’s business community was invited to get onboard. It wasn’t really a pitch for sponsors, more of a rallying cry to think how joining the Curiosity world could work for them, their employers and their customers.

And there’s more to come beyond the daily content , the occasional podcast and pitching up at The Big Malarkey Festival.

Later this summer Curiosity will be at Humber Street Sesh with Dave already telling anyone prepared to listen that we’re going to be the first-ever non-music act on the festival’s bill. History in the making.

See you there if not before.

It’s a traditional moment in the civic calendar when the normal political cut and thrust witnessed inside the council chamber is cast aside in favour a large slice of historic pomp and a side order of pleasantries.

Outgoing Lord Mayor Cheryl Payne will recall the her highlights of the last 12 months before placing the chain of office around the shoulders of her deputy and successor Maria Coward.

A few more words of thanks, the new Lord Mayor announces the charities she intends to support during the year and then it’s off for a few snapshots for the family album and a bufffet lunch.

I wish Maria well and happen to think she will do a good job.

The installation ceremony follows much the same pattern every year.

However, there will be a subtle difference this time with Daren Hale due to be installed as Deputy Lord Mayor.

When I first started covering the city council in the mid-1990s an informal policy of historical succession was in place when it came to deciding who the new Lord Mayor would be.

It worked by effectively ensuring whichever councillor had chalked up the most years on the authority would be appointed initially as the next Deputy Mayor before becoming Lord Mayor the following year.

This wasn’t a merit-based promotion to the highest civic honour in town. All you had to do was stick at it and avoid a knock on the door from the Grim Reaper.

The system was deployed by the ruling Labour group to guarantee a Labour Mayor every year.

This was because the Labour group was so large (at one point occupying all but one seat in the aforementioned council chamber) that other groups never had the numbers or sufficient wrinkles to challenge it.

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Technically, the appointment of a new Lord Mayor and Deputy is subject of a vote at the council’s annual meeting a week or so beforehand. However, such was the size of the Labour majority that the outcome was always a forgone conclusion.

Things changed in the early 2000s when the Lib Dems won power for 12 turbulent months before regaining control of the council for a longer spell a few years later.

The Lib Dems promptly scrapped the length-of-service rule and simply picked someone irrespective of how long they had been a city councillor.

In that first somewhat crazy term, an alliance with a small group of maverick ex-Labour independents was formed because the Lib Dems didn’t quite have enough councillors for a clear majority.

As a result, ex-Labour stalwart Terry Geraghty (who would later return to Labour) was manoeuvred into position as Mayor, skipping the normal convention of serving first as Deputy Lord Mayor.

A tenuous argument justifying the move was that Geraghty’s first relatively brief stint as a city councillor in the early 1970s before his much lengthier service as a county councillor in the Humberside authority qualified him for the role on the grounds of political longevity.

This conveniently ignored the unwritten but previously accepted rule that continuous service on the city council alone rather than any other council was the qualifying criteria.

Ultimately, it was an arrangement that suited both Geraghty’s ego and the Lib Dems by effectively sticking two fingers up at those sitting opposite on the Labour benches.

When Labour regained control 12 months later the historical succession policy was restored. As it happened, by this time Conservative John Fareham had sufficient miles on his civic clock to become Lord Mayor during the period.

At the start of their second spell in 2006, the Lib Dems still didn’t have the numbers and relied on support from a handful of minor opposition groups and the deciding vote of Colin Inglis, who was suspended by Labour at the time, to become the ruling administration.

It was enough to take political control but when it came to voting for a new Lord Mayor, that same small rump of support still favoured the historical succession system and Labour’s next-in-line long-in-the-tooth candidate Trevor Larsen got the gig.

Later, when the Lib Dems finally managed to put clear water between themselves and Labour they switched to voting their own in as Lord Mayor irrespective of the lengthy civic track records of some on the Labour side.

Since then both the Lib Dems and Labour have continued with this alternative arrangement while in power. That is, until now.

With the Lib Dems currently in charge, opposition Labour group leader Hale was last week voted in as the new Deputy Lord Mayor for 2025/6. He’s also currently the longest-serving councillor on the council.

All of a sudden, we’re back to historical succession. So why the change?

After the recent council elections, I wrote about the likelihood of an informal pact between the Lib Dems and Labour designed to put the squeeze on the new Reform UK group on the authority.

Now with 26 seats but without an overall majority, the Lib Dems can’t run the show exactly how they please.

Having lost seven of the eight seats they were defending, Labour are now on 16 seats. Reform have 10 while there are five independents.

While the numbers aren’t there for the Reform group to make much of a difference, I sense a political pincer move has been made to neutralise any potential threat from them.

Have the Lib Dems quietly agreed to Hale becoming Deputy Lord Mayor in exchange for Labour not kicking up too much of a fuss over their continuation as a minority administration? Probably.

Has Hale persuaded the Lib Dems to discreetly unite with his troops when the need arises to thwart the ambitions of Nigel Farage’s foot soldiers in Hull? Maybe.

It certainly looked that way at the recent council AGM when a Reform bid to get group leader Richard Kelly elected as planning committee chairman was quickly crushed.

By then, Lib Dem Mike Ross had been re-elected as council leader. Helpfully for him, Labour councillors abstained in the vote.

Pacts like this are rarely publicly acknowledged by either side. Many people across the political spectrum still shudder at the memory of David Cameron and Nick Clegg getting chummy in the rose garden at 10 Downing Street.

If a deal has been struck here, it’s likely to be more along the lines of a nod and a wink and a quiet word here and there. The days of secret handshakes behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms are long gone.

I also suspect it has involved a bit of crystal ball-gazing.

There’s no guarantee Reform will be able to repeat or even exceed the haul of ten seats it achieved earlier this month in next year’s Hull elections.

The cycle of having one-third of council seats up for election each year and the apparent resilience of the Lib Dem vote across the city means the prospect of Reform takeover next May seems remote despite Kelly’s forecast of a turquoise tsunami on the horizon. It could well turn out to be more of a trickle.

Either way, with Hale now likely to be chairing full council meetings as Lord Mayor from May next year he’s likely to use the opportunity to keep the brakes on Reform by denying them any wriggle room.

Aside from acting as the city’s ambassador, performing all kinds of ceremonial duties and getting to wear robes and a hat straight out the wardrobe department of Pirates of the Caribbean, the Lord Mayor also chairs full council meetings.

As chair, the Lord Mayor is meant to oversee the proceedings in a non-partisan manner.

By and large, that’s been the case over the years I’ve been reporting on the council with the odd exception when an occasional eyebrow-raising casting vote from the chair has been made.

Some have chaired full council meetings with a rod of iron, others have been more laid back. One or two didn’t appear to know what they were doing half the time.

In Hale’s case, I’m expecting a no-nonsense approach and I think it’s no accident that he’s been lined up to take over in the chair when Reform could well have more seats on the council.

He’s been around long enough to know the score. He’s a canny political operator, albeit one with a recent track record of leading Labour through a series of election reversals. Had he been a football manager, he would have been packing his bags long ago.

As it is, he will have to give up his role as Labour leader when he becomes Lord Mayor in 2027.

Meanwhile, the new Reform group faces a year of knuckling down, learning the ropes and doing the basics at ward level. It’s pretty much all they can do.

Given the council’s proportionality rules covering the distribution of committee places for each party, their ability to influence anything the council does over the next 12 months is extremely limited.

Some have suggested that without any previous frontline experience, some of the new Reform intake might start getting itchy feet once the realisation sets in that they’re politically isolated. Alternatively, adopting a ‘them and us’ mentality might suit them down to the ground.

So the civic year ahead of us set. Beyond that, who knows what’s in store? As ever, politics in Hull is never dull.

Of all the highlights from Saturday’s Championship play-off final victory, I’ve personally enjoyed re-watching Hull City winger Yu Hirakawa’s controlled creation of Oli McBurnie’s match-winning goal the most.

The Japanese international practically caresses the ball with the outside of his right boot before a firmer touch and a sudden burst of pace takes him into enough space to tee up the chance.

It’s footballing poetry in motion.

Aside from Hirakawa’s sublime moment of skill, I’ve spent a lot of time since then following the online reaction in Turkey to City’s return to the Premier League.

As you might expect, a large chunk of it is partially lost in translation.

A debate on one long thread appeared to revolve around whether City’s Turkish owner Acun Illicali should have paraded around Wembley in the post-match celebrations with a crinkled Turkish national flag or a neatly ironed and pre-folded one.

Another featured some interesting opinions on the charms or otherwise of Hull as a city as viewed from 2,000 miles away in Instanbul.

The main takeaway appeared to be a lot of Turkish pride in the achievements of both City and Ilicali with the presence of hundreds of black and amber-clad Turkish football fans on Saturday underlining this unlikely bromance.

As Ilicali is a recent former vice-president at Fenerbache, their presence at Wembley wasn’t a surprise particularly when he revealed after the game that he had arranged tickets and transport for 200 of them. Another 200 attended the match having made their own arrangements.

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Perhaps more interesting were some other faces on his extended guest list on Saturday, including Turkish billionaires Yuksel Yildirim and Murat Ulker.

The former is the head of a family-owned Turkish conglomerate with global interests in mining, metals and shipping while the latter leads a vast food group which includes United Biscuits who, through its McVities brand, has provided previous sponsorship support to City.

The club’s ascent to the Premier League now makes it even more attractive proposition for Turkish investors.

What is clear is that unlike the club’s previous promotions to English football’s top tier, this one will be accompanied by some serious investment from the owner alongside the money automatically triggered from the PL itself. Whether other major Turkish business figures join in remains to be seen.

While fans brace themselves for a summer of potentially big player signings, I would like to see Ilicali and whoever he can persuade to back him financially to take a proper look at the community facilities around the MKM Stadium.

I wrote about this issue here last week before the play-off final and I still stand by every word.

The mothballed outdoor pitches designed for public are a disgrace, the exterior of the indoor arena could do with a serious deep-clean, the road around the stadium probably needs resurfacing and some new directional signs to replace the existing grime-covered ones wouldn’t go amiss either. I’m also told that visiting some of the toilets inside the stadium isn’t a pleasant experience these days.

All of the above falls under the responsibility of the Stadium Management Company, the operators of the ground and its immediate environment, which these days is owned by Ilicali having previously been in the hands of successive Hull City owners.

In between reading Turkish tweets about Hull, I decided to check the latest SMC accounts and discovered its most recent annual accounts covering were published two months ago in March covering the year up to 30 June 2025.

The period covers last season for both City and fellow tenants Hull FC, neither of whom covered themselves in much glory at the time.

The main headline was a £3.2m net loss for the year (£3.1m loss in the previous year) despite an increase in revenue in key activities including matchday attendance. According to the report, the loss was covered by funds supplied by Ilicali’s main holding company, its ultimate owner.

“The company (SMC) relies upon the support of the parent company, Acun Medya Holding BV. The parent company has provided funds to meet all trading obligations and will continue to support the company,” it says.

Encouragingly, a strategic report within the accounts paints an optimistic view of the future despite Hull City’s flirtation with relegation last season and the subsequent well-documented transfer embargo stalling progress on proposed re-development in around the stadium.

Four areas for “strategic growth” are highlighted, including improving stadium facilities to enhance the matchday experience, reducing matchday costs without compromising quality while negotiating better vendor and supplier terms, strengthening fan engagement and, last but by no means least hopefully, “investing in stadium infrastructure improvements to ensure long-term sustainability and upgrading amenities to maintain a high standard for fans and event attendees.”

They are listed as bullet points in the report as simple statements of intent but at least they are there.

There’s also been a relatively recent change in directors at the SMC too, with Mustafa Yokes and Kerim Sayan being appointed in September last year - two trusted right-hand men from Ilicali’s team. Sayan is also deputy chief executive at Acun Medya.

With promotion, things will hopefully start to improve off the pitch.

The SMC - often forgotten about when the action gets going on the pitch - needs a bit of extra Turkish delight more than ever. Exciting times? Let’s hope so.

At first glance, North Ferriby doesn’t seem to the place where people are too worried about their energy bills.

The village lying immediately west of Hull and Hessle is firmly part of the leafy gin and Jaguar belt.

Historically, it’s a place where wealthy 18th and 19th century Hull merchants spent their money on building on large houses for themselves.

Today, the parish of Ferriby is still home to a generally affluent population of just over 4,000 while highly-paid footballers have replaced wealthy shipowners,

Even so, I’m sitting in Simon Hudson’s living room discussing the cost of living and, in particular, household utility bills.

Two decades ago he was the first resident in the village to install solar panels on the roof of his house. At the time, it was a big investment in relatively new and unknown but expensive technology.

A self-confessed “eco geek”, he’s been exploring alternatives to the traditional use of fossil fuel technology for domestic power ever since. Over the years, he’s added more solar panels and air source heat pumps.

“How much do you think a typical solar panel for a house costs these days?” he suddenly asks.

I admit I haven’t a clue and take a wild guess at £1,000. He smiles. “About £40 to £50,” he says with a smile.

His point is that the affordability of making the switch to more environmentally-friendly power sources is still not fully understood by most people. The days of waiting several years for a return on an initial investment are rapidly coming to an end.

Simon’s semi-detached house is relatively modest by Ferriby standards. When I arrive for our chat I mistakenly approach the house next door having clocked solar panels on its roof. Had he persuaded his neighbour to follow suit?

“It’s been a ripple effect. Because I was the first to do it, I’ve had lots of people coming up to me in the village asking about the pros and cons. I can probably think of at least a dozen who have gone ahead with it after having a chat.

“Once they get their head around how much money they are likely to be saving, it’s usually a no-brainer.”

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In his garage he shows me the less glamorous ‘behind-the-scenes’ tech which comes with the panels installed on two south-facing roofs at the rear of his house. I get the impression many others have been given the same guided tour.

Three years ago he teamed up with some friends with a shared enthusiasm for green technology to spread the word in a more practical way by helping organisations in the village to switch to using more sustainable forms of energy.

The creation of Sustainable Ferriby as a community interest company coincided with his retirement.

“I was lucky enough to be in a position to start something like this with a few other like-minded people here who I’ve got to know over the years.

“We initially applied for a grant to get up and running but didn’t get it so we just cracked on and came up with a list of 15 organisations in Ferriby and Swanland to approach to see if they would be interested.”

So far, a couple of those projects have already been ticked off the list.

Solar power has been installed at an allotment allowing gardeners to replace their petrol-driven lawnmower with a battery-charged alternative, the village’s primary school now has solar panels on its roof as has a social club.

Both the allotment and social club solar arrays received grant funding sourced by Sustainable Ferriby who also managed to persuade East Riding Council to opt for solar panels as part of refurbishment work at the school.

“There is a perception that everyone living in a village like North Ferriby is well off and, to an extent, it’s true but it doesn’t apply to everyone,” says Simon.

“Being a community interest company literally means we have to deliver benefits to the community and there is a sizeable number of people here who need help with things like energy bills.

“We got involved with the social club partly because it primarily serves that demographic. The club had seen a big increase in its energy bills to the point where they were becoming a real financial drain on the business.

“We managed to persuade them to use solar panels as a way of making the club more viable because without the club being there, the community it serves would lose out. In the end it’s win-win and works really well because the power is generated during the day when the club is usually closed and then used at night when it’s open.”

The remaining projects on the original list are still being assessed, including a potential solar link-up with Northern Premier League side North Ferriby FC.

“Our model is different to most community energy organisations, “ explained Simon.

“We act as enablers by encouraging and supporting others to own and operate energy assets for the benefit of the wider community.

“As a non-profit CIC, we’re not about owning and running our own energy projects. Instead, we provide expertise, source potential grant funding and give people confidence to make the change.

“As a rule, people don’t really understand the benefits of sustainable energy until it’s explained to them. There’s a lot of understandable fear about considering doing something new. We make it easier for them to believe in it.”

The allotment project is a good example of putting this into practice.

“The people at the allotment contacted us to look at how they could bring power to the site while staying completely off-grid.”

The solution was the installation of a four-panel solar array on the roof of a shed housing a manual Edwardian era water pump connected via a borehole to an underground aquifer. Funding secured from a nearby wind farm community grant scheme made it happen.

Allotment committee vice-chairman Alistair Green said: “Installing a traditional power line to the site would have cost us a fortune.

“As it is, we now have clean energy from the solar panels. We’ve got a new, much lighter mower and removed the problem of storing petrol on site. We’ve also got a place where people can charge their own tools and even a power source for lighting if we need it.”

Sustainable Ferriby’s long-term aim is to turn the whole village into an ‘energy club’ with network of community-run projects, generating their own surplus energy to offer to residents at cut-price rates.

Beyond that, rolling out the same model to other neighbouring villages is also on the agenda.

For now, Simon the CIC’s work is already inspiring others.

“I can probably think of at least two dozen people in the village who have had rooftop solar panels installed directly as a result of what we have been doing since we started.

“People are starting to get it - whether it’s solar, heat pumps or electric vehicles - and we are here to help them.”