Wednesday 19 August 2009

Goole area

We've paid a few visits to the Goole area now, firstly the village of Hook which lies in the bend of the river Ouse to the north east of Goole. Then we took a look at Old Goole which lies to the south of the town. Both times we nibbled away at a bit of the town that was closest to the village. Today we waded in and tackled part of the town centre and residential area south of the railway.

Hook was straight-forward. It is a pleasant place but rather ominously there is an embankment between the village and the river. I want to improve the river bank and there is a footpath along the top of the embankment so a walk is in order. I think the river bank was drawn as part of the coastline process from aerial photos. It is very jagged which is not how the river looks, but the only way to make it better is the walk it with a GPS. I would find it hard to live under the embankment without constantly checking how high the river is on the other side. About one fifth of the rainfall of England flows out of the Humber into the North Sea; the Humber is mostly fed from the Ouse and the Trent.

Old Goole is a rather run-down place on the outskirts of Goole near its docks. We trolled around seeing two abandoned churches and a single small supermarket. We headed into Goole to look at the industrial estate near the docks. We discovered a bustling, thriving marina at the end of the Aire and Calder canal. There was a mix of canal narrow boats and motor cruisers. I think there is access into the river Ouse through lock gates. There is a public footpath through there so I'll get a better look.

Today's push into the town was through a tangle of Victorian terraces which was quite a tricky job to draw up later. The buildings gave a couple of areas with poor GPS reception and some of the name plates on the streets were hard to find and very hard to read. Some of the streets were completely boarded up ready for redevelopment, presumably when the building industry picks up.

The town still needs much more work so a few more visits are needed. I'm not sure when we will return because Hull is about to get all of its bus stops loaded from the NaPTAN import. We then need to visit them to see if they are correctly positioned. We have not tagged any bus stops so far so the issue in some areas of merging existing stops with the new imports will not apply, but the experience of the Birmingham team who processed the first import indicates that most stops need moving and that some will be missing or spurious. We'll see what we find.

1 comment:

- said...

Re: NaPTAN, I'm not sure either, I should probably chase up the mailing list.