Sutton & Wawne Museum for maps directions

M A P S & G U I D E S
to our villages, plus a brief look at what records we have
the guide to "THE GROVES" is now further down the page

Founded by Merrill & Peter Rhodes over 30 yrs ago ~ The Old School Museum ~
Our historic area also covers Stoneferry, Wilmington and
St Marks in The Groves. Perhaps we should have called it
The Merrill Museum, it would have been very appropriate

celebrating ancient villages linked by a shared history

Folk Museum & Family History Centre
inside The Old School
manned entirely by friendly volunteers ~~ and we need more !

Additional to the Image Map above, with it's clickable links, there's a Wawne photo website, by Barbara ... excellent!

z Bus Map for Sutton	Church Street - main buildings
Streetmap - map of Sutton area ....	Streetmap - map of Wawne area ....

A full list of all the graves in both churchyards, St Peter's and St James',
are on this website at GRAVEYARD LISTS. Photos supplied via email on request.

the map to the right showing their
proximity, on the northern outskirts of
Hull about 3 miles, or 2.7km, apart.

It's hard to credit it now, but there never used to be anything between the areas of those shaded circles, Sutton to the south-east, and the smaller Wawne to the north-west. Nothing at all, other than a few lone cottages, farms, and one large country house set back from the lane. The whole area would have been predominantly white on this map.

That brown connecting line with its modern roundabouts is that very old lane, today the Wawne Road - and no longer a quiet country lane. It ran along the low ridge that kept the ancient trackway just above the floodplain, the very track that villagers of old Sutton had to walk to attend mass every Sunday and feast day at St Peter's Church in Wawne. That was the time when their own church was merely a tiny chapelry of St Peter's, in the early 1300s. For centuries, until less than 100 years ago, walkers or horse riders along that lane would only have heard the song of the lark, chattering hedge sparrows and assorted other birds, mingled with the bleats of hundreds of sheep - and maybe the occasional beast - in the large fields on either side of the hedgerows.

For over 700 years ago, Wawne was the 'senior' church or village, and Sutton's chapel merely a 'daughter' church. Though an earlier building to the present St Peter's is thought to date from well before the Norman conquest, the earliest known historical references date from 1115.

Until the 'new' St James' at Sutton was built, the one we see today, and then consecrated as a new and separate parish in 1349, all burials had to be held at St Peter's. It was along this green lane that mourners would slowly proceed, carrying their coffin, winter or summer, rain or shine, to bury their dead.

For well over 400 years, life in both villages moved through the various changes and upheavals in English life, occasionally ravaged, touched or influenced by some, but by-passed by many. Kings and Queens, civil wars and insurrections, all came and went, and the area remained a remarkably quiet backwater, even by English standards. Nothing changed much at all until the industrial revolution brought more modern farming implements, or the occasional windmill converted to steam as well as wind. Undoubtedly the biggest changes, and most notably the biggest visible sign in Sutton of that revolution, like thousands of villages nationwide, was the coming of the railway.

From that time on, in 1864, Sutton increasingly became a 'dormitory' village of Hull, and increasing in size year on year as that nearby whaling and fishing town also grew in both size and wealth to give us more or less the shape of the heart of the village in what we see today.

It is my personal belief that had the new railway first taken a slightly more northerly course on leaving Hull, so following lower ground nearer to the river to avoid cutting through the slightly higher ground that was Sutton on its low ridge, it would have passed more equally between the two villages, before then turning roughly east towards Swine as it did after passing through Sutton. Perhaps then the station would have really been titled, "Sutton & Wawne," and Wawne would have benefitted more too. There were many stations so titled when two places shared the same railway. Money often played a big part, when a wealthy landowner paid or bought shares in the railway company so as to have the line pass through his estate, and thereby often got a 'free' station for his own use.

We can speculate that our fabled station might well have been on that same lane, perhaps near where "The Swallow" pub is now just south of the Wawne Drain. The area immediately around would surely have grown up long before it did, just as it has some 100 years later when Bransholme estate was built.

As it was, trudging 3 miles to the nearest station in Sutton was better than having no station at all, or else traverse the muddy 5 miles or so directly down through Stoneferry into Hull. Perhaps there were marginal benefits to Wawne after all.

My circles on the map mark the centre of both parishes, and show both villages appear to be well separated. And so they are now. Newcomers to Hull and it's history could be forgiven for thinking that first Bransholme, and then Kingswood, were always there. But it wasn't always so.

In 2017, Bransholme was just 50 years of age, and the even more recently built Kingswood development was still but a pup and a planner's dream.

The estates, comprising what is now, in effect, a growing small town, were born out of the remnants of what had been the 'Abercrombie Plan' devised for Hull after the massive destruction of the Blitz. As well as slum clearance that would have happened anyway, some 80% of the city's housing stock was destroyed or damaged in the wartime bombing. Hull needed a lot of new homes. And in the 1950s, it started to grow.

Even more folks may be surprised to know that it was never originally intended for Hull's new 'dormitory town' to be built on the flood plain where it is now - but first planned for the slightly more highly elevated fields and woods around either Rise Park, to the north east beyond Skirlaugh, or equally well to the east at Burton Constable! Come into the museum and view our copy of the Abecrombie Plan - we have the maps of what was first proposed and it certainly was not what we have now.

All of Bransholme, Sutton Park and Kingswood, were virgin fields, frequently flooded from an untamed and very tidal River Hull in winter, but dry enough to graze cattle in summer. There were several dairy farms, but two of them, Low and High Bransholme, gave the area it's name today. Wawne Drain, one of several dug by the ancient monks of Meux, was always the boundary between the two ancient parishes, and would be so today had not the very new St John's Church been built on Wawne Road itself, thus making yet another new parish to serve the huge number of new inhabitants of Bransholme.

The Groves
The actual shape of the historic Sutton parish is even more of a surprise, for only a fraction of that old parish is shown on the map above. Until 1887,

it's former shape could be roughly likened to this mishapen red kite, where the wobbly tail extended way to the south, right down Cleveland Street to the north side of Witham, and thence north back up Dansom Lane. The west side of the wobbly tail was the course of the River Hull, the far side of which was mostly the parish of Sculcoates. The white cross marks the relative position of St James' Church in Sutton village, inside the red circle on the map above, and the white line that of Witham and Holderness Road today. Below that white line was the adjoining parish of Drypool, and another St Peter's Church, sadly destroyed in the Blitz. We mention those adjoining parishes because so many folks who research their Sutton family history will find those other parish names cropping up in their records too. It's not at all unusual to see a record of a lass born in one parish, married in the next, and buried in another, all close by and abutting each other. For our purposes, we can think of Sutton as being almost central to all those other places named around it.

The green cross is the area of Stoneferry, the mauve cross is Wilmington, and the green circle denotes the area known as 'The Groves', or anciently, the 'Growths'. It was very wet around there, the river bursting its banks with monotonous regularity several times a year during very high spring tides until higher banks and better drainage was installed in Victorian times. In fact, it flooded annually all down Witham to even as recently as the 1950s, and only the building of the Tidal Surge Barrier in 1980 pretty well cured the annual deluge to the low-lying dwellings either side. Click the graphic to enlarge it. The 'Growths' took it's uninspiring name from the sheer amount and proximity of huge reed beds, fertilised by the regular flooding, several times in some years. They must surely have been tall and dense to deserve the name.

Thus all of Stoneferry, Wilmington and St Mark's in the Groves (or Growths, to give it's even older title) were areas whose inhabitants were often baptised, married and buried at St James' in Sutton village itself, leading to much confusion today amongst family history researchers. As an aside, it's worth pointing out here that another minor point for confusion is that St James' at Sutton is often mistaken for the war-damaged - and long since demolished - church of St James', in St James' Square just off Hessle Road behind the old ARCO building on the other side of the city to the west.

The 1881 Census was the last to record Lime Street and The Groves as being in Sutton Parish. Increasing industrialisation brought the numerous new terraced streets and tiny courts housing those thousands more inhabitants up both sides of Cleveland St. They were folk who would eventually gain their own parish churches - St Mark's consecrated in 1887 was one, St Saviour's at Wilmington was another - and thus the old, huge and medieval parish of Sutton was divided up.

Before we leave 'Lime St' - and The Groves - it is worth mentioning the connection with the famous hymn tune, 'Melita', known to generations of Royal Navy seamen as "Eternal Father, Strong to Save ...". Those now famous words were penned by a Hampshire man, William Whiting, but the man who wrote that just as famous tune was Rev. John Bacchus Dykes, born in 1823 down Lime St here in Hull. He later became a lifelong abolitionist and good friend of William Wilberforce, amongst many others. It is of particular note to us that baby John was baptised in St James' Church in Sutton, perhaps our most notable example of one born so far away from Sutton village but still baptised there, because it was his family's parish, however inconvenient the long walk in those distant days. Another of his many famous hymn tunes, around 300 all told, was 'Holy, Holy, Holy." How many times has that been sung in St James' over the past 150 years and folks had no idea of the connection. A great deal more detail of John's life may be found in a book, FAR HORIZONS, by Robb Robinson of Hull University, available via the University or usual book retailers and similar channels. Hull History centre has research copies.

A 'stylised' map of the immediate Groves area shows the very southernmost extent of Sutton Parish until 1887,

St Mark's in The Groves .. click to enlarge

though St Mark's Church itself is just off this map a hundred yards to the north, beyond Mulgrave Street. The map can be seen here, on clicking this thumbnail.

The red kite lost its tail.
Or maybe it was a red flatfish.

A much longer description of the whole 'Groves' area, including another map and a tribute to their formerly 'lost war dead', is on a whole page to itself, HERE, and will open in a fresh page in your browser.

Back to the Start Page

It is because of all that ancient history,
the family connections between the folks of both villages
and all the farms in between, that makes our little museum -
and thus our website - what it is, and what we are all about.

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broadley

merrill1976pet3r

Use this page also in conjunction with the
Family History information and Other Links pages

OUR MUSEUM SHOP

where our DVDs,
local interest
books, etc
are on sale
every Friday

The photo below
is a good example
of the dozens of
images that we hold
in our extensive
photo archive.

Click to enlarge it.

This class of girls
mostly seem to
enjoy having their
photograph taken ...
but not all, it seems.

Go to the
CHURCHES PAGE
for information on how to contact the main
parish churches, their clergy and church offices.

IMAGE MAPS
Hover your mouse over areas of either of these images, such as the Churches, churchyards, Village Halls or Schools, and you'll find that various areas and buildings are 'clickable' and takes to a relevant page. If the mouse arrow changes to a hand with a pointing finger, try clicking it ....
LINKS UPDATED: Sept 2022 : : : : : Convert this aerial image to a Street Map showing main buildings; use Backspace key to return to aerial view. All the links in this IMAGEMAP, except St Peter's Church, leave this site and then open in a new browser window. Additional to the Image Map above, with it's clickable links, there's a Wawne photo website, by Barbara ... excellent!

Use this page also in conjunction with the Family History information and Other Links pages

OUR MUSEUM SHOP where our DVDs, local interest books, etc are on sale every Friday

The photo below is a good example of the dozens of images that we hold in our extensive photo archive. Click to enlarge it. This class of girls mostly seem to enjoy having their photograph taken ... but not all, it seems.

Go to the CHURCHES PAGE for information on how to contact the main parish churches, their clergy and church offices.

Use this page also in conjunction with the
Family History information and Other Links pages

OUR MUSEUM SHOP

where our DVDs,
local interest
books, etc
are on sale
every Friday

The photo below
is a good example
of the dozens of
images that we hold
in our extensive
photo archive.

Click to enlarge it.

This class of girls
mostly seem to
enjoy having their
photograph taken ...
but not all, it seems.

Go to the
CHURCHES PAGE
for information on how to contact the main
parish churches, their clergy and church offices.