How holidays used to be - book opens window into past

Dressed in long coats and furs and nearly everyone, including the very youngest, wearing hats, a charabanc overflowing with workers sets out on their annual holidays.

Staff from the Steam Toffee Works in Hull gather by the Grey Cars charabanc - a monster of an open-top vehicle which would take people on four-day Lakeland trips for just £8, around 1922.

It is one of 200 images from a vast archive collected by local historian Paul Gibson, which appears in the fifth volume of the popular Hull Then and Now series. It contains intriguing pictures of some of Hull’s old shops - which tended to have far more ornate shopfronts - the city’s early motor transport, and pubs past and present.

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Mr Gibson bemoans the fact that the trend - which started in the late 1800s - of sweeping away the old, continues apace: “The outcry over lost buildings seems only to be heard once they are scheduled for demolition, or have already been lost,” he writes. He has seen many of his top 10 list of buildings at risk disppear, including Moors’ & Robson’s Breweries Ltd, Crown Brewery, Francis Street, earlier this year. The book is available from Waterstones Hull and online, price £18.