Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate, in York, is always cited as Yorkshire’s shortest street. What about the longest? Google’s AI suggested Beverley Road, in Hull. So obviously I didn’t believe it. AI-generated information about cycling tends to be a load of cobblers. More cobblers than a shoemakers’ convention in Northampton eating desserts with fruit filling and biscuit topping.
But as it happened I had some business in Hull today, and I liked the idea of some cycling flânerie between its centre and the market town of Beverley, destination of the putative longest street.
I started in Paragon St, to check out the People’s Memorial. The UFO-like silver globe commemorates those lost in WWII bombing raids: Hull suffered as badly as anywhere. Peer inside the globe’s slits and you can see silhouette figures, including a chap on a bike.
Perhaps one day I’ll ride from here to the celebrated memorial in Meriden, in the middle of Britain, which remembers the cyclists who died in both world conflicts.
Nearby is the historic site of Beverley Gate, where until the 1780s ‘Beverley Road’ used to begin, at the entrance to Hull’s old walled city. Its remains are set out as a sight to see, not because there’s much to admire – it’s, er, a pile of old bricks – but because of its historic significance.
Here in 1642, was the first major incident of the Civil War. Hull’s famously independent citizens locked out King Charles and told him to push off, which sounds an engaging idea to me still.
Beverley Road used to run along what is now King Edward St (Edward, as king? Come back Charles, all is forgiven!) and Prospect St, a shopping axis that has a statue of Hull’s most famous high flyer. Local girl Amy Johnson (1903–41) was a pioneering pilot and the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia – not the first bright talented young Hull thing to get as far out of the city as possible, I suppose.
The start of Beverley Road now is at the busy road junction with Spring Bank, by the Travelodge and the offices of the Hull Daily Mail.
I’ve a soft spot for the Hull Daily Mail. It’s a bog in East Yorkshire. Because in 2017 the paper notoriously ran a front-page feature ‘exposing’ cyclists ‘flouting’ a ‘city centre ban’ on riding a ‘pedestrians only’ area, before it was pointed out to them that it was a cycling zone and the riders were doing nothing wrong.
Anyway, here starts Yorkshire’s longest street. A street is certainly is, being a thoroughfare with lots of reasons to stop, as opposed to a road, where you exactly don’t want to stop.
Beverley Road has plenty of shops; many were shuttered and graffitied this grim February afternoon, the opened ones being a mix of ethnic groceries, vape and tat parlours, fried chicken joints, and placeholder charity shops and local organisations.
Beverley Road’s popular-culture claim to fame is that Nos. 34–38 was the home of Turner’s, a furniture store whose slogan – Everything But The Girl! – became the band name of local musicians Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. It’s the headquarters of Hull Bid and other bodies now.
A council leaflet details some of the heritage of Bev Road, though a lot of it is shabby and scruffy now. The ‘Lightowler Houses’, once the villa homes of Hull’s well-to-do, for instance. The National Picture Theatre is famous as Britain’s last surviving unrestored WWII bomb damage – but now that work to refurbish it has, after over eighty years, at last started, the whole building is under scaffolding and sheeting.
Beverley Road isn’t an uplifting place – a long, tatty street on the fringes of a struggling town, home evidently to a wide range of people whose parents did not work on the docks in Hull’s golden days, but perhaps had their own battles in Africa, the Middle East or Eastern Europe.
My eye was drawn to two little architectural gems: the Mayfair building, a striking art deco cinema that is now apartments; and the grand entrance gate to Pearson Park just off Beverley Road. The park was a haunt and home of Philip Larkin, whose glum poetry makes Morrissey look like Michaela Strachan.
It was also drawn to the graffitied remains of the Rose Hotel, with art-nouveau tiling and a pub sign mysteriously modelled after Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s delightfully fluffy self-portrait. Rococo on Beverley Road! Yay!
I’ll say this for Beverley Road: it’s not bad to cycle. The bike-path provision is a bit mixed, but it’s pretty good and fairly extensive, and I found riding reasonably stress-free despite the busy traffic.
Beverley Road is definitely a street up till now, but it stops feeling that way once you get to the junction with Cottingham Road, 1.75 miles from Spring Bank. The shops run out, and after this you keep heading north-north-west, still with adequate cycle provision, but it feels busy, roady, dual-carriageway-ey.
I carried on to Beverley, anyway. Beverley Road, Hull swops to Hull Road, Beverley at a point in the countryside at Dunswell, about four miles from Spring Bank. So, Yorkshire’s longest street is either 1.75 miles or 4.35 miles, depending on how loose your definition of ‘street’. (Shops? Opportunities to stop? Houses?)
In Beverley I couldn’t resist having a look at Grovehill Junction, once pilloried in the populist press as Britain’s ‘most complicated intersection’, thanks to its 42 sets of traffic signals.
As with my recent trip to see Sheffield’s ‘controversial’ ‘Dutch roundabout’, there was nothing to report. The Enigma Code it isn’t. It’s, er, a road junction with a lot of signals that, you know, works fine.
And so to York, where I finished my trip with Yorkshire’s Shortest Street. The celebrated Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate stretches a mere 80 feet / 24m, most of that consisting of the sign. It’s really just the last bit of Colliergate, with only a shop or two, one of which satisfying is numbered 1½.
A plaque unconvincingly explains the origin of the name, and the street sign is much photographed by tourists heading for Shambles round the corner, or perhaps Greggs opposite. (By the way, a few websites refer to Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate as ‘Yorkshire’s longest street name’, but it’s not even York’s longest. Upper Grosvenor Street is near my house, and I’ve cycled along Killingwoldgraves Lane outside Beverley in the past.)
So, well, that’s the long and the short of it. Yorkshire’s Longest Street and Yorkshire’s Shortest Street, explored the best way: by bike.