28i15: Street Cricket, Abbey St area, 1981 - East Hull
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A view of Hull
Still Occupied
Images on this site are arranged into rough areas by location as in my book 'Still Occupied', available on Blurb. Eventually this site will contain all the images in that book and more.
A game of cricket in the street - according to my contact sheet, Abbey St - in front of a rather forbidding factory building which I'm pretty sure is no longer there. The G5 is perhaps for Gate 5, suggesting this was a fairly large undertaking. The ball, a tennis ball, is just visible to the left of the batter, a girl who has taken a pretty hefty swing which failed to make contact.
I think this was a family game, with an older man at the left who could be a brother or father. I stood and watched for a few seconds, taking 2 pictures - this was the second. The 35mm shift was a manual lens, not ideally suited to action, but I had learnt to squeeze the button on the lens to stop down the aperture and press the shutter release as a single action - and still find myself sometimes doing so while taking pictures - just as I sometimes still try to push the lens body to one side or another to adjust the framing, but realise what I'm doing when it doesn't move.
The 35mm shift was a kind of gift from Hull, something I'd long coveted but not been able to afford. One day I got off the train in Paragon Station and walked across Ferensway to look in the window of the photography dealer a few yards up the road, Hilton Photography (they moved to Paragon St years ago) and there was the lens in the window. It wasn't cheap, but it was in pristine condition and considerably less than the new price. These were rare items, I'd not seen one secondhand before and nor I imagine had the dealers, and I suspect they didn't really know what it was or what it was worth. I really couldn't afford it, but I bought it on the spot.
Peter Marshall
01784 456474