Picturing the 1780 Charterhouse

 The first pictures we have of the 1789 Charterhouse building are, of course, not photographs but drawings.  

This one seems to commemorate the opening of the new building.

This one appears in Tickell's book on the history of Hull and is dated 1793.  On the western edge is the archway which was the last remaining bit of the priory, and through it can be seen a windmill.  There is no paved road outside the building and no obvious boundary to the property.  The angle from which the drawing has been made is slightly different from what one could achieve today; there are buildings in the way now.

There are very few depictions of the buildings other than the original 1780 structure, including the blocks built behind it.  

This one by F S Smith is the only one which survives, drawn in 1885.  Even when photography was common very few people ventured round the back, so this is a particularly valuable image.

The oldest photo we've found of the Charterhouse is a postcard dated 1904.  This one looks very much like it so is of a similar date.  I wonder if the residents are lined up outside waiting for a funeral procession to go by.  The fascination of this photo is in the external appearance of the building.  It is covered in ivy (or is it virginia creeper?); we know that this didn't survive intact into WW2.  A photo taken in 1941 after an air raid caused blast damage shows most of it has gone from the front wall.  However, the flag pole is still there in the later photo.  Most obviously, the early photo shows the boundary wall and railings.  We don't have the date for when these were installed.

 When the building we now know as Old House was rescued from near-dereliction after the war the brick-work was stripped of all plant life, and the trees were removed.  From then on the photos of the Charterhouse mostly look very similar.  This is one I took about 10 years - but it's out of date.  The very tall chimneys have since been shortened to reduce the risk of them succumbing to high winds.  

People who live and work around the Charterhouse have access to other angles from which to take photographs.  Here are a few.

 

Occasionally photographers have tried manipulating their pictures to produce something out of the ordinary.

I'm not sure how this curved image was done.

And this one owes much to Photoshop.

There are many ways of looking at the Charterhouse.

[Thanks to, among others, Carol Osgerby, Adam Randall, Ken Hines and UniqueImagesof Hull.]