The hundred year old shed

Image: © Paul Glazzard Taken: 18 Sep 2007

The year is 1905. Queen Victoria isn't looking too well these days, having been pronounced dead some four years ago and succeeded by her son Edward VII. Newcastle are top of the English football league and a major match has just kicked off in Russia between Tsarist troops and Russian workers. Norway has decided to end its union with Sweden and set up its own kingdom, and some fuzzy-haired patent examiner from Berne, Switzerland, has published what he calls his 'special theory of relativity'. In South Africa a mine superintendent doing a routine check at the end of the day has stumbled across a 3,106 carat shiny white rock called the Cullinan diamond, the biggest chunk of which will eventually end up in the Tower of London on top of the sceptre in the British crown jewels. Meanwhile at Whitedale Station near Withernwick, East Yorkshire, workers are erecting a standard 12ft by 12ft parcel shed on the southbound platform of the Hull and Hornsea Railway line. One hundred and two years later, Queen Victoria is still dead and Newcastle are no longer top of the football league. The disused Hull and Hornsea railway line now forms the Hornsea Rail Trail and the eastern stretch of the Trans Pennine Trail, which runs for 215 miles from Hornsea to Southport and was officially opened in September 2001. The signal box at Whitedale has long since disappeared and the sturdy brick-built coal bays are rapidly falling apart but this simple wooden parcel shed remains intact, having been maintained as a garden shed by the owners of the station house since the railway's closure in the 1960s. This old shed has seen a lot in its lifetime. Or maybe it hasn't. After all, it's just a shed.

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