Once Again Assembled Here

Travel Guide

Hull

Most of the novel takes place in and about a school in Hull and a secret from  WW2 but the rest of the city comes into view with snapshots and flashbacks of a city undergoing change and hiding secrets:

Holy Trinity church

“The marketplace was deserted in the darkening later afternoon. There was fog in the air and a bonfirey smell that seemed charged with a sourceless nostalgia.

I walked slowly around the church. It was still smoke-blackened and Dickensian in those days, with its madly elaborate exterior and its somewhat uncomfotable tower that looked as if it had been arrested short of its full height

Towards the end of the twelfth century, before there was a church on this site, the city had seen a pogrom against its small Jewish community. Following the massacre at York in 1190, Richard I had forbidden the persecution of the Jews”

However,as soon as he departed for his Third Crusade, there was a rash of incidents until the expulsion of the Jews from England a century  later.

Hands On History Museum

Given the academic setting of this novel, the Hands of History Museum is a good place to visit.

Victoria Park

This park features a lot in the novel. It’s right next to the Humber docks so very central and a nice oasis in a busy city.

Feldberg’s Antiquarian bookshop

Feldberg’s Antiquarian books occupied a surprisingly large, not to say labyrinthine premises in the Victoria Arcade near the Law Courts.

Feldberg’s lay in the deep interior between a religious supplies shoe and a joke emporium with a side line in pornography. The idea was presumably that you graduated from porn to antiquarianism and then sough consolation of the church.