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The Tin House, Immingham: Last surviving Edwardian shack built for Yorkshire dock workers open to the public. Tony Johnson spoke with Malcolm Cullum about the Immingham Dock Tours taking place on Saturday, July 22.
Transcript
00:00 My name is Malcolm Cullum and I'm the owner of this place which is the last remaining
00:08 tin bungalow in Immingham on Pallum Road of what was a whole town built for the navvies
00:15 who worked on Immingham Dock.
00:16 Can you just tell us about the history of the place?
00:19 Yeah, they were built in 1906 and they were presumably here for ten years and when the
00:29 dock was completed in 1912 they were sold off.
00:35 Most have been demolished but now this is the last one.
00:40 Can you just tell us about who would have lived here and the other buildings in the
00:46 town that were built at the same time?
00:49 Yeah, down the lower end of Immingham, it's still known as bottom end and top end, it
00:56 is on a slight slope, the town, towards the dock so we can't get flooded if there was
01:02 a surge.
01:03 And down the bottom end they built this whole town of what was mostly dormitories but they
01:10 built shops and a beer hall and things like that.
01:16 But they obviously put the bosses up the top end there, these bungalows are slightly bigger
01:23 and obviously they've been well maintained to remain all these years later.
01:29 So who actually lived in this property?
01:33 I can't remember exactly without looking on the board but it mostly was the engineers,
01:40 the chief engineer and the foreman and funny enough one was for the baker.
01:47 So why that was, they obviously considered the baker as a very important person.
01:54 I bought this in 1975, the one that was in Blossom Way was bought by my grandad in 1929
02:03 and so it won't be too long, it's now been in our family for 90 years, it's been demolished
02:10 but the land is still in our ownership.
02:12 It has varying tenants, one lady who was here for 20 years and it got to the point
02:22 with heat efficiency surveys that I couldn't let it anymore, they are rather cold in winter
02:29 I'm afraid.
02:30 And it's now a heritage centre?
02:35 Yeah that's it, I've taped it back, we've stripped all the walls and painted them in
02:41 the colours that we think originally we did find when we stripped the wallpaper off, we
02:47 found paint underneath but we think it was lead paint so we quickly painted over and
02:54 it's gone back to the Tundra Group boards, we've painted all the doors and skirtings
03:00 in brown paint, we've rewired in the old fashioned wire and taped it back as though
03:08 you were walking into somebody's house or bungalow in 1906, well around that time anyway.
03:16 And it must be quite exciting the fact that you're keeping this heritage of the town
03:21 going because this could have easily been lost into the midst of time.
03:25 It could be, I mean they did list the last three that was remaining, one mysteriously
03:33 burnt down, wasn't in our ownership I must say, the other one which was next door has
03:40 gone to Sandhoff Tramway Museum near Apwood and they've reassembled it so there's just
03:48 the two remaining now and I'm interested in Immingham history and so it seems a good
03:56 idea to do this.
03:58 Thanks.
03:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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