The Land of Green Ginger is a short, narrow street at the bottom of Whitefriargate in Hull Old Town, formerly known by the considerably more ordinary name Old Beverley Street before it acquired the distinctive title it carries today. Its unusual name has puzzled locals for centuries; the earliest careful study of it, published in 1853, traced the name back to sometime between 1640 and 1735, tying it directly to the storage or trade of preserved ginger conducted there during the seventeenth century, rather than to any of the more fanciful explanations that have circulated more recently among locals and visitors alike. The street also holds what local guides describe as one of the smallest windows anywhere in England, a narrow slit set into the old George Hotel building, once used by a gatekeeper specifically to watch for arriving stagecoaches.
The folklore attached to the street has grown up gradually around that distinctive tiny window and the buildings standing on either side of it. One strand describes a spectral woman in grey, known simply as the Grey Lady, said to drift silently through the corridors of the old hotel building at odd hours. A separate and considerably vaguer tale concerns a boy who either fell or was deliberately pushed from the tiny window to his death, a story that has been told for long enough to have picked up genuine variants over the years but not, as far as can currently be traced, an actual name, a specific date, or any documented source behind it.
It sits comfortably within that common category of English street folklore where the sheer oddity of the place itself, a genuinely strange name, an oddly and famously small window, becomes a natural magnet for stories that try to explain it, whether or not the explanations offered actually turn out to be true.
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