Philip Larkin liked Hull, he once said, “because it’s so far from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It’s in the middle of the lonely country, and beyond the lonely country there is only the sea.”
Growing up within the Hull postcode, travelling into the city to patronise its guitar shops and nightclubs and dealers in motorbike spares, I never felt the city was a nowhere – but looking out across the Alexandra Dock on a summer afternoon, it is easy to appreciate the Coventry-born poet’s view. This is where the lonely country meets the sea, or at least the estuary.
Today, the Bahamas-registered Arco Dijk lies in the dock’s thick-walled embrace, moored by cables the width of a labourer’s arm, its rusting blue flanks lapped by the fine orange soup of the Humber. To the east, the low Holderness coast tails off into the long sandbar of Spurn Point, crowned by its lighthouses and isolated RNLI station. Around the dock’s landward side, meanwhile, are the sparsely populated acres of the Port of Hull: warehouses half-filled with aggregates and animal feed, paper and piles of plastic-wrapped timber from Scandinavia, waiting to be hauled somewhere else.
“It’s pretty quiet now,” says Rev Cameron Macdonald, and indeed it is. A former army chaplain with close-cropped hair and punkish ear studs, Macdonald runs the Mission to Seafarers in the Humber, ministering to the mostly Filipino, Indian and eastern European crews who populate the world’s merchant ships. He is referring to the Hull mission, which is empty this morning, and perhaps also to the season, but his words could be used to describe the past several decades in the city.
Before the 1970s, these wharves would have been crowded with ships and dockers, some knee-deep in the vessels’ holds, shovelling, hauling and rolling Britain’s imports ashore and her exports aboard. Hull was at one time the UK’s third largest port, and if work here was hard (a “bloody, godawful occupation”, according to one local), it was at least employment. The shipping container, the fork-lift truck and privatisation changed all that, as a stack of the rusting steel boxes and the solitary driver of a loader testify.
If automation dealt a huge blow to the dockers in the east of the city, in the west the 1970s Cod War killed off the other Hull industry: fishing (the city has always split between the docks and the trawling; each community even has its own rugby league team). “Hull built all its wealth on the fishing industry, and on whaling before that,” says Alan Johnson, the former home secretary and MP for West Hull and Hessle. “It took a terrible toll. There were 6,000 men lost in 150 years of trawling out of Hull. Nine hundred ships didn’t come back. It’s an amazing carnage … an industry that had a mortality rate 17 times higher than coal mining. But it was a way of life and it employed thousands of people and thousands in the fish processing industry.” Even 40 years on, there is a palpable sense of pride in the city’s fishing past: hundreds still turn out every year on the old fish dock for the memorial service for trawlermen lost at sea.
Hull’s double blow began a long decline that left it by some measures the poorest city in Britain, ranking near the bottom of every indicator of UK socio-economic wealth. When I ask Naomi Clayton of the Centre for Cities where Hull fits in the national picture, she produces a set of damning statistics. It it is bottom of the 2009 economic prosperity index and built environment index. It has the lowest rate of employment and the highest proportion of people claiming Job Seekers’ Allowance (6.9% to a UK average of 3.0%). It is Britain’s poorest city in terms of weekly wage. It has a major skills shortage, low rates of business startup, a high crime rate and the lowest percentage of residents with NVQ4 qualifications or above. Its housing stock is dirt-cheap: in July the average Hull property sold for £69,000, compared with £188,000 in nearby York.
Perhaps because of its isolation, Hull has had little sympathy. The common reaction from outside the city is scorn: in 2003 it was named Britain’s most “Crap Town” by the Idler magazine, while newspaper wags down the years have commonly cited the lines “from Hull, from Hell, from Halifax … Good Lord, deliver us”, as if this 17th-century poem were evidence of the city’s eternal damnation. Little was done by central government to alleviate Hull’s suffering: “It was a terrible tragedy,” says Johnson. “Hull was promised compensation, reskilling, all these things, but none of it ever materialised. People working 18 hours on and six hours off were classed as casual labour and got statutory redundancy. In a sense, that is what Hull is still living with.”
In 2014, however, there is a new sense of optimism about the city, a feeling that the bottom of the decline may have been hit and the indicators can only move up. The hope is centred on Alexandra Dock. In two years’ time, this expanse of silt-filled water and concrete will be transformed into Green Port Hull, a service hub for the giant wind farms being built in the North Sea. Siemens and Associated British Ports will initially invest £310m on a wind turbine facility in the city that will build and service the UK’s massive Round 3 offshore wind programme.
Five miles downriver at Paull, Siemens plans to manufacture the turbines’ blades, which will be carried on a purpose-built private railway to the Green Port for partial assembly. From here, ships will steam east for 12 hours to the arrays at Dogger, Hornsea and East Anglia, where the giant windmills – each of which will stand taller than the Eiffel Tower – will be installed. The Siemens/ABP money is the biggest single investment Hull has ever seen, and promises to bring with it a host of support industries and work for contractors, but it is just part of a broader development in Hull and the Humber: a second major renewable energy development worth half a billion pounds is expected to be built on the south bank of the river by Able ports.
“This is big, big stuff,” says Chris Haskins, the crossbench peer who chairs Humber Local Enterprise Partnership and who coined the phrase “energy estuary” to capture the Humber’s new economy. “And we’re still counting, because there’s another £300m in the pipeline which may or may not come, never mind £500m on the south bank. I would say you can probably talk about 3,000 jobs on the north bank in the Hull area in the next four or five years.”
Hull, according to Johnson, is on the verge of a windrush. “It’s like oil to Aberdeen,” he says, “and I don’t mean that as an exaggeration.”
The weight of the past is oppressive in the Guildhall, a baroque-style tour de force on Alfred Gelder Street that houses the city council and the law courts. The ground floor is stuffed with statues of the wealthy and powerful of earlier eras, when Hull’s grand buildings were thrown up on the back of profits dragged out of the sea. I am directed past a newly restored and painted statue of Edward I, the king who in 1299 gave Kingston upon Hull its name and a royal charter, up a sweeping staircase to a landing adorned with glass cabinets heaving with silverware – a cup bearing the name of former mayor Sir Henry Cooper; a ceremonial silver trowel used to break the ground for the Guildhall – and down an apparently endless, dark-panelled corridor into a room that carries the lingering smell of cigarette smoke.
Council chief Stephen Brady has the build of a bantamweight and is referred to only as “the leader” by Mark Jones, a second Labour councillor who settles on the black leather furniture. Brady is suited, his shoelaces knotted carefully in a double bow; despite the city’s reputation for producing Old Labour warhorses, his words are carefully chosen.
It has been a remarkable six months, says Brady, so remarkable that Hull has had a hard time believing its own good fortune. “The city in general was very sceptical [of getting the Siemens contract],” he says. “They felt this didn’t happen to places like Hull. And in a sense it isn’t the be-all and end-all, but the huge swell of confidence from that decision has greatly affected the mindset of the schools, the universities, and opened the eyes of other businesses looking to invest in the area. So, yes, confidence-wise it has been a huge boost.”
The key factor in Siemens’ decision to come to Hull was geography – “Purely location,” says Jones, who did more than many to win the bid, “and the scale of the investment in the North Sea” – but it was also because of the relationship the council built with the German engineering company. “We realised we’ve got to try to dig ourselves out and move the city forward, Brady says. “We’ve shown we’re not saying ‘Poor Me’, we’re actually getting down to it. We’re confident and we feel that certainly in 10 years’ time, this city will be totally different to how it is now. We are going to show the major companies that investing in Hull is the right thing for them and will produce good returns for investors.”
The week before my visit, George Osborne was in Hull for the announcement by Reckitt-Benckiser of a £100m investment in a research and development facility in the city. “I wasn’t on the invite list,” says Brady wryly, “but the fact is, Osborne felt it was important to be here with £100m of investment by Reckitts when they could’ve gone anywhere – Singapore or anywhere else. That was another boost.” And in November last year, Hull was the surprise winner of the UK City of Culture 2017, reckoned to be worth £60m to the economy. Even the city’s football team, Hull City, has started to perform, playing European football this season for the first time in its history.
The day when Hull won the City of Culture bid produced an “unbelievable” feeling in the city, says Brady. “People who probably didn’t know what it meant were punching the air. There wouldn’t be many places where you got everybody on the buses and taxis and on the estates, all talking about how proud the city was to have beaten off the competition from 14 or 15 applicants – from being rank outsiders – to land this, and that has had a big feeling of confidence in the city centre.”
“Times have been pretty tough for Hull in the past 25 to 30 years,” says Jones, “But this has really switched the mindset from managing decline to managing growth. It is a fantastic place to be and, as the leader says, the optimism in the city – despite the fact it hasn’t arrived yet, things haven’t changed yet – is absolutely there.”
Growing up eight miles away in Beverley, the county town of East Yorkshire, Hull was – still is – derided for being badly run and poorly educated. Partly this was what Johnson calls “snobbishness”, partly natural political tension between the Tory-voting, middle-class shire and the Labour-voting, working-class city (with the exception of a period of Liberal Democrat control of the council in the 2000s, Hull has consistently voted in Labour MPs and councils for half a century). In the 1970s and 1980s, Hull was nevertheless where county people went to do things: to work and shop; watch films at the ABC and the Cecil; go to exotic Italian or Indian restaurants; pass a few hours at the bowling alley. We went there to spend money.
One effect of the city’s decades of decline is that the class and welfare divisions have grown: more of the people with the high-paying Hull jobs now live in the county, but fewer of them come to the city to spend what they earn there. It would be easy to read this as a the county’s gain and Hull’s loss, but it has a negative effect on the county too: development in the East Riding has massively expanded and the green spaces around Beverley have filled up, even as Hull’s population has declined and its property stock stagnated.
Driving through the northern outskirts of the city, once wealthy pockets such as Pearson Park, where Larkin lived for 18 years in an attic flat, appear frayed, and grand buildings on Beverley and Anlaby Roads are derelict. In the once-prestigious streets in the centre, the few remaining prestige shops to have survived from the 1970s appear to be struggling in a sea of bookmakers, cheap loans providers, discount clothes stores and open-all-hours pubs.
For tangible signs of a Hull renaissance I walk across the A63 from the city centre to Humber Street. Until four years ago this road was home to the city’s fruit and veg market; it has a shabby urban chic, reminiscent of the run-down inner city quarters where artists settle because it’s cheap, and which then become hip and expensive. Within a few blocks are a microbrewery, art galleries, graphic designers, vintage furniture shops, a stonemason, a jeweller, a “Museum of Club Culture” and a digital media centre, C4Di.
Rob Moore, a former dean of Hull College of Art who runs the Studio Eleven gallery in the street with his business partner Adele Howitt, was one of the first to move into the area. In the run-up to the City of Culture award, Moore became something of a poster-boy for the city’s cultural regeneration. His small, well-stocked gallery has been visited by a succession of arts dignitaries, from Maria Miller, who was then culture secretary, to the BBC director general Tony Hall and the City of Culture judges, led by Phil Redmond.
As the councillors admit, the Humber Street cultural quarter exists partly by accident, after a multimillion pound plan to clear the area and redevelop it collapsed during the latest recession. The council handed the area over to the creative sector: “The council had a big meeting and asked for ideas and bids for using buildings and about 200 people turned up,” Moore says. “About eight of us got into buildings, and the council spread what little money they had round to make them safe. I think all of us that got in four years ago have survived and we’re flourishing as a little cultural community within the area. The thing that enabled us to be here were some far-sighted councillors who gave us great support and low rents.” It is now a pocket of thriving enterprise of exactly the type that most cities crave.
Winning the City of Culture bid was, Moore says, “a great surprise but a huge achievement. And it’s the sort of place that needs it.” The judges liked the fact that when they talked to people in the city, they were clearly aware of the bid. “I don’t think they got the same response in Leicester,” he says. Rosie Millard, the former BBC arts journalist, is chairing the City of Culture company with Martin Green, who ran the opening ceremony of the Tour de France in Leeds, as chief executive. The programme, inspired by Larkin’s poem “Days”, will include an event every day of 2017, an idea Moore describes as “brilliant, really simple”.
Music was historically one of Hull’s strengths, with the city producing bands from the Housemartins and Everything But the Girl to Fine Young Cannibals and, more recently, the Paddingtons. It remains the city’s true love, Moore says, and in summer the council holds festivals in the Humber Street area: more than 40,000 people attend the Humber Street Sesh festival, which had 180 bands performing on pop-up stages, as well as theatre groups, dancers and comedians.
The Freedom festival, which celebrates the work of Hull’s abolitionist MP William Wilberforce, attract similarly large numbers. The theatre company Hull Truck also has a national profile, and has moved into a flashy new glass-and-steel structure by the station, and there is a strong tradition of ballet and contemporary dance. “Hull has got a real quirky cultural offering and a lot of it has been underground,” Moore says. “The visual arts – apart from the wonderful Ferens Art Gallery, which I think is one of the best provincial art galleries – was always pretty low key, and places found it hard to survive. But there were again quirky things like [the artists collective] Hull Time Based Arts, which was strong for several years.”
The city’s cultural life and its economy are directly connected, Moore says. “I think everything interrelates: if a big company moves a big investment into a city, people aren’t going to want to relocate here unless there’s a social, cultural life to become part of. From my limited knowledge of big companies, it’s really important if they’re going to attract some quality skills to the business.”
Humber Street is a small, fragile basis from which to regenerate the city, not least because as money has returned to the economy, a new developer has taken control of the site. Brady tells me the new masterplan for the area will be “sympathetic” and retain its character, but initial plans included knocking down the back of Moore’s gallery, which he says would make it unviable. The developers’ proposals have other advantages, though, such as putting housing back into the area, which would create a mixed-use quarter that could be “fantastic”.
“It will be interesting to see whether the culturally minded people in the city council still maintain an interest and can fight off the obvious conflicting interest, like turning it into chains, Costa Coffee and all the rest,” Moore says. “I guess they’ve got some tricky decisions to make. I think it would be a shame for Hull if some of the people like us and others who are not for profit don’t make it to 2017.”
The point of 2017 will, he says, be all about generating some longer-term interest in the city, and his only worry is that it will leave no legacy: “My fear is that once the circus leaves town, we’re not just left cleaning up the elephant dung for the next two years.”
Will it be enough? Or has too much damage been done? When I ask Clayton of the Centre for Cities if this could be Hull’s transformative moment, she stoically resists optimism, talking instead about “long-term trends” being extremely hard to turn around. But surely the City of Culture year could provide a boost, as it did in Liverpool or Glasgow? Clayton cites an academic study that shows major cultural events have little effect on the local economy, and can even have a net negative effect on sentiment.
Macdonald is also pessimistic: there is an ingrained, and understandable, “believe-it-when-I-see-it” scepticism. “People think they’re forgotten,” he says.
But the people who are closest to Hull business have few doubts. Haskins acknowledges the challenges, but is adamant that the uptick in the city’s economy has begun already. “It’s taken off, no question. Hull is showing definite signs of recovery: house prices are moving up and the unemployment figures are coming down quicker than the national average, which is pretty encouraging – and this is before any of the Siemens bite has taken place. The Siemens thing is big, and it’s sort of given people a degree of confidence that they didn’t have before. It’s slow … nothing is going to change very rapidly, but it is changing.”
And the much-discussed skills shortage? Haskins says it was a product of the apprenticeship system largely bypassing Hull; here, starting work for young men meant simply heading down to the boats or the docks to take their chances. “But Siemens are very confident they can fix it, and they will fix it,” he adds.
Johnson, meanwhile, believes the Siemens investment and the things that come with it are the best thing to happen to Hull for a long time: “It was national news, but here it was just amazing. Will it replace the fishing? Theoretically there will be as many jobs coming out of this and everything else it brings with it as there were in the fishing industry.
“The university will gain out of the marine biology of it, all the support industries will gain from it. The [turbine] blades are currently being made in Denmark and they are bringing them over and encouraging all their tier-one suppliers to come with them. The company that builds the towers are Korean, and I’ll be very surprised if they don’t move here as well. And unlike an industry where you didn’t need any qualifications, it’s an industry where you do. These are good, high-quality, well-paid manufacturing jobs. And there is absolutely no doubt that Siemens’s whole record, wherever they’ve located, has not been to bring people in from overseas. They want to grow their own skills here.”
The wind energy boom is not the only thing Hull has going for it, says Johnson, reeling off a list of other areas of strengths in the city, from biomass to bioeffluent to digital culture and the computer games sector. It is, however, the main thing. There is a certain symmetry to Hull again putting its faith in the one great resource that has provided for it over the years: the North Sea. “It is almost poetic,” Johnson says.
Moore, meanwhile, senses the city has become more upbeat: “I think when I first came to work here many years ago, there was still a lot of doom and gloom about it, it’s part of the psyche really.” Now, in all quarters, he thinks people are more optimistic. “I think there’s less looking back now, and a bit more looking forward.”
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