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Off Topic Hull: City of Culture

Discussion in 'Hull City' started by originallambrettaman, Feb 10, 2014.

  1. Party Hull!

    Party Hull! Well-Known Member

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    Saw this today as I went about my errands. Why not eh?

    The Smiths thing at Tigers Lair tonight. Missed Morrissey last night but will be in attendance this eve.
     
    #3041
  2. TIGERSCAVE

    TIGERSCAVE Well-Known Member

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    #3042
    Kempton and Howden Tigress like this.
  3. John Ex Aberdeen now E.R.

    John Ex Aberdeen now E.R. Well-Known Member

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    I shall have a skeg after the game tomorrow, I go down St Georges Road, so will have a look.
     
    #3043
  4. Fez

    Fez Well-Known Member

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    <laugh> You beat me to it!
     
    #3044
  5. C'mon ref

    C'mon ref Well-Known Member

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    Maybe not strictly the C.o.C. thing but was in town today and I noticed that some of the paving slabs, not included in the refurbishment, alongside the Ebeneza Morley pub for instance, which were in a bad way, are being lifted and re-laid so that the pavent is not an obstacle course that it once was. But there are many other areas that are likewise, especially near to the Cenotaph and alongside the KC building.
     
    #3045
    Last edited: May 23, 2017
  6. originallambrettaman

    originallambrettaman Mod Moderator
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    Martin Green, Director of Hull 2017, said:“Our thoughts today are with the victims, their loved ones and everyone affected by this terrible attack in Manchester. The safety of event goers is always paramount and we are working closely with the team at Radio 1’s Big Weekend and Humberside Police to ensure everyone attending has a safe and enjoyable experience this weekend. A robust event plan is already in place and security arrangements will continue to be reviewed over the next few days.”
     
    #3046
  7. originallambrettaman

    originallambrettaman Mod Moderator
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    #3047
    Dills double deckers likes this.
  8. John Ex Aberdeen now E.R.

    John Ex Aberdeen now E.R. Well-Known Member

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    I see Ross Noble is on at Pocklington Arts centre in July, if anybody likes him.
     
    #3048
  9. Chazz Rheinhold

    Chazz Rheinhold Well-Known Member

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    I prefer Gary monk to bill bailey and Ross noble, just.
     
    #3049
  10. Kempton

    Kempton Well-Known Member

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  11. Dr.Stanley O'Google, HCFC

    Dr.Stanley O'Google, HCFC Well-Known Member

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    Photographs by David Morris

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    #3051
  12. southerntiger

    southerntiger Well-Known Member

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    Can anyone help
    There appears to be a real shortage of hotel accom for next Sat after Paul Heaton gig.
    Anyone know of b & bs at a reasonable rate for some mates
     
    #3052
  13. steverico

    steverico Well-Known Member

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    I've recommended Kingstown Hotel in Hedon, it's not that far from the stadium
     
    #3053
  14. John Ex Aberdeen now E.R.

    John Ex Aberdeen now E.R. Well-Known Member

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    Statues in stations were once all grim-faced Victorians and war memorials. Not any more. Today’s railway monuments are dioramas of civic identity, an opportunity for heritage-savvy towns and cities to claim their local heroes. Huddersfield has Harold Wilson; Liverpool, Ken Dodd. Southend’s got a skateboarder, and Paddington has its dopey bear.
    In Hull, it is Philip Larkin who we have put on a pedestal. At first sight, the poet, all 7ft of him, seems the perfect choice. Martin Jennings’ sculpture at Paragon
    upload_2017-5-30_8-11-45.png

    Station was inspired by the late leaving protagonist of Larkin’s poem the Whitsun Weddings. It was in Hull that Larkin lived and worked for 30 years and wrote most of his best work – so why wouldn’t a grateful city commemorate him? Well, it’s not quite that simple.

    Philip Larkin came to Hull in 1955 to take up the post of head librarian at the university. A month later, he started slagging the place off. In a letter to his friend DJ Enright, the poet moaned: “I’m settling down in Hull all right. Every day I sink a little further.” After four months, it was: “What a hole, what witless, crapulous people.” To other correspondents, he complained that Hull was “fish smelling”; “a dump”. But the real killer was a backhanded compliment: “I wish I could think of just one nice thing to tell you about Hull – oh yes, well, it’s very nice and flat for cycling.”

    UK City of Culture. What they’ve heard so far from Chesters, a colleague of Larkin in the 1970s and 80s and a founding member of the Philip Larkin Society, only goes to confirm their suspicions: that Hull’s “poet laureate” (a position which he declined in 1984) was dour, detached and a bit heartless – hardly what the city deserves or needs.

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    The Philip Larkin statue at Hull railway station. Photograph: Geography Photos/UIG via Getty
    But they needn’t worry; according to Chesters, Hull soon began to “work on Larkin”. The poet liked that it was unpretentious, with less “crap around” than London. He was free to produce some of his best work: the Whitsun Weddings, the Large Cool Store, Toads and, above all, Here, Larkin’s sweeping evocation of a city and its hinterland. With its “surprise of a large town”, its “spires and cranes” and “ships up streets”, Hereshows how intimately Larkin had come to know his adopted home by 1961 – and how far he’d come from his early dismissal of it.

    Jonathan Tulloch is in no doubt. The novelist’s forthcoming book, Larkinland, is a 1950s “fantasia” woven around the characters and locations of Larkin’s poetry. “Larkin loved Hull. He called it his ‘lonely northern daughter’,” Tulloch tells me over the phone. “When you think of Hull, you think of Larkin. It’s that train journey [described in Here and The Whitsun Weddings]. It’s so beautiful. Larkin glamorised the place, made it his Venice. I think he was lucky to have Hull and Hull was lucky to have him. A lot of people take Hull out of his poetry and that’s a great loss.”

    The Larkin Trail is one attempt to remedy this. Beginning close to the train station statue, it maps the poet’s landscape with a series of plaques in significant locations. I take a moment to find the first one in the Royal Station Hotel: no chain-smoking salesmen here these days, just clean-looking culture tourists. But otherwise the foyer is just as Larkin portrayed it in Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel – with good reason. When the hotel was gutted by a fire in 1990, the re-fitters reputedly used the poem as their guide.

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    Paragon Street and King Edward Street in the 1950s. Larkin moved to the city in 1955. Photograph: Alamy
    The Trail dates back to 2010. The 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death also saw the city streets populated with 40 giant decorated toad sculptures, a colourful reference to the poems Toads and Toads Revisited. Chesters says – only partly tongue in cheek – that Larkin with Toads had been an attempt to get better publicity for three things badly in need of it: Hull, toads and Larkin.

    That the poet should find himself on the makeover couch with warty amphibians shows just how much his reputation had slipped since the posthumous publication of two books in the 1990s. Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life and the Selected Letters portrayed a very different Larkin to the gentle, sensitive soul of popular imagining. This Larkin was a faithless lover, whose letters to cronies included charmless racist ditties. Friends and former colleagues, including his most recent biographer James Booth, have defended the Larkin they knew against the “nasty” version. But the mud still sticks.

    BBC documentary about the poet, a female audience member disrupted the generally cosy atmosphere by asking why Hull people should be so proud of Larkin. He was a misogynist and racist, she said, and he didn’t do anything for the image of the city.

    I later asked Joan, the Larkin “heckler”, why she’d spoken out. “I’d got less and less to like him,” she said. “He seemed a bit miserable, a bit dour. It was like he was a depressive so Hull was the best place for him.”

    This is all irrelevant as far as poet and publisher Shane Rhodes is concerned. “You shouldn’t mix up the man with the art,” he says. “Maybe it’s best not to know; just read the words for what they are.”

    Rhodes grew up on a north Hull council estate where he had to hide his bookishness. Along with Joni Mitchell and Sylvia Plath, Larkin was a massive early influence.

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    The toad statue in Hull, part of the ‘Larkin with Toads’ project, celebrating the poet’s work. Photograph: Stuart Forster/Rex/Shutterstock
    It shows in Rhodes’ latest work. The City Speaks, commissioned for a new public sculpture and subsequently used at the launch of City of Culture, is a personalised retelling of Hull’s history. And while the voice is different, the way it switches between big themes and individual experience is a lot like Larkin.

    Of course, there’s more to Hull’s poetry scene than the bard of the Brynmor Jones Library. Larkin himself helped to usher in a new generation in 1982, writing the lyrical foreword for the influential Douglas Dunn-edited anthology, A Rumoured City. In September, Rhodes will co-direct Contains Strong Language, a spoken word festivalintroducing yet more Hull voices. Dean Wilson, Joe Hakim and Vicky Foster, he hopes, could be the latest in a poetic lineage stretching back to Andrew Marvell.

    Has everything now been said about Philip Larkin? Can Hull move on? Not a chance. This is 2017; Larkinmania is just getting going. The Larkin Society and university are about to host a major biographical exhibition, including hitherto unseen photography, manuscripts – and pyjamas. Larkin has finally been admitted into Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Even more impressively, he’s made it on to the wall at my local pub. A slightly weird new mural shows Larkin driving a steam train with the faces of William Wilberforce and Amy Johnson puffing out of the funnel.

    I’m sure the poet wouldn’t have objected to this well-meaning cultural jumble. Nor would he have minded being festooned in amber and black for Hull City’s one and only shot at FA Cup glory in 2014.

    So is Hull’s enthusiasm for Larkin misplaced, nothing more than a branding exercise for the City of Culture celebrations? It is true that in the pantheon of Hull’s civic heroes, Larkin will never command the easy affection of a Mick Ronson or Tom Courtenay – both working class lads “made good”.

    But perhaps he gives us something else: insight. Joan, who spoke out at the Larkin documentary premiere, admitted his poetry at times mirrored her own alienation: “I’ve an image of [Larkin] sitting on a park bench, not part of it, just observing. It reminds me of how I used to feel before I was a mother, sitting in Queen’s Gardens, feeling isolated and different from everyone else.”

    This Hull, this Larkinland of the mind, isn’t always an easy place to be. But for anyone “surprising a hunger … to be more serious”, it’s good to know it’s there.



    https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...p-larkin-poet-love-both-ways?CMP=share_btn_tw
     
    #3054
  15. originallambrettaman

    originallambrettaman Mod Moderator
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    Just check here - https://www.airbnb.co.uk/
     
    #3055
  16. southerntiger

    southerntiger Well-Known Member

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    Thanks but even on there they have nothing in Hull.
     
    #3056
  17. dennisboothstash

    dennisboothstash Well-Known Member

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    haven't looked myself, but I had heard everything had sold out months ago
     
    #3057
  18. mplooney

    mplooney Well-Known Member

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    It might be a bit of a hassle but have you thought about Barton? The last bus is 11.30 from Hull City Centre but a taxi is only about £20. Some pretty decent places to stay and not expensive.
     
    #3058
    dennisboothstash likes this.
  19. dennisboothstash

    dennisboothstash Well-Known Member

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    On New Years Eve the nearest hotel room was in Cleethorpes! (I was speaking to one of the people involved in bringing the Blade in who had got a room for NYE and NYD)
     
    #3059
  20. originallambrettaman

    originallambrettaman Mod Moderator
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    You'll never get a taxi to take you to Barton when there's a major event on.
     
    #3060

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