Off Topic Today's Guardian

Not a bad article ... http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/feb/14/hull-uk-city-of-culture-2017-rowan-moore

Imagine a city unlike any other: apart, independent, with histories of free thinking and opposition to authority, and of writing and drama that continue into the present, which has indeed been called “the most poetic city in England” by an unbiased authority, whose historic centre contains Victorian and Edwardian magnificence, a large and luminous almost-cathedral and a close, distinctive urban grain, penetrated by bodies of water, that has something in common with the Dutch and Baltic cities with which it historically traded. On sunny days, of which its dry climate allows a number, it enjoys a radiant northern light that bounces off the broad river estuary that it faces. One writer, John Godber, talks of the “frisson” of the light, and the alternating buoyancy and lethargy that he claims come with the rise and fall of the tides.

Then call it by its name, Hull, and a different image is conjured. Hell Hull Dull Hole. Or, in the city’s H-dropping, L-swallowing, vowel-shortening accent, Ol. A fundamental but mucky and unsexy part of a ship. A name which, to those who don’t know the city, suggests unspecified post-industrial misery, a cloud of depression somewhere disconnected and remote. Perhaps if it went by its official full name, Kingston upon Hull, suggestive as it is of a settled old country town on a charming waterway, it would get a better rap, but use of that royal-flavoured title would be to deny a proud moment of its history, which was when Hull denied Charles I access to the city and its store of armaments at the outset of the civil war.

Comedian Lucy Beaumont on Hull
Now it has another name, UK City of Culture 2017. It’s fair to say that this honour has been greeted with a fair amount of incredulity inside and outside the city. “You’re only here for the culture” is the ironic chant that Hull City AFC’s fans direct at visiting supporters. At the Laugh out Loud comedy night in the city hall every act starts with a joke on the subject. “Where are you from?” one performer asks a member of the audience. “Essex”. “What do you think of Hull?” “****”. “Well Essex is never going to be City of Culture is it?” Baron Prescott, MP for Hull East for 40 years, and Hull’s most famous living adopted son, says that he was “a bit surprised” by the designation.

“I’m not a cultured man myself,” says the former deputy prime minister, “and I didn’t think it would take off, but it has. It has made people say ‘Oh Christ, Hull’. It has put the pride back in.” It is a “fabulous city”, he says, but suffers from “people who haven’t been there criticising it. All you ever hear about is sink estates or aggressive people like me.” He cites the crowds that turn up for celebrations of the city’s historic events, such as its role in the civil war or the 75th anniversary of the death of the Hull-born aviator Amy Johnson. He reels off some of the famous performers from Hull – Tom Courtenay, John Alderton, Maureen Lipman, the Beautiful South, David Bowie’s backing band the Spiders from Mars – but says that no one talks about them in relation to their city. He could add, but doesn’t, the performance artists Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and their Dada-inspired creations Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, who spent much of the 1970s getting into trouble with the police for obscenity.

Prescott attacks “that stupid cow who does that programme” – he’s referring to Kirstie Allsopp, who once announced that Hull was the worst place to live in Britain. It is probably “the biggest working-class town in the country,” says Prescott, as the business owners and professionals tended to live in the nearby, charming country towns of the East Riding of Yorkshire. “Culture was the rugby” – the city manages to support two successful rugby league teams – “and the family. Culture was solidarity, the strength that comes through knowing each other.” It was also present in such things as the intense rivalry between the west and east halves of the city, which is reflected in the support for the respective rugby teams and is unintelligible to those outside. Prescott recalls the reaction when he “belted that fella” – the time in the 2001 election campaign when he hit an egg-throwing protester. “You could tell he wasn’t from west Hull,” said someone from west Hull, “because he didn’t put the head in.” The accusation was that Prescott was soft.

Within the definitions of culture that might be recognised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which nominates a UK City of Culture every four years, Hull’s most obvious claims to fame are poetry and theatre. It has the blessing/curse of Philip Larkin, on the one hand one of the greatest 20th century English poets, who chose to spend most of his life in Hull, on the other a writer whose reputation for misanthropy and melancholy does nothing to reduce the fog of gloom attributed to the city. In the 17th century, Andrew Marvell grew up in Hull and returned there as its MP. In the 20th and up to the present, Stevie Smith, Douglas Dunn, Roger McGough, Sean O’Brien, Peter Didsbury, and Andrew Motion have been in some way connected. It was the Australian-raised Peter Porter who came up with the line about it being the most poetic city.

In drama, as well as the stars Prescott cites, Hull has Hull Truck, the theatre that developed shows that became national and international hits, most notably John Godber’s Bouncers. “We had an audience the Royal Court would die for,” says Godber, who was the theatre’s artistic director from 1984 to 2010. “People who went to the theatre the way Brecht wanted people to go to the theatre – with the attitude that culture is not what someone else does. The audiences might be reluctant to come, but when you’ve got them they’re incredibly loyal. In London I’d never get an audience where I could meet them in the butcher and they would tell me that there was too much swearing in my latest play.”

Godber’s approach was to write work that was locally based but not just relevant to Hull, for example Up ’n’ Under, a play early in his tenure about rugby league. (Two large men appeared at his door who turned out to be players: “They said it was the best play they had ever seen. It was possibly the only play they had ever seen, but it was good they said it.”) He would also try to sneak in more difficult stuff “under the radar.” It didn’t always work: “We showed a production of Wozzeck that got Olivier awards and everything. Some nights there were only two people in the audience.”

Hull also has the Freedom festival, a late summer performing arts event originally prompted in 2007 by the 200th anniversary of William Wilberforce’s success in abolishing the slave trade, Wilberforce having been another Hull man. (Which prompts another deprecating dig at the comedy night: “It’s to free people trapped in Hull who just crawled out of the sea and didn’t get any further.”)

It has a raucous music scene in pubs and clubs, which Godber says “is about the music and not necessarily getting legless”. One, the Adelphi, is a venue both rackety and venerable in a surprisingly suburban location. Inside, a band old enough to be part of punk when it first came round is yelling to an audience of which the same could mostly be said. “They look like a group of guys sitting in a pub planning a diamond heist,” says a man loitering in the freezing cold outside, who turns out to be the club’s boss. “Yes, this is my gaff,” he admits.

City of culture is not the answer to all Hull's problems – it's a catalyst
Like other old industrial cities, Hull has a legacy of splendours into which its past magnates poured their surplus capital: a guildhall with corridors of prodigious length and prodigious quantities of hardwood panelling, the Ferens art gallery, with a scattering of impressive old masters (Frans Hals, Canaletto, Lorenzetti) and a strong showing of British art from the 19th century on. It has a delightful glazed arcade from the 19th century off which opens an old-fashioned market. Other attractions include handsome Victorian engineering in the docks, and a series of ornate cinemas bequeathed by J Arthur Rank, the Hull man who directed profits from his family’s milling business towards building up the British film industry.

There are museums of both local and global resonance where underinvestment has so far spared them the gimmicks of state-of-the-art overinterpretation: the museum of slavery in Wilberforce’s unusual 17th century house, the maritime museum with its beautiful and moving relics of lives lived and lost at sea, Roman mosaics in the Hull and East Riding Museum whose touching clumsiness reminds you that this was very much an outpost of the empire. The city’s university is a powerful force in nourishing its cultural life.

There is the Deep, a lottery-funded aquarium contained in a pointy, iceberg-like projection designed by Terry Farrell, which although it looked at the time of its conception like a poorly considered excuse to spend money, is apparently doing well. There is the steel, swing Scale Lane bridge completed in 2013, whose practical justification is still in doubt but which adds to the pleasures of the city’s outdoor spaces. There is the Freedom Centre, which Prescott wants to show off, a community centre with a library and theatre in the somewhat battered Preston Road area, a particular success of his government’s New Deal for Communities programme of regeneration.

Larkin said it is 'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance'

Against these reasons to be cheerful is pessimism caused by the hard knocks the city has received – devastating bombing in the second world war, the disappearance of its fishing fleet in the 1970s. It has suffered more than most places from misguided attempts to experiment with council housing construction; the aptly named 1920s Winget method (“let’s just winget”) of panels made of concrete mixed with ash. It has suffered too for the more modern municipal belief that shopping centres are the answer to urban decline. There is a lot of retail development, some of it lumpishly appropriating the water-filled docks that were among the city centre’s assets, with the predictable effect that Hull’s older markets and shops are struggling to compete.

The Hull Truck has had its troubles – it moved into a fine, purpose-built new theatre in 2009 from the old tin shed of a former church hall in which it had prospered, with the result so common in such cases that it lost its immediacy and found it hard to sustain its new premises. Old hands say that performance and art in the city were more vital in the 1970s and 80s, when there was both a more anarchic spirit and more arts council funding. On top of which a certain belief that the toast will always land jam-side-down seems intrinsic, part of the air and water of the place. “I by the tide/Of Humber would complain”, as Marvell said nearly four centuries ago.

Hull, Larkin said, is “a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance”. Godber says that it is “a perfect place looking out on the rest of the country”. Its distinctive spirit and fabric, combined with an under-heated property market, make it possible to try things out in a way that is no longer possible in more expensive parts of the country. The most notable recent example is Kardomah 94, where Malcolm Scott, a successful chartered surveyor in his 50s who decided he wanted to do something special with the rest of his career, has converted part of his office building into a performance venue, bar and restaurant. It is now the centre of Hull’s cultural energy, a sort of entrepreneurial micro-version of the Southbank Centre in London, and the most positive recent sign that the city can create and prosper.

In the sort of chance encounter that happens easily in Hull, I bump into a film-maker who had seen me at a film evening at Kardomah 94 the night before. “Hull saved my life,” he says, on account of its combination of cultural history, available space to live and work, and sociability. Jez Riley French, the sound artist and composer, who lives in Hull, doesn’t quite agree: “It’s a good place to come and develop your practice if you have the vision to do so independently. You can do anything. No one will bother you.” But he says he finds it more difficult to find spaces to put on performances there than in any other city he knows, and he has trouble pursuing his favourite technique of recording the subtle noises caused by the subtle movements of buildings. “I’ve hardly ever recorded in Hull. People have no interest at all. Other cities have been able to say ‘that’s a nice building, go on in’.”

The stories you need to read, in one handy email
It’s not yet clear exactly what its year as City of Culture will bring to Hull and very little has been revealed beyond that the year will be themed around four seasons called Made in Hull, Roots and Routes, Freedom and Tell the World. There is remarkably little concrete for an event less than 11 months off, but the year’s chief executive, Martin Green, formerly of the 2012 Olympics and the Yorkshire Grand Départ of the Tour de France in 2014, is keeping his cards close to his chest: “We’re not revealing anything unless it’s really going to happen.”

What has been announced, by the city council, are £80m of upgrades to streets and public buildings in the centre, to bring coherence to its partly fractured beauties, and make the open more attractive to those sucked into the shopping centres built under previous administrations. The improvements include the makeover of Humber Street in the old Fruit Market, where galleries and other artistic businesses are based. A £700,000, 350-seat outdoor theatre will be built in the city’s disused Central Dry Dock.

It’s not an entirely positive sign that a proposed sculpture by Richard Wilson, which played a part in Hull winning the 2017 bid, has been scrapped, still less that the Rank Hovis flour mill, a majestic local landmark, has been demolished so that a could-be-anywhere Radisson Blu hotel can be put up instead. For sure, it wouldn’t have been easy to find a new life for the huge old mill, but you feel that other cities could have managed it. But, if being city of culture achieves anything, it must surely be about helping Hull to fulfil its nature as a place apart, where new things grow spontaneously, where future Larkins can find their niches, and where Hull Trucks, and indeed Throbbing Gristles, of the future can arise.

 

I gave up halfway through. It bored me....

 

Snap, too much culture, no enough tits for a good read.

 

Meaningless romantic twaddle.

 

Same here.

 

Don't forget the east wind on Springbank, in January...

 

I'm pretty sure he was sat next to me at the LOL comedy night. I dont even get a mention!! ****

 

Didn't even get to the end of the first paragraph.



But at least my paint is drying on the kitchen door.

 

I thought I'd been a bit harsh so I went back and read it all. Unfortunately it's the same old regurgitated bollocks that every other journo has written. I love my city but I think it will all end in tears with stuff half finished and visitors deciding that once is enough. A bit like the Phoenix Nights open day. Shame really.

 

Too much about John Godber and John Prescott, neither embody Hull.

 

You mean family fun day!

 

Did Fez write that?

 

Stop online bullying him.

 

****ing fish docks Thursday

 

Yea, everyone from Hull pronounces it ol'? Bloody Ull mate.

Vowel shortening? Has this clown even heard us speak?

Apart from those two things I liked it.

 

I wish I'd wrote this.

 

Usual inflated importance of the rivalry between the RL clubs, yawn. Rivalry my arse.

 

Too much 'chuffin Nora! Godber/Prescott generic Northerner **** and 'RL hotbed' nonsense.

On the positive side, no Housemartins.