City of Kingston upon Hull: Fishing Port Turned City of Culture
Hull has always done things differently. It is the only city in England that had its own municipal telephone system (cream-coloured phone boxes instead of red). It voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. It produced Philip Larkin, who lived and worked as the university librarian from 1955 until his death in 1985, writing some of the finest English poetry of the twentieth century from an office overlooking Cottingham Road. And in 2017, it served as UK City of Culture, an honour that genuinely changed the city.
The Deep, an aquarium built at the confluence of the River Hull and the Humber Estuary, is architecturally striking — a sharp-angled building that juts out over the water like the prow of a ship. The Museums Quarter in the Old Town contains Wilberforce House (birthplace of William Wilberforce, who led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade), the Streetlife Museum, and the Hull and East Riding Museum. The Fruit Market area, once a wholesale district, has been converted into a cultural quarter with galleries, bars, and independent shops.
Hull's economy was built on fishing — the city was England's premier deep-water trawling port, and the triple trawler disasters of 1968 (when three ships sank in Icelandic waters, killing fifty-eight men) are memorialised on the waterfront. The fishing industry collapsed after the Cod Wars, and Hull spent decades in economic difficulty. The City of Culture programme, a revitalised university, Siemens Gamesa's wind turbine blade factory, and logistics hub developments have begun to shift the trajectory. The population is around 260,000.
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Hull has always done things differently. It is the only city in England that had its own municipal telephone system (cream-coloured phone boxes instead of red). It voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. It produced Philip Larkin, who lived and worked as the university librarian from 1955 until his death in 1985, writing some of the finest English poetry of the twentieth century from an office overlooking Cottingham Road. And in 2017, it served as UK City of Culture, an honour that genuinely changed the city.
The Deep, an aquarium built at the confluence of the River Hull and the Humber Estuary, is architecturally striking — a sharp-angled building that juts out over the water like the prow of a ship. The Museums Quarter in the Old Town contains Wilberforce House (birthplace of William Wilberforce, who led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade), the Streetlife Museum, and the Hull and East Riding Museum. The Fruit Market area, once a wholesale district, has been converted into a cultural quarter with galleries, bars, and independent shops.
Hull's economy was built on fishing — the city was England's premier deep-water trawling port, and the triple trawler disasters of 1968 (when three ships sank in Icelandic waters, killing fifty-eight men) are memorialised on the waterfront. The fishing industry collapsed after the Cod Wars, and Hull spent decades in economic difficulty. The City of Culture programme, a revitalised university, Siemens Gamesa's wind turbine blade factory, and logistics hub developments have begun to shift the trajectory. The population is around 260,000.
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