A Visit To Hull: On Thursday 26th July 2018 I took the train to Hull with my wife. She had been born there and I had visited the city many times over the years, at first staying at her family home and since that was sold around 2000 at first with a friend and more recently in hotels.
Hull was the place where I really cut my photographic teeth, producing my first extended photographic project which was exhibited at the Ferens Art Gallery there in 1983. You can see many of the pictures from the project on my web site Still Occupied… a View of Hull which I produced to celebrate Hull’s 2017 year as UK City of Culture, as well as in my earlier book of the same name, still available on Blurb where there is an extensive preview.
Rather more of my pictures are also in a couple of albums on Flickr, one of black and white and a second of colour images and there is also some more recent work, including from the 2018 visit on My London Diary.
After booking in to our city centre hotel we had time for a walk before dinner around the city centre and into the Old Town.
Hull claims to have England’s smallest window – the crack between the two stones was a lookout for coaches, and of course the Land of Green Ginger, where there is also the Second Star on the Right and Straight on ’til morning.
Hull used to mean fish, but the Cod Wars put paid to that, though there are still some reminders of the past, and still former docks in the city, though this one is now a marina. And out to the east are more modern docks, with Hull remaining a major port though now much eclipsed by Immingham and Grimsby.
Fruitful Harvest III was moored in the marina, but was built for fishing from Peterhead and later moved to Buckie. By 2018 the ship was registered in Grimsby but no longer registered for fishing, now a just a pleasure craft.
Hull has changed radically since I first visited in 1965, and this area, now called Humber Quays, was then a derelict dockland area and lorry park. Now it has modern office blocks and a memorial to the many emigrants who landed in Hull from Europe and were then mostly entrained to Liverpool to continue their journey to the USA.
Across the mouth of the River Hull is Hull’s biggest tourist attraction, the Deep, opened in 2022. It was built on Sammy’s Point which in my pictures from the 1980s was a storage area for navigation buoys, but had much earlier been a shipbuilding site. In the foreground is a recent footpath bridging across a dry dock, now full of water, still in use until fairly recently.
Our walk had been vaguely following the Larkin Trail, based around the life and work of Hull’s most famous poet – though born in Coventry he became Librarian at the University of Hull in 1955 and remained in the city until his death in 1985, writing most of his best-known poems there. After dinner in a city pub we took a bus to rejoin the trail at Pearson Park when he lived in a flat from 1956-74 – the blue plaque is just visible in the picture.
From the park we walked back into the city centre towards our hotel as light was beginning to fall along Beverley Road, passing several closed pubs, including The Rose and the Bull Hotels.
You can see more pictures from this walk and from the next few days before we left for a a short stay at one of Hull’s seaside resorts, Hornsea, in the Hull Supplement to July 2018’s My London Diary.