Ferensway | >Re-PHOTO

Return to Hull: Monday 20th February 2017 was the last day of a short visit to Hull, the city where my wife was born and grew up, and where I made my first sustained photographic project.

Return to Hull - 2017 — *Scott St Bridge and the River Hull*

As I wrote in 2017, “I was trying to visit as many of the locations where I had photographed back in the 1970s and 80s for the show and the book ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull’ and which I’m currently putting on the ‘Hull Photos’ web site, a day at a time throughout Hull’s year as UK City of Culture.“

You can still see those photographs on my Hull Photos site, though there are now larger versions and more pictures in my Flickr albums – links at the end of this post.

In 2017 didn’t want to do a straightforward “then and now“. My earlier pictures were not simple topography but a more personal view of the city, and both it and I had changed in the 45 or more years and I was determined to look at things differently – and with different photographic parameters.

While I had then photographed mainly in black and white and with only a moderately wide 35mm shift lens, in 2017 all of my pictures were in colour and my main interest was in the much wider scope of a roughly 140 degree panorama rendered with a cylindrical perspective which I had been using for some years in my personal urban landscape projects.

I’ll post here under the various headings in my 2017 posts for the day on My London Diary. Here I’ll just post pictures but you can read much more on the links to that site I give for each section.

Gipsyville

Text and more pictures at Gipsyville.

Hessle Rd

Although I took quite a few pictures I didn’t stop to make any panoramic images in this area.

Text and more pictures at Hessle Rd.

St Andrew’s Dock

Text and more pictures at St Andrew’s Dock.

Ropery St & St Mark’s Square

Text and more pictures at Ropery St & St Mark’s Square.

City Centre & Beverley Rd

Text and more pictures at City Centre & Beverley Rd.

Sculcoates & River Hull

Text and more pictures at Sculcoates & River Hull.

We went on to visit some exhibitions and it was soon time for dinner, but our day had not ended and afterwards we walked into the Old Town and to the Humber Street Gallery where I took this picture looking over the rooftops to Holy Trinity.

Many of my older pictures from Hull are now in two of my albums on Flickr:

Hull Black and white
Hull Colour 1972-2000

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

Hull 2025 – An Evening Stroll: Last month I realised it was seven years since I had last visited Hull. Too long for a city that played an important part in my life and in my growth as a photographer. So I booked train tickets and a hotel room for a short visit with my Hull-born wife earlier this month.

I first visited Hull around 1965, going in some trepidation to meet and stay with my future parents-in-law who lived in a small street of terraced houses around a mile and a half from the city centre.

I don’t remember much from that trip, though I think I will have been taken shopping to the city centre and also in to the old town, but it was the first of many visits.

Back in 1965 I was a penniless student and although I had long had an interest in photography and owned a rather basic camera I couldn’t afford to take pictures. It was only a few years later that I learnt how to save costs by developing and printing myself and began actually earning money that I was able to get a cheap camera that worked and began as a photographer.

And some of the first real photographs I took were in Hull in the early 1970s. During that decade I was teaching at a large comprehensive with a very heavy workload and had relatively little time to take pictures, except during the school holidays, and we spent quite a lot of those in Hull.

My work in Hull began to take shape as a project concerned with Hull’s heritage and its loss as large areas of the city were redeveloped and much of its traditional industries being lost, including of course the fishing after the final Cod War in 1976.

And my first one-person show took place in Hull in 1983 – and much later I produced the book ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull‘ using the same work and more, one of my first self-published books.

Hull was always a city of culture, with an unusual collection of museums, theatres, artists, poets and music of all types. Its relative isolation from other cities and large towns made it very culturally self-reliant.

Shamefully when it became the UK City of Culture the huge majority of Hull’s own artists were sidelined, with the event being run by a team who came from London and dominated by events and people with no real link to the city. But some locals responded by doing their own thing as a part of the year – and I set up my Hull Photos web site where I uploaded a new picture of Hull every day throughout the year (and for some time afterwards.)

In this short series of posts I’ll share some of my pictures from my visit this month, starting with a couple of posts from our first evening. I haven’t captioned these images – but if you know Hull many will be well-known to you.

The next post will finish our walk on the evening we arrived. Later posts will include more from Hull as well as our trips to Hornsea and Beverley.