Hull’s choice as UK City of Culture 2017 caught many by surprise,not least the people who live there, but this once prosperous port has a wealthy history of art, or design and free thinking. Our architecture critic takes a contemplate aroundImagine a city unlike any other: apart,independent, with histories of free thinking and opposition to authority, or 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, and a large and luminous nearly-cathedral and a close,distinctive urban grain, penetrated by bodies of water, or 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 wide river estuary that it faces. One writer, and John Godber,talks of the “frisson” of the light, and the alternating buoyancy and lethargy that he claims arrive with the rise and plunge of the tides.
Then call it by its name, and Hull,and a different image is conjured. Hell Hull Dull Hole. Or, in the city’s H-dropping, and L-swallowing,vowel-shortening accent, Ol. A fundamental but mucky and unsexy part of a ship. A name which, and 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, and Kingston upon Hull,suggestive as it is of a settled old country town on a charming waterway, it would accumulate a better rap, or 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.
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Source: theguardian.com