by Tim Moore
The Hull and East Riding Museum, deep in the old town’s cobbled-alley core, introduced Living in the Past as a further civic theme, and ran with it, over the hills and far away. The Story of Hull, I gathered from a wall-filling tableau thus labelled, began with the Big Bang. I couldn’t dispute that this was literally the case, but it still seemed a trifle presumptuous: I pictured some robed deity effecting nucleosynthesis between his giant fists with a cosmic roar: ‘Let there be Hull!’ The story arc did not steepen, and seeing the third chapter in the making of Kingston upon Hull headed Earth’s Crust Forms, I involuntarily emitted a loud and disparaging noise. There were no other visitors around to hear it – none, indeed, in the entire museum – but a man in a name-badge quickly appeared. He gave me a cold look, and followed me at an indiscreet distance into the next room, in which Hull was exposed to carboniferous life-forms, and struggled against glacial erosion. Indeed, he went on to shadow my entire tour, making theatrical attempts to appear nonchalant and distracted whenever I glanced over my shoulder, rubbing at a spot on a glass case or flicking imaginary dust off a mammoth’s knee. He was there when something unique and definitive finally happened in the East Riding (four thousand years ago, when local traders set out across the North Sea in 45-foot plank-built craft: the excavated survivor on display is the oldest boat in Europe). He was there when a native British mosaicist copied a Roman pattern-book image, shown below, and when Northern European urban civilisation set the standards for Hull’s emergent merchant class, see left. He was especially there, right by my elbow, in fact, when I interacted with a miniature diorama portraying the 1643 Siege of Hull, in which many blue LEDs outlasted the encircling red ones. That was the final exhibit, and when I’d pressed every button twice he all but stomach-barged me through the exit.
Old Hull revealed itself as a pleasant little maze of tight lanes that occasionally threw you out into a bijou cobbled square, with a church at its heart and a border of gable-fronted houses betraying the city’s age-old links with the Low Countries (ferries still run to Zeebrugge and Rotterdam). The irresistible street names told Hull’s tale rather more evocatively than the museum had managed to: Whitefriargate, Bowl Alley Lane, Three-Crane Wharf, Land of Green Ginger. Some of the sympathetically renovated red-brick mills and warehouses that lined them were home to design agencies and the like, but a fair few were home to no one, which along with the vast and empty bike racks spoke of a well-meaning make-over that had stalled. I’m guessing sensory deterrents may have played a role in this. The River Hull, the modest Humber tributary that runs through the old town, had done a grand job as a mercantile artery back in the day. But as a picturesque aquatic backdrop – its current civic duty – it proved a truly horrible failure. With negligible river traffic, and hence no dredging, the upstream estuary’s silt monster had for unchecked decades been spewing its big brown guts out all along and sometimes right over the banks. Sometimes caked and crevassed, sometimes as moist and slurried as the loosest of loose stools. The gathering stench proved an unfortunate complement. I’d been told that Hull smelt of chocolate, but my wrinkled nose suggested otherwise, a suspicion later confirmed by my eyes when I Googled up details of the nearby ADM Cocoa Mass factory. Cocoa mass is to chocolate what magnolia emulsion paint is to gold-top double cream. It’s actually nothing more offensive than ground-up cocoa beans, but it sounds grim, and my word it smells grim, like plasticine fried in linseed oil. This difficult odour has hung over central Hull for generations, but naturally enough won’t be troubling local nostrils for much longer: a couple of months after I passed through, management announced plans to close the factory.
The miasma dispersed as the lanes opened out into the broad granite streets of imperial Hull, all Victorian heft and confidence. I noted with dismay, if not surprise, that almost every one of the grand old civic institutions, with their columns and domes and roof-mounted statues of Britannia in a chariot, had been Wetherspooned. The big banks had been first to succumb, and the magnificent general post office was now two bars and a snooker hall. I couldn’t find it, but Bevin House – formerly the regional headquarters of the Transport & General Workers’ Union – is apparently a casino. Isn’t that just beyond parody? Old Ernest must be spinning faster than the roulette wheels.
I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding from the Yorkshire winter in Hull’s many municipal museums. All were free, which in my book is half the battle won (no children in tow, no giftshop-crap-related bribery – and so the remaining half is won). At the same time, every single one of these museums was entirely deserted, which meant some awkwardness at the less captivating amongst them. A nice old lady at an entrance kiosk would welcome me in with a grateful smile, then I’d walk straight into a room filled with old buckets and ironing boards, or a gigantic gallery of full-length portraits of Edwardian harbourmasters. Stripped of the getting-my-money’s-worth factor that would have otherwise stubbornly detained me, it was tricky to know just how long to mill about before I could slink out past the kiosk without earning a look of disappointment or betrayal. Answer: never quite long enough.
By far the best was the Maritime Museum, which with poignantly impeccable timing emerged from the magnificent old Docks Offices in 1975 – the very year that the local fishing industry died and Hull’s marine associations became a past to remember, not a present to administer. I spent a happy hour poring over its maps alone, amongst them a contemporary depiction of the River Hull’s docksides in their copperplate pomp, a dense compaction of activity you could almost hear and smell: timber yards, coal staithes, cooperage works, breweries, cotton mills, sugar mills, corn warehouses, bonding warehouses, and a sperm candle manufactory that dated it to the city’s whaling boom, and doubtless entertained the school parties. And there were humbling reminders that whatever the downsides of the dole queue or a career in oilcake, the locals must at heart be very glad not to call the sea their workplace. I learnt that in 1830, nineteen of the whaling ships sent out to the frozen Davis Straits did not come home. The terrible winter of 1968 claimed fifty-eight fishermen’s lives. Between those two dreadful years, a trawler and its crew were lost on average every two months.
Tales such as these didn’t do much for my existing terror of the open sea, so it was a soothing pleasure to find the museum’s first floor almost entirely devoted to model ships in glass cases, which I happen to love. Especially when, eighty-six years after they were made, a restorer finds a note stashed under a funnel, and that note reads thus:
Oct 6th, 1913. To whom so ever find this may know that this is placed inside of the model of the Imperator, H&A Line, 828ft long, 87ft beam and 48ft depth. The model is built to scale by the writer in Fuhlsbuttel Hard Labour Prison with very odd and rough tools. Despise it not on account of roughness, it is a labour of love and helps to pass the time. I am here now two and a half years, having been sentenced in Leipzig to seven year for espionage for the dear old English Government. I am an English man and a ship owner residing in Coltman Street, Hull, Yorkshire, England. Wife a Hilton good and true, five children. Max William Schultz.
What a wonderful story, made more wonderful as I’d walked right down Coltman Street that very morning. Admittedly not quite so fab for Max, who was finally let out at the end of the war but died in Hull just six years later, aged forty-nine.
I’d left Craig outside the Royal Hotel, and picked out by a late, low shaft of sun he looked as good as he ever would, black coachwork against burnished Victorian limestone, every inch the British Leyland brochure cover. I imagined the strapline: The Austin Maestro – because you’re not worth it, or, Come on – it’s got four wheels and everything. Please? Who was Maestro man? Not for the first time I wondered why anybody at all had ever bought one. Ford and Vauxhall, British Leyland’s American-owned rivals, had for some years been making cheap family cars that were demonstrably more reliable and better equipped, so I could only assume that the customers who stayed loyal to BL did so out of dogged national pride. All the same, it was a l
ittle sad to realise that even the kind of people predisposed to engineering romance would be left entirely cold by the quirk-less, gawky, anti-charismatic machine sitting there before me. No prisoner would ever feel inspired to construct a lovingly detailed scale replica of an Austin Maestro, or if they did Mr Barraclough would inadvertently sit on it, to much canned laughter.
I’d read that half of Hull’s 250,000 inhabitants live in the 105 most deprived metropolitan areas in the country, a statistic that sounded dreadful but was quite hard to make sense of. Aside from the uninviting parade of windswept council blocks behind the station, Hull’s class-leading awfulness had only manifested itself through ghostly commercial desolation rather than living, breathing fucked-uppery. Perhaps sensing this, Ozzy’s chosen route out of town took me through Bransholme. Not so much a housing estate as a housing borough, even a whole county, an East Riding of Housing, Bransholme fanned endlessly out into the gathering gloom. I wasn’t surprised to learn later that it’s the largest post-war council estate in Britain. Every exit from every landscaped roundabout dispatched me into a little satellite Bransholme, all stubby cul-de-sacs of identical slit-windowed, wedge-shaped homes, laid out by the half-dozen in two-storey terraced slabs. Ozzy didn’t like it at all: ‘Turn around when f-f-fooking possible!’ he’d yell; I’d do so, then a minute later find myself surrounded by rusty lock-up garages, earning another shrieked reprimand and some more heavy work on Craig’s ever-reluctant wheel.
In between U-turns, I was scoring big points in my I-Spy Book of Urban Meltdown. Burnt-out car in playground? Tick. Pregnant teenager in tracksuit pushing pram? Tick. Smoking child idly flicking the Vs at buses? Mystery pile of mangled bar optics in middle of road? Knot of potato-faced hoodies by parade of boarded-up shops seeing man in stupid car taking pictures, then lumbering towards him en masse? Tick, tick, tick, eeek, screech, vroom, come on you useless crap-tent I said screech, vroom. The mood of ratcheting panic was fed by the in-car soundtrack, which now married Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ to Ozzy’s disorientated screaming. It was like karaoke night in Broadmoor.
Bransholme was built for the tens of thousands Blitzed out of their homes, but half of them had died or moved away long before the estate was finished. Vast areas of Bransholme were ghost towns from birth, and as the population dwindled further so its streets grew ever quieter. Craig’s clock said early-evening rush-hour, but my eyes said Sunday afternoon. People who definitely had jobs looked as vacant as those who probably didn’t: two policemen drove by looking like crash-test dummies in uniform, and I saw a postman standing motionless with the flat of his hand against a pillar-box, as if being recharged. Even the conspicuous absence of graffiti seemed consistent with the general air of sloth, as if the young people of Bransholme couldn’t be arsed to hate their surroundings enough to want to deface them. How tragic that these blank trudgers were the grandchildren of the dockers I’d seen scurrying around the holds of ships in the Maritime Museum’s newsreels, the embodiment of time-is-money commercial hyperactivity. Now everyone had far too much time, and not nearly enough money. The best I could say, in relation to their hometown’s table-topping achievements in over-indulgence and under-learning, is that nobody looked too fat or too drunk or too stupid, at least not all at the same time.
I wondered how long Hull could go on like this. You felt it was living on borrowed time as one of only six English cities deemed worthy of identification on ITV’s national weather map. The recession stamped on Hull’s fingers just as it put a hopeful hand up to haul itself out of the mire: from the start of 2008 to the end of 2009, more people lost their jobs in the city than anywhere else in the land. By 2010, advertised vacancies (oilcake taster, caravan-finder general) were outnumbered sixteen to one by jobseekers. And yet it could all have been so different.
In 1999, Hull council sold its stake in the city’s telecom operator, Kingston Communications, for a more than tidy £263 million. Overnight, one of our most destitute and desperate regions found itself blessed with the wealthiest local authority in Britain. It must have felt like a lottery win, and was certainly disposed of as such. The council listened to the sober voices of reason advocating steady investment in the city’s infrastructure, educational facilities and so forth, with a long-term view to creating jobs and otherwise bringing the regional economy back from the dead. Then it went out and blew £32 million on a state-of-the-art sports stadium, and another £45 million on an aquarium with the deepest fish tanks in Europe – I’d seen it marooned on the inert waterfront, angular and sinister, like a Stealth bomber that nosedived into the estuary mud. In a fit of morning-after remorse, councillors then vowed to do something for Hull’s long-suffering poor and needy. The citizenry expressed loud relief that their elected local officials had belatedly come to their senses. Except they hadn’t: Hull council promptly shelled out the balance of its windfall, an extraordinary £96 million, on double-glazing the Bransholme estate. Many of the houses thus enhanced had lain empty for years, and hundreds were subsequently demolished. In three mad years, they spunked the lot.
The mini-Bransholmes grew steadily more unsettling. One was entirely composed of boarded-up bungalows. Another had words like BELIEVE and FAITH signposted in the centre of every roundabout, creepily dystopian attempts to instil a sense of purpose and community by decree. It would have been about now that I recalled Hull’s hallowed reputation for ‘glassing’: when the city’s pubs took part in a two-year trial serving beer in plastic containers, the local NHS saved £7.2 million on eye-surgery costs. I sensed it was only a matter of time before my increasingly frequent and panicky about-turns would cause me to sideswipe somebody’s careworn Astra van or smoking child, and thus interact with the glass-toting zombies of Bransholme in a scenario heavily weighted to my disadvantage.
At last I hit the roundabout-roulette jackpot, and presently found myself in the realm of dark trees and the national speed limit. The road rose away from the Humber’s alluvial flatlands; I knew I’d definitively left poor old Hull behind when I passed a telephone box that wasn’t white. I sighed mournfully, but pathos was never easy to sustain with Craig’s jukebox up and running. Just past Beverley, Frankie Howerd launched into a rendition of ‘When I’m 64’, and I found myself greeting the black moors ahead with an expression of lobotomised disbelief that I must have picked up in Bransholme.
‘Sunday morning – go for a ride?!’ Frankie’s throaty, swooping innuendo introduced the soundtrack to a musical production so provocatively obnoxious and ill-conceived it made Springtime for Hitler look like Mary Poppins. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a 1977 production financed with the profits from Saturday Night Fever, put a work of lofty musical genius into the hands of oafish has-beens and never-weres, and weaved in a storyline so shed-eatingly inane that after some deliberation I’ve decided I cannot bring myself to describe any part of it. Except for the happy ending: the trumpeting enormity of the film’s box-office failure bankrupted its producers.
The cast of this ungodly travesty reads like a veritable ‘Why Them?’ of late 1970s popular culture: Methuselan cigar enthusiast George Burns, frog-eyed pocket whisperer Donald Pleasence, any number of shirt-averse period pretty-boys from Paul Nicholas to Peter Frampton. Earth Wind & Fire appear as themselves; legacy-shredding keyboardist Billy Preston as ‘a magical golden weather vane come to life’. To put the project’s comprehensive awfulness into perspective, the Bee Gees – the sodding Bee Gees! – repeatedly begged to be released from the film, and later sued the producer for $200 million. In a state of mesmerised horror I led a queue of impatient motorists northwards through the night, past Scarborough and Whitby, into and out of mysterious little coastal towns where silver waves crashed in under a full moon. George Burns fixed a hole where the rain got in; I gripped the wheel harder as the brothers Gibb read the news today, oh boy. The remaining tracks had all been fed through a vocoder, the ‘Mr Blue Sky’ voice manipulator that held so many period artistes in its idiotic thrall. This at
least had the benefit of muffling the final contributions into an unintelligible stream of twangy robotic flatulence.
Things were getting bleaker, more serious. Every seaside settlement was a mean and moribund ex-mining village; I drove down into one and found a huddle of pebble-dashed terraces staring out at a terrifying sea, black and white and furious. The shingle was bulked up with hunks of masonry and what I first took for lobster pots were balls of rusted chicken wire. I was, it now occurred to me, definitively in the north-east: where the wind was always cold, the people largely unintelligible and the front gardens – a nation-besting 47 per cent of them – entirely paved over.
Just up the road I passed another jaunty seaside attraction: Redcar steelworks, home to Europe’s largest blast furnace and the dominant local employer for a century and a half. Though not for long: the day after I drove by, Tata Steel announced the plant’s imminent closure. It’s now fairly clear that by this point I had evolved into something more than just a curious tourist on a last-chance-to-see trip around his nation’s neglected nether regions. I was the very angel of death, dispatching chocolate factories, wholesale fruit markets and any number of venerable hotels with my life-sapping aura. Sorry, Britain.
I approached Middlesbrough with a level of expectation appropriate to its table-topping position in the Erection, Erection, Erection chart: the very worst place to live in all of Britain. On cue, a thin, gritted sleet began to spatter the windscreen, scraped into cloudy mush by Craig’s flapping rubber twigs. The roundabouts were embellished with sculptures paying dour tribute to the area’s metallurgical heritage – molten iron pouring forth from a giant bucket and so on – and the night was distantly bordered with gleaming, steaming petrochemical cathedrals. In twenty-first-century Britain you’d imagine poor air quality as something you’d need a white coat and a big machine to detect, but when I creaked down the steamed-up window an inch for a better view, a gust of soured brimstone smacked straight into the back of my throat.
