Abstract
As UK City of Culture in 2017 Hull has been celebrating its rich history and cultural heritage while reaffirming its place in the contemporary world. This edited collection of well-researched and beautifully-illustrated essays is perfectly timed to coincide with the resurgence of interest in the city that this award has offered. Hull: Culture, History, Place presents a fascinating insight into the distinctiveness of this important maritime city from its prehistoric origins up to the twenty-first century. In the Introduction it is stated that one of the aims of the book is to ‘celebrate’ Hull; to applaud this ‘distinctive city’ and its ‘proud and often remarkable history’; in short, to capture its ‘Hullness’ (pp. 10–11). Such a claim could lead readers to be concerned that the book takes a decidedly hagiographic and parochial approach, setting out to ‘rescue’ the city from its more negative recent representations. However, while this volume does indeed set out to celebrate Hull’s ‘distinctive’ nature (the word or its synonyms are employed repeatedly throughout) it does so in order to emphasise the ways in which the city has acted as a unique site of economic, social and cultural exchange. Rather than taking a blinkered look at the city’s history through rose-tinted spectacles, then, the book’s eleven chapters offer up a broad and candid appraisal of Hull’s development, decline, and resurgence over the course of the lengthy chronological period covered.
Hull’s distinctiveness was produced, the editors contend, by three key elements: water, commodities, and people. The city’s proximity to the sea, as well as its abundance of waterways that connected it to the hinterlands, permitted easy access to trade routes, allowing it to become ‘a place where the peoples, commodities and finances of the northern European world connected’ (Atkinson, McDonagh, McKeon, Salter, Starkey and Wilcox, p. 1). Of these three elements, it is the theme of water that dominates most chapters in this volume. This is not surprising for Hull was, as Martin Wilcox points out ‘foremost a port town’ (p. 117). As a place of arrival and departure the port was central in fostering the growth of a diverse number of industries and businesses across a series of trades and manufactory sectors, as well as encouraging mobility and the mixing of peoples from across the globe. However, the city’s reliance on the sea is shown to be both a blessing and a curse; responsible for its rapid rise but also for its precipitous decline. In his opening chapter D. H. Evans demonstrates that the city’s location on the waterfront ensured that, by the Middle Ages, it had become one of the most important ports in the country. Subsequent chapters by Elizabeth Salter, David and Susan Neave, and Wilcox that chart the port’s development from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century likewise show how central the port was in boosting the city’s fortunes. However, Jo Byrne and Alex Ombler’s closing chapter lucidly demonstrates that when the city’s links with the sea were fractured – particularly after the decline of its fishing industry in the late-twentieth century – its status abruptly fell. As a result, ‘the city turned its back on the water’ (Byrne and Ombler, p. 299); a rejection of its roots that has only more recently been reversed. The port, once central to the city’s identity, looked for a while to be its scourge.
Studies of ports have traditionally focused on networks of trade and economic development, while maritime histories have habitually concentrated exclusively on activities at sea rather than on land. While this book understandably has a strong focus on Hull’s global trading networks and its commercial activities, it also pays significant attention to the people of Hull (not just its residents but those passing through) and the role they played in shaping the city’s economic and social geography. This is a highly refreshing approach that identifies the port as a liminal urban space encouraging social and cultural diversity, not just along its waterfront but also in the neighbourhoods that played host to commercial and industrial areas, such as the dockyard and fishing communities of East Hull and Hessle Road respectively. Ports foster social mobility and mixing, and Nicholas J. Evans’ essay demonstrates how the influx of ‘outsiders’ into Hull has been ‘an enduring feature’ of the city’s maritime identity and a ‘symbol of its entrepreneurial vigour’ (p. 146). This social mixing has not been without its problems, however. While the lack of migrants from the British Empire and other places further afield ensured that social conflict was less racialised in Hull than in other British cities, the anxieties and tensions caused by the ebb and flow of people from other lands did lead, Evans contends, to some resentment and an unwillingness to accept ‘outsiders’ who did not assimilate or integrate into their host communities. Despite being ‘a truly global city’, then, Hull remained according to Evans a ‘monocultural’ one (p. 165); a surprising detail that also sets it apart from most other port cities.
A single book cannot, of course, do full justice to the long history of this city, even one that comes in at over 300 pages. Nonetheless, by covering a diverse range of topics across a long chronological period – from the early settlements of the prehistoric era to the political rebellions of the early modern period, through to the bombing traumas of the Second World War and the city’s resurgence after the catastrophic decline of the fishing industry in the late-twentieth century – this collection of essays offers the reader an absorbing snapshot of the city’s rich heritage. Moreover, the many interesting vignettes – 25 in total – located within each chapter add further illuminating detail. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural geography, history, and literary studies, deploy a diverse array of source materials, including diaries, letters, inventories, wills and testaments, and oral testimonies, to demonstrate how important the city of Hull was not just to British, but global history. Hull: Culture, History, Place is an excellent book that will be of much interest to the readers of this journal, as well as to scholars of social, economic and cultural history, along with urban (and historical) geographers. It is also highly recommended as an introductory text to anyone wanting to find out more about the history of this important and distinctive maritime city.