The Full English, page 31
Hull doesn’t have quite that dour (and mischievous) insularity, but it does have an assertive individuality, a uniqueness even. On the gable ends of some of the 50s council houses on Shelby Street, near enough to see from your train window, different coloured bricks have been used to make some big mosaics. One is a huge trawler, the other a prop forward handing off an incoming tackle. Rugby League and deep sea fishing are two things Hull – or Kingston upon Hull to give it its proper name – excels at. You notice at the station that the trains are ‘Hull Trains’. You spot outside on the street that the phone boxes are cream not red, because Hull has never been part of BT and has its own comms network called KCOM. Hull isn’t the North East. It isn’t Yorkshire. It isn’t the East Riding. It’s Hull.
It’s more Riga than Redcar. Priestley noticed this in 1933; ‘Unless you should happen to be going to one of the Baltic countries, Hull is out of your way,’ he advised. ‘It is not really in Yorkshire, but by itself, somewhere in the remote east where England is nearly turning into Holland or Denmark … Something of the outward character of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries with which it trades has crept into the appearance of Hull.’ Hull was the first city in England to have a Danish Church. It still stands there on Ferensway as you exit the station, just opposite the fabulous mid-century cinema called, weirdly, Cecil. That’s now a bingo hall and Den Danske Sømandskirke is living precariously these days. Its full-time pastor has gone and the internet is a quicker, easier way of staying connected to communities at home in Aarhus and Odense.
The Scandinavian church was established in Victoria’s reign when many Danish ships docked in Hull with holds laden with cattle, bacon, butter and corn. By the time Victoria died, Hull was the second biggest port in England and the hub of trade lines that spanned the world. Priestley writing in 1933 could confidently state, ‘it was founded by Edward the First, and it has been growing steadily ever since. It is still growing.’ Such confidence was short-lived, regarding the shipping trade at least. Hull’s fleet has been declining for decades. The six deep-water trawlers still working from Hull at the start of the millennium have been bought by an Icelandic/Dutch operator. Without salting old sores or exposing my ignorance, I’m always slightly baffled by those seaports, always facing other lands, which voted in 2016 to sever ties with the continent. Hull was one, enthusiastically voting for Brexit. It remains to be seen whether it will prove a glorious new dawn for the port.
Hull Docks has success stories though. I’m bound for one. To get there, I pass along Porter Street, a riotous motley of several generations of social housing. Other blitzes are better known but Hull was the most devastatingly damaged of all British towns and cities during the Second World War. A vital, prosperous seaport and ripe target for German bombs, 95 per cent of its houses were damaged. Over half the city was made homeless. A massive rebuilding programme began right here, with what the locals call the Australia Houses. The pub on the corner may have closed, and the theatre group based there may have moved on, but if the Australia Houses – circular balconied art deco tenements overlooking a central communal garden accessed by a pretty arch – were in Shoreditch or Hackney, it would cost you a million and the view from your bedroom window would be a fried chicken shop, not the seabirds and tides of the Humber estuary.
Hull’s docks, still the briny, beating heart of the city when Priestley came, have had fortunes you might call mixed. Albert and William Wright docks closed in the early 1970s but were revived by the relocation of the fish dock in 1975. Both survive as docks, berths and training centres. At about the same time Iceland declared a 200 mile ‘exclusion zone’ for ships during the Third Cod War in November 1975, St Andrew’s Dock was a major casualty. The proud, busy home of Hull’s fishing fleet, the largest deep-water fleet in the world for nearly a century, it is now a sad relic, silted and vandalised, owned piecemeal by several parties, including a local vet, and full of ghosts and graffiti.
For a happier story, stroll to Humber Dock. By the time you read this, it may actually be a stroll too. But in the summer of 2022, enormous excavations and demolitions, phalanxes of diggers and battalions of hardhats, made it about as congenial and navigable as the Cretan labyrinth, your narrator a desperate, disoriented Theseus seeking the Minotaur of the docks. Huge colourful boards and hoardings had been placed everywhere to cover yawning, chasmic holes in the road. On them, interesting facts were displayed such as that people from Hull are referred to as Hullensians and that pioneering aviatrix Amy Johnson was one of them. These titbits are intended, one assumes, to distract from the fact that it is getting dark and starting to rain, you haven’t eaten in hours and you are weeping silently with your fingers hooked in a chain link fence looking at the clonking masts of the Humber Dock, so tantalisingly near yet seemingly unreachable.
Okay, it wasn’t that bad, and it was worth the trip. Humber Dock closed in 1968 and later re-opened as a marina. There are hundreds of craft here, and here is where I should talk of skeffs and ketches, bowriders and sloops. But they were just a lot of quite pretty boats to me, the lubbiest of landlubbers. One looked a bit like a pirate ship if that helps set the scene. By the quayside, there was a chandlery, which means a place where they sell ‘boat stuff’ and I tried on a couple of jaunty caps before the suspicious assistant asked if there was anything specific I was looking for. I was tempted to make up something plausible: ‘Do you have a Newfoundland Skeffers Gob Hat in turquoise, me heartie?’ But instead I strode towards the estuary, eyes narrowed, as if scanning for ketches on the bobbing horizon.
A statue here on the Bullnose commemorates the 2.2 million people from Northern Europe who passed through Hull bound for new lives in America. There’s an identical companion on the Liverpool waterfront, from where the trip must have been a lot easier as you were facing in the right direction. But again, I’m no Jack Tar. Today I have the quayside to myself but for two couples glamorously dressed in leopard prints and blingy shades, filming themselves throwing music video shapes to what sounds like Ghanaian highlife. Behind them the North Sea rolls and rocks. It’s kind of funny and sweet. There’s a small queue for The Deep, a gargantuan new aquarium. I take the perfect opportunity to look windswept and thoughtful over the harbour wall out across what Larkin called ‘the widening river’s slow presence, the piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud.’
Left lies the ferry terminal, from where you can go only to Rotterdam, a feisty, sport mad, beery sister port in Holland which has always been a closer cousin to Hull than London is. Right, along the Hessle foreshore, after six miles of fine if dullish walking, is the span of the Humber Bridge. The longest suspension bridge in the world when it was opened in 1972 after a century of campaigning, it is still the longest in the UK and the longest anywhere that you can walk across. A couple of years back I did just that from Ferriby to Barton-upon-Humber, a charming market town steeped in history that for centuries was a very separate and unique place with its own character and dialect, linked to its big city neighbour only by infrequent small boat ferry. The bridge has brought it nearer but it’s still quirky and idiosyncratic, and the mile-long narrow Ropery Hall (where they once made the ropes, obviously) is the longest listed building in England. It’s an arts and craft centre now and an excellent one. The ropes have gone but carrot cake, handmade amber brooches and stand-up comedy keep the place buzzing.
I retrace my steps into the Fruit Market, a little piece of Humberside that aspires to the condition of San Francisco. They were trading here for four centuries, firstly in fish and then, as the name suggests, mainly in fruit and veg. In the nineteenth century the bustling community here could support a circus, a theatre and a chapel and at its peak was selling 20,000 lettuces a week, fact fans. But the Luftwaffe and market forces conspired to end these boom years and the market itself was moved out of town in 2009. For a while, it looked like the Fruit Market might go the way of St Andrew’s Dock, a melancholic decline into dereliction until the bulldozers came. But, as in post-industrial spaces from New York’s Meatpacking District to the weavers’ cottages of Hebden Bridge, these derelict spaces became colonised by bohemians and creatives on the hunt for basic studios and cheap, funky places to live. Now the Fruit Market is the trendiest place in Hull. The ‘fishy-smelling pastoral’ of the streets, as Larkin called it, now includes a community café, a distillery, a gallery, a tapas bar, an artisanal gelateria, a ceramics workshop, a high-end Indian restaurant, a jeweller and a clutch of bars and pubs. In a nice touch, the council have left the ‘ghost’ signage of the market’s previous life just visible above these chic modern outlets, names that echo a disappeared Hull: Humber Fruit Brokers; Gibson Bishop & Co; Connolly Shaw Ltd; J. Bradnum & Co, Fruit Merchant (now a posh chocolatier). A bloke about my age passes by with his young son and points at an upstairs window: ‘That was my dad’s office when it was a fruit importers. I used to go and pinch all his stationery.’
The Minerva pub overlooks the estuary. Reputed to have the smallest rooms of any British pub, it’s no surprise that they’re all full. So I take my pint outside and watch a small boat, possibly a cutter or a yaw, plough the smudgy blue waters of the Humber. Hull was the second UK City of Culture I’ve been to on my trip and it reminds me a little of Coventry; blitzed almost into dereliction, resurgence then recession, now embracing the move into a post-industrial phase, confident, creative, full of students and artists yet still with the character of a proper city, not a ‘pop up’ hub. When Northern and Midland industrial conurbations become cities of culture, they are the softest of targets for snobs further south, setting up rote cracks about whippet racing and clog dancing. But in both cities, the impact has been considerable.
An excitable crowd on the quayside turns out to be a wedding party. The bride is posing with her gartered leg up on a capstan for the photos; the groom’s laughing, handing her a prosecco as the bulbs flash. Obviously, I’m reminded of one of adopted Hullensian Larkin’s many masterpieces The Whitsun Wedding, his elegiac, wistful account of newlyweds boarding a train full of hope and anxiety. I checked the date. Whit Saturday was last week, but it was nearly the ‘frail travelling coincidence’ he wrote of in that verse. I finished my beer and headed for the station, even later getting away than Larkin was, wondering as always about that ‘arrow shower, somewhere becoming rain.’
2
Evening was drawing in over fen and field when Priestley came to Lincoln in a crepuscular fog, imagining himself a Victorian solicitor coming to read the will in a Wilkie Collins romance. No such gloom or murk attends my arrival in the city. A sudden thunderstorm has moved across the vast, flat fields of Lincolnshire as I approach, piled dark thunderheads flashing and sluicing over Saxby and Market Rasen. By the time I arrive, though, it has swept out over The Wash as quickly as it came, swishing its dark cape of rain, and I arrive in a Lincoln showered and glistening in the sun. It is half term, and the streets are thronged with locals and tourists. Once upon a time –twice and three times, actually, maybe during the Roman, Norman and Medieval period – Lincoln was a city to rival London in wealth and importance. That may no longer be true, but on a late spring morning after a reviving rainstorm, as citizen and tourist pass and mingle beneath the arch from the Strait to Bailgate, Oxford Street and the Square Mile were no comparison to Lincoln.
Except perhaps some of the prices. My hotel is a smartish gaff on the Brayford Waterfront where the room service menu offers a fish finger roll for £13 plus £5 tray charge. In other words, £18 for a fish finger sandwich. Baffled once again by the elevation of this ‘dish’ from the penurious student’s meagre lunch to gastro pub delicacy, I decide to eat out. There is a nice symmetry in that my English journey, like Priestley’s of course, is beginning and ending on ancient, prosperous waterfronts, in Southampton and Lincoln, in places where our island nation has traded and explored, made friends and gone to war, set sail for new shores and sought to protect its own. Brayford was the first known settlement in Lincoln and was once Lindon, ‘Lin’ meaning pool and ‘don’ meaning ‘foot of the hill’. Later the Romans called it Lindon Colonia, and by contraction, Lincoln. After a century of decline as the barge trade dwindled with the coming of road and rail freight, Brayford Pool, the oldest natural harbour in England, is now reborn as an upmarket marina where masts and highball glasses clink and chime all day and night. The last of the old wharfside buildings was demolished in 1993 and the Royal William IV pub is the only pre-1945 building that remains. I notice on the chalkboard outside that tonight is quiz night and mentally file this choice nugget of intel for my evening plans. Before then, I have a date with history. Headed downtown, I pass the Drill Hall where I’d played my one-man show before lockdown.
We were once a nation of drill halls. Every town had one, and when Priestley came it would have rung and clattered to army volunteers marching and presenting arms and standing at ease. Even as late as 2015, Historic England estimated there were about 1,500 still around, now turned into flats or gyms or, as in Lincoln’s case, an arts centre. When I’d played here, it was threatened with closure and I filmed a heartrendingly powerful yet elegantly witty appeal for them in which I encouraged people to sponsor a brick for a quid. I’d like to think that it was this urgent bulletin that saved the day, but I acknowledge that being taken over by some energetic and skilled people at the college probably helped.
In Lincoln, all roads eventually lead to The Strait and a steep hill called, with admirable clarity, Steep Hill. I stop off briefly at the Back To Mono record shop to nose around the weird stuff. A middle-aged man enters in search of Pet Shop Boys collectibles and a studenty girl buys the new Arcade Fire on vinyl. William Goldman was speaking of the film business when he said ‘nobody knows anything’ but he could have been describing the music industry. Decca records told Brian Epstein that ‘groups of guitars are on the way out’, the major labels told us that ‘home taping was killing music’ and that we should sell our beloved vinyl records and buy 8-track tapes, DATs and Minidiscs and a host of other forgotten ‘innovations’ now cluttering the attics of the world’s audiophiles. Sweetly, in utter defiance of the industry’s predictions, I have found a vinyl record shop in every town and city I have visited on this journey, often combined with some other quirky retail function; a coffee shop or patisserie, clothes shop, haberdashers, abbatoir, fishing tackle shop etc. As I stroll up town in the newly-rinsed air I pass a sax and trumpet duo comprising a young lad and his dad in a wheelchair giving a spirited, if not entirely note perfect, lounge jazz version of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’, a daring piece of recontextualisation à la John Coltrane’s reading of ‘My Favourite Things’. Worth a few quid of anyone’s loose change.
Steep Hill is, according to the council bumph, the fourth steepest cobbled street in England. When I mention on Twitter that I find it hard to believe there are steeper, a volley of texts informs me of terrifying gradients in Clovelly, Devon and Shaftesbury, Dorset, the hill from the Hovis ad where ‘it were like tekkin bread to’t top ot world’. But let’s not get bogged down here. Steep Hill is steep. That’s for certain. Chris Florance tells me that ‘as a sixteen-year-old YTS lad I worked in the bookshop at the top of Steep Hill in the mid 80s. It was not unusual for customers to come in and need medical treatment from the hard walk up the hill.’ Ironically, Steep Hill is a great leveller. Just as I am wondering if I can give my aching calves and tight lungs a breather by pretending to take in some architectural features, a young and athletic looking woman overtakes me on the rise then, just as I’m feeling ancient and decrepit, turns and says to me: ‘This is insane’. We both park ourselves on the conveniently-sited benches outside St Michael’s parish church, the Mayor’s Chair, ‘traditionally a place to rest on Steep Hill’. Once upon a time, Steep Hill was the city’s busiest food market, and would have echoed to the cries of fishmongers at the top, butchers at the bottom and poulterers in the middle.
When Priestley came there was apparently a distinction between ‘uphill’ and ‘downhill’ Lincoln, an upstairs/downstairs style division. ‘It appears that there is great local snobbery about this hill. To be anybody in Lincoln you must live “uphill” … In short, a successful social life in Lincoln is essentially uphill work. You labour down below, in the clanging twentieth century, and spend your leisure by the side of the Cathedral, in the twelfth century.’ A lady in an ice cream shop, Lincoln born and bred, tells me this distinction no longer applies, though anyone lucky enough to live in Cathedral Close is ‘winning at life’. Next door is a shop selling all kinds of vintage militaria and ephemera, including a box of second-hand parachutes and bungee cords – something I would be decidedly keen on having in factory-fresh working order.
The oldest building on the hill, indeed one of the oldest residential buildings in England, is The Jew’s House, originally owned by a wealthy Jewish trader, Bellaset of Wallingford. Lincoln’s Jewish community were rich and powerful but, as always, regarded with suspicion by some, stoked by a confected libel surrounding a child supposedly kidnapped and killed by a nationwide Jewish conspiracy. In 1290, Edward I expelled all Jews from England and the house was seized. Over the intervening centuries it has been many things, and since 1973 a restaurant where now chef Gavin Aitkenhead can rustle you up some beef fillet carpaccio and roast squab pigeon if the climb gets too much.
But after a little exertion, and a restorative pause at the Mayor’s Chair with an ice cream, you’re at the top and keeping that date with history. Look right and here’s the cathedral, once the tallest building in Europe and one of the finest Gothic structures in the world. Commissioned by William the Conqueror soon after he’d come to power – still a sore point with some of us – you can easily imagine it giving an eleventh-century peasant a surge of the devotional willies. Here was God’s eternal and limitless power rendered in stone and glass and flying buttresses. A constant and permanent scaffolding orbits its enormous walls, one circuit taking approximately forty years. No single architect has ever been in post for a full restoration circuit.
