Hull City of Culture 2017: An introduction

The city of Hull isn’t used to making a fuss. Defined by the down to earth, no nonsense attitude of its people, Hull’s charm has been modestly hidden in its cobbled alleyways, in tales of mirth in one of many local boozers, or in the minds of its elder generation perched on the sea front, nursing memories of times gone by. Although Hull’s rich history is well known among its people, it has never been a city to boast its prospects to the rest of the world, rendering it misunderstood, and even forgotten, in the UK’s catalogue of cultural communities.

When Martin Green, CEO and director of Hull UK City of Culture 2017, was gifted with the task of bringing Hull’s cultural identity into the limelight, he faced a daunting yet enticing project: how will Hull celebrate its culture while remaining true to the heart of the people who carry its history?

If the UK City of Culture status is unfamiliar to some, that’s because it’s so new. Londonderry, Northern Ireland, was the first city to receive the accolade in 2013, designed to boost the city and its tourism as well as bring in 3000 jobs. After the success of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture status in 2008, it was decided that similar benefit could be brought to cities across the UK every four years.

For Green, the project had to be wanted and rooted in the needs of Hull’s people in order to work. “Although the document was many pages long, its key phrase was ‘we want it and we need it,’ written in that refreshingly Hull way,” he says of the bid. “A lot of people in the city were consulted, so you were safe in the knowledge that that document was fed into by lots and lots of people. So our job was to curate that. In all parts of the programme, you can trace that genealogy back to that document. Things may be larger, or have been brought together, but everything sprung from the bid.”

The four seasons

Green, with the city’s residents, has created a 365-day festival that sees Hull brought to life through world-renowned art, theatre, literature and music, and the city’s wealth translated into a certified bragging right. Staged in four seasons – Made in Hull, Roots & Routes, Freedom and Tell the World – the phases of the programme are integral to the Hull 2017 vision.

Learning from Liverpool and Londonderry, Green says that, while the four themes were originally planned to run concurrently through the year, “we made just a simple decision to assign them all a season. That was down to our research, and through talks with Liverpool and their Capital of Culture bid, and Londonderry. They both said, ‘Don’t try to release a year’s work in one go.’

“What we also realised was that if we assigned each season a theme, it allowed us to build a narrative throughout the year,” he explains. “Now that Made in Hull is over, we move into Roots & Routes – to talk about this city as a port city, its international connections and particularly its historic connections with Reykjavík, Rotterdam and Freetown in Sierra Leone, and its new connection with Aarhus in Denmark, which happens to be European Capital of Culture 2017 and, likewise, a port city, a re-emerging port city. With this, you can see that you start with the individual, the story, the community, the city; and you spend the year pushing, pushing and pushing the walls back, breaking the walls down, and connecting with the rest of the world.

“We then move into Freedom in the summer, which widens the lens again. You know, this is a city that’s built itself on the respective freedoms from William Wilberforce – we annually host the Freedom Festival here, which sees 130,000 attend a great programme of art and street art, all linked to ideas of freedoms.”

A vibrant programme

The events that are unfolding in the city are constant and unmissable. Whether it’s John Grant’s North Atlantic Flux festival celebrating the links between Hull and Nordic creativity, the work of Hull-bred art collective COUM Transmissions brought back to life in the independent jewel that is Humber Street Gallery, or the birth of Hull Comic Con, the city is delivering both residents and tourists a cocktail of events that understand the balance of timing and local and national communities. There is so much going on, Green says, that the seasons were necessary in order to break down the platter of stories.

“What you realise is you’ve got this absolutely unique opportunity – because everywhere else is a two-week festival – to take your time to tell many stories, in many ways, to different audiences,” he says. “Through the year we’ll enjoy those lesser-known stories which are for smaller, more definitive audiences, but over the year you accumulate and collect everyone, and everyone will find something they share a connection with.”

While the programme promises to put the city on the map, Green is keen to stress that Hull’s City of Culture status is for life, not just for 2017.

“I don’t think it was necessarily the case that people had a negative perception of the city, I think they had no perception of the city,” he says.

“And now they do. And that will continue, and hopefully now people know that, through the programme, the city is no longer operating in black and white – it’s now operating in glorious technicolour.”