Is Hull really the second worst place to live in Britain?

ON A day like this, as thin fingers of sunlight struggle to break through a bruised-looking sky, the murky Humber estuary doesn’t look particularly inviting.

But it’s to the water that Hull has traditionally turned for both trade and inspiration. You don’t have to walk far in the city centre before stumbling across references to its proud maritime heritage. The fishing industry may have long since gone but the city’s close affinity with the sea has again become a focal point as Hull prepares to take on the City of Culture mantle in 2017.

The Deep, one of the UK’s biggest aquariums, and the continuing redevelopment of the nearby marina have transformed the waterfront. Along Humber Street and Dock Street renovation work is feverishly taking place, as it is around the nearby Centre for Digital Innovation (C4DI), the centrepiece of @TheDock – a scheme within Hull’s fruit market and central dry dock area.

It’s a visible sign of Hull’s ongoing regeneration. However, it isn’t all good news for the city.

Last month, Hull was labelled the second worst place in the country to live, with Bradford rated the worst, according to the uSwitch.com annual Quality of Life index. Researchers assessed 138 local areas on a number of different factors including employment rates, house prices, life expectancy and average incomes.

Hull Council said the figures appeared to be out of date and pointed to another survey, by The Sunday Times, which said Hull was one of the best urban places in Britain to live in.

It’s fair to say that people here have become hardened to criticism over the years. Hull has certainly endured its fair share of traumas it was, for instance, the most bombed city in the country apart from London during the Second World War, a fact that isn’t widely known.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Hull was a city on a downward slide, when in fact the opposite is true. Local writer Russ Litten, whose latest novel Kingdom has just been published, questions some of these surveys. “You can’t tell me that the quality of life here is worse than any other city in the North of England,” he says.

“There’s a physical isolation about Hull but when people do come here they fall in love with it. For years it’s had one of the highest student retention rates in the country.”

Hull has perhaps always had an insular ‘end of the line’ feel about it, but it is slowly turning this to its advantage. “There’s an independence about Hull,” says Litten. “I went to a pub recently after going to a poetry reading and there was a ukulele ensemble playing Oasis songs. There was a big crowd watching this impromptu ukulele jam and it’s like that here, every night there’s something interesting going on.”

Having spent years in the shadows there’s a feeling that Hull is coming out of its shell. “We don’t brag about ourselves in the way some other places do and I think getting City of Culture has made the city more self-conscious.”

Phil Ascough is a PR consultant and non-executive director at Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce. He points out that the city’s cultural renaissance hasn’t happened in isolation, it has been underpinned by economic growth and private and public sector investment. “City of Culture has triggered a lot of investment in other areas, the public realm being the big one,” he says.

Ascough believes Hull has had to learn hard lessons from the past. “When jobs were lost following the demise of the fishing industry there was no such thing as re-training. The attitude was ‘the boats aren’t there any more you better go and find something else to do,’ and a lot of people struggled with that.

“Training is still a big priority but the difference now is that something is being done about it and we have Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) working with entrepreneurs with the aim of creating job opportunities that are sustainable.”

Elaine Burke is director of learning and programme development at The Open Futures Trust and has worked in Hull for the last 20 years. She believes the decline of the fishing industry during the 1960s and 70s created a vacuum that had a profound knock-on effect on poorer communities. “People were moved into outlying estates like Bransholme, Orchard Park and Preston Road on the fringes of the city,” she says.

This had the unfortunate effect of concentrating social problems like joblessness, poverty and health issues in certain areas of the city. It’s a legacy that is now being tackled but it’s not one that can be rectified overnight.

Burke believes that one of the keys to Hull’s resurgence over the past five years or so has been the fact that different sectors are working together. “People are making the connection between wellbeing and educational attainment, and between tourism and culture and industry.”

She also points to the City Plan, led by Hull Council, which aims to create 7,500 jobs for local people over 10 years, as an example of private and pubic sectors working in unison. “The regeneration that we’re seeing has been brought together by the glue of ambition and aspiration.”

But jobs alone can’t make Hull a place where people are happy to move to. “If you want a city that people want to work in they have to want to live in it too. People want to be somewhere that has good schools and interesting things to do.”

Which is where culture comes in. Burke was involved in the Larkin25 festival in 2010 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the poet Philip Larkin’s death – the centrepiece of which was an art project that saw 40 giant toad sculptures dotted around the city to form a trail.

It garnered widespread praise and piqued the interest of the national media. “I think the toads project opened people’s minds to the idea of culture playing an important role in city life,” she says.

Hull’s cultural scene is undoubtedly flourishing. As well as hugely popular annual events like the Freedom Festival and Humber Mouth Festival, Hull Truck moved into a new £15m home in 2009 and Ferens Art Gallery is undergoing a £4.5m facelift in time for it to host the Turner Prize in 2017.

Hull’s regeneration didn’t start with its winning bid to become City of Culture, but it has a big role to play in keeping the momentum going. “We want an education system where kids want culture and are familiar with it, culture shouldn’t be about special one-off events, it should be part of what’s happening every day.”

Surveys and statistics are all well and good, but they don’t tell the whole story.

“There’s a saying that if it works in Hull it will work anywhere,” says Burke. “The city does have its issues but it’s an exciting place to be right now, things happen in Hull that don’t happen anywhere else and if people don’t come here they are missing out.”