Lost world of Hull and high water

A few years ago, at the end of a telephone interview, I mentioned to the playwright that I thought it was wrong of the BBC to keep locked away in its archives his wonderful 1970 TV drama Land of Green Ginger. It was hard to imagine a better evocation of Hull in the 60s and 70s, I said. What a shame that a new generation of Hull folk would be denied the opportunity of seeing his depiction of everyday life in the port during what many would consider its heyday. The Humber had been so much livelier then, whereas on my last visit very few vessels were moving on the river.

Soon after our conversation, a small Jiffy bag dropped through my letterbox. When I opened it, I found just a home-burned DVD to which was attached a yellow Post-It note with the scribbled words “Land of Green Ginger”. Within minutes, it was playing on my TV and instantly transporting me to the Hull I knew as a journalist nearly 40 years ago.

Land of Green Ginger – taking its name from a small street in Hull’s Old Town – tells the story of a local girl who works in London but has come home for the weekend. On the train north, she meets a posh newspaper reporter who’s on his way to write a profile of Hull, and she jokes with him: “A fish shop fifty miles down a railway siding... is that what they say?”

It’s one of Alan Plater’s most memorable lines, and distils not just how Hull folk thought they were viewed by the rest of Britain but their own sense of isolation that has always made the city feel so different from everywhere else.

The play opens with a beautiful sequence filmed on the river. The famous Watersons folk group sings North Country Girl in the background. There’s a trawler on its way back up the Humber from Iceland while one of the coal-fired Humber Ferries, its red funnel trailing black smoke, puts out from Victoria Pier and heads for New Holland on the south bank.

With that image firmly in my head I returned there last month and stood on Victoria Pier remembering smokey old ferries like the Wingfield Castle and Tattersall Castle, and thinking how antiseptically clean the waterfront now looked.

The constant bustle of cars and passengers queuing and disembarking was replaced by a few camera-totting Japanese tourists posing for each other’s photographs. The old ferry buildings, once as vital a part of Hull life as the ticket office on Paragon Station, have been made into apartments, and it is left to the inevitable blue plaque to remind visitors that a ferry service operated here from 1825 until the completion of the Humber Bridge in 1981.

Nearby is still the Minerva Hotel, where an open fire in the one-roomed bar warmed many a passenger while waiting for the ferry, but these days it is a spacious pub-restaurant complete with small theatre. Across Pier Street there is now a To Let sign outside the offices of the anachronistically named Anglo-Soviet Shipping Company.

The whole waterfront area south of Castle Street is going the same way. The old fruit market around Humber Street, through which ferry passengers had to walk on their way to and from the city centre, is no longer filled with the sights and smells of fresh produce arriving from all corners of the globe. Regeneration is underway here too, with yet another theatre and some new bars, and within a few years it will be hard for anyone not fortunate enough to have experienced it to imagine the colour and vitality that once filled these cobbled streets.

From the Minerva, I crossed the old lock gates at the entrance to the old Humber Dock, a structure that Health and Safety and no-win-no-fee lawyers would put out of bounds were it still in the condition I recall from a few decades ago. These days the gates have been restored and the dock has become a forest of yacht masts that looks like a postcard from Cannes.

Next to it is Humber Quays, the name given to Hull’s new glass and steel business quarter. Its heritage is evinced by the old dock railway lines which have been left embedded among the cobbles, and a monument to over two million trans-migrants who passed over these cobbles, either on their way from Europe to catch trains for Liverpool and Glasgow en route to ships that would carry them to new lives across the Atlantic, or sailing from Hull to South Africa and Australia.

West of here is where the biggest changes of all on Hull’s waterfront are set to happen. At the far end of Wellington Street you come to what seems like a dead end of steel railings and a big Associated British Ports sign. This is the old Albert and William Wright Docks, once the centre of Hull’s great fishing industry and now in various stages of demolition and reclamation.

My advice to anyone who knew and loved the port of a few decades ago is explore here as soon as you can, because some parts are literally changing overnight. It is possible – or at least it was when I visited – to find a narrow opening between the railings, carrying a short stretch of the Trans Pennine Trail from Hornsea to Southport, and reach the side of the docks.

This provides an opportunity to experience what I think must be the saddest view in the whole of Hull. As far as the eye can see are empty berths which the huge fleet that once fought Iceland in the Cod War used to call home. Now – almost symbolically – poppies grow out of cracks in the concrete.

To all intents and purposes, Hull is no longer a fishing port. These days, Grimsby is where fish is landed and changes hands. No doubt new apartments and shopping complexes will erase the sadness in time, but away from the old fish dock Hull still manages to look a prosperous and vibrant-looking seaport.

Before the dock disappears, however, someone should try to capture the faintly sweet mustiness that envelopes the old warehouses and fish quays, a smell that seems to encapsulate decades of cod, diesel and sweat. It should be put in a bottle or aerosol can and sold as the smell of old Hull.