You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 8

  Hull had earnt its prosperity as an adaptable port, always quick to follow the money: from wool to wine, from sail to steam, from Flanders to the far-flung colonies. The dockers hauled ashore the raw materials that fuelled the Industrial Revolution, and loaded the ships back up with its manufactured bounty. (I’d always assumed that local MP William Wilberforce was inspired to abolish slavery by terrible scenes witnessed on the city’s docksides, but in fact Hull was never significantly involved in history’s most shameful trading enterprise.) I turned left, and found myself walking down a survivor of these happier, wealthier times. Coltman Street was a long, long road of fine nineteenth-century terraces, interrupted by the odd chapel and church: a model Victorian thoroughfare, as long as you ignored the occasional Goering-ordained gap. The street’s prodigious length made it plain that these were homes for a broader demographic than the merchant class, yet their dimensions and optional architectural extras – a columned portico here, a fancy fanlight there – set them distantly apart from the two-up two-down brick hutches that would have been the comparable accommodation stock elsewhere. This was the Hull that struck it rich and spread the wealth around, the Hull that in 1814 had opened one of Britain’s first people’s dispensaries, a clinic where the poor were offered free treatment and medicines.

  ‘Lust?’

  I looked up from the tiny and useless map of Hull I’d been given at the hotel, and found myself presented with a fellow pedestrian whose bulk and genial ruddiness instantly called to mind the Jolly Fisherman, in a turquoise shell suit. You could get through an awful lot of aimless wandering in London without attracting attention, let alone concern, but despite Hull’s travails the Yorkshire spirit of kindly nosiness had evidently prevailed. So too had the local dialect, which processed vowels in a manner that even fellow Yorkshiremen found challenging.

  ‘Curled out this marnin, intit?’ he said, rubbing a huge pair of hands together after I’d told him I was trying to find my way to the docks. ‘Like the Nerth bloody Pearl! Reckon sner’s on the way. Foller this rerd and yerl it docks, what’s left of them.’

  I thanked him, bowed my head into the bitter wind and headed for the Humber.

  For most cities the Depression was a blip; for Hull it proved a tipping point. In 1935 one of the biggest docks was filled in, and by 1939 almost half of the sixty-five local railway stations designed by George Townsend Andrews, architect of Hull Paragon and the Royal Hotel, had been closed down (fewer than a third now remain). When the time came to rebuild the war-shattered city, it was clear that with both the Empire and British manufacturing already in retreat, finding dockside employment might be an issue for the tens of thousands who would call those new council blocks home.

  The local fishermen had a history of falling victim to their own success: after an insanely lucrative thirty-year whaling boom – the oil and baleen from a single carcass could net a Victorian skipper £2,000 – Hull’s harpoon-happy fleet set off for Greenland in 1850 to discover there wasn’t anything bigger than a walrus left for them to catch. (A hardy few kept doggedly at it. In 1910, an expedition set out to see if the population of bowhead whales had recovered: it hadn’t, so to make the best of a bad job they shot 242 polar bears.) Serendipitously, or so it seemed, seven years earlier a trawler blown way off course in a storm lowered its nets into unknown depths 60 miles off the Hull coast. The crew hauled them back out with some difficulty, having chanced upon the fishing grounds of the Dogger Bank, the richest that had ever been found in British waters, or indeed ever will be. So vast was their catch of cod and herring that they returned to Hull with their boat’s flanks thickly encrusted with gleaming fish scales. The area was dutifully nicknamed the Silver Pits, and just as the whaling gold rush died, along came another. Such was the demand for crew that over half the apprentice trawlermen had to be recruited from workhouses as far away as Manchester and London. Such were the riches on offer that more than one of these fish-fingered Oliver Twists retired as millionaires. The railway arrived to take away cod to the nation’s chip shops, and deliver coal for the new steam trawlers. By the end of another insanely lucrative thirty-year boom, the Silver Pits were already in steep decline.

  The overfishing precedent was there, and not only there: Great Yarmouth and its abruptly redundant herring fleet lay just down the coast. Yet, Hull went on to base its entire post-war economy on intensive deep-sea trawling, and the concomitant assumption that the cod was not as other living creatures, in that it didn’t breed, but rather spewed forth in unending profusion from the mouth of a magical undersea cavern. Guess what happened next? That’s right: an insanely lucrative thirty-year boom. Hull’s trawlermen did so well out of North Sea cod in the Fifties and Sixties that they were known as ‘three-day millionaires’, a reference to their pools-winner spending habits on those long weekends ashore. Tubby old skippers in canary-yellow drape suits and snakeskin shoes were driven about the city in cabs with seventy-two-hour fares on the meter, trailing crowds of children screaming for ‘scrambles’: a rather unedifying pastime wherein handfuls of cash tossed out of the window unleashed an apparently hilarious feeding frenzy. In 1975, a third of all Hull households were effectively dependent on cod and its batter-bound brethren.

  By then, the skippers of Europe’s largest fishing port were having to sail an awfully long way to bag a decent netful: the Baltic, the lonely Barents Sea, and most fatefully the waters around Iceland. Having no wish to incite the wifely wrath of Odin, I’m happy to state that the Cod Wars of the mid-Seventies were the inevitable consequence of intolerable bullying and provocation, and their outcome a just and noble victory for the plucky underfish. In reality, the Cod War was missing an ‘l’: the presence of a huge and strategically vital NATO base near Reykjavik had a decisive bearing on how things panned out to Hull’s considerable disadvantage, particularly once the Icelanders announced an intention to defend their newly enormous fishing limits with a fleet of Soviet Mirka-class frigates. The British government’s decision to respect these limits was probably less to do with any dutiful acceptance of Iceland’s right to its own marine bounty, and more down to a short and very loud phone call from Washington.

  Anyway, the consequences were devastating and immediate. In 1975, 150 trawlers were registered in Hull; today there are three. The local fish-processing industry collapsed almost overnight, and this time there was nothing to replace it. A website devoted to the city’s history concludes with this sad round-up of ‘late-twentieth-century local industries’: ‘Oilcake is made in Hull. So are plastic bags and caravans.’ Hull had gone into the economic egg-shop with just the one basket, and tripped up on the way out. Since the war, the city has shed a quarter of its population.

  Feeling my limbs growing rigid with cold, I juddered robotically up to the waterfront. The first dock I encountered was lined on one side with long-derelict warehouses and light-industrial workshops; the other had been gentrified along the model pioneered in London, with the old wharfs and shipping-company offices hollowed out, tarted up and reinvented as bistros and fancy handbag shops. Little knots of well-groomed women squinted at menus or window displays, the cobbles gleamed: it was all entirely agreeable, as long as you ignored the striding, hair-gelled battalions of self-important young-executive bellends, and kept well away from a fountain that the wind had transformed into an annoying elder brother with a garden hose. And as long as you didn’t turn to face the dock itself, there to confront the structure that emerged from its waters on stilts. An information board identified this as the Princes Quay centre, a shopping mall that opened in 1991 and bore noble tribute to Hull’s marine heritage by virtue of calling its floors ‘decks’, and looking a bit like a ship (I paraphrase).

  It did look a bit like a ship, but it looked a lot more like a temporary pedestrian bridge at Gatwick Airport. Judging from the flimsy, glazed superstructure’s slightly ramshackle demeanour, and its streaks and scabs of premature decay, such a construction had provided not only the architectural inspiration, but
the raw materials. What a sorry contrast with the weighty domes and towers that stood in ageless, stolid majesty along the imperial-era downtown skyline behind. And with what had gone on here before: a hive of eager, cosmopolitan economic production reduced to a tawdry little shrine to parochial consumption. The interior lived down to expectations, the usual study in soulless, cheerless retail geometry, a place where shops were units, arranged above the inevitable food court and around the inevitable atrium. JD Sports, The Disney Store, Clinton Cards. The ‘shopper’s map’ by the lifts betrayed the one conspicuous feature: almost all of the larger ‘units’ had been covered with a sticker marked VACANT. Fortunes were once made in this dock, but they clearly weren’t now being spent here.

  I peeled one of the stickers back far enough to reveal a familiar red logo, which caused me to sigh aloud, and so attract the attention of a security guard who delivered a half-hearted ticking-off. Thirty years ago, he’d have got me in trouble with my parents; thirty years hence, with my children. Committing petty acts of vandalism without serious redress must be one of the principal advantages of middle age, and I made a note to do it more often.

  The logo directed me to a long and very closed unit, its departed incumbent identified in ghostly negative by the dust silhouetted around absent lettering. Woolworths: our ultimate retail institution, an idiosyncratic and stridently native presence on every high street (um, even though it was originally American). Defiantly, definitively British for one hundred years, from the days when that meant energy and innovation, then into the complacent good times, the complacent bad times, and finally via belated scatter-gun commercial desperation to a pitiful, whimpering death. It was all very Austin Rover, I supposed, right down to the humiliating post-mortem efforts to resurrect a brand by then so toxic, so synonymous with shoddiness and failure, that no sensible business would have anything to do with it.

  I pulled up my collar and jogged towards the dual carriageway that now separated Princes Quay from the grown-ups’ pool, the Humber Dock. This was where the deep-sea big-boys had once been relieved of their exotic contents; rebranded Hull Marina, its quaysides were now bordered with swish warehouse conversions, and – miles away at its Humberside extremity – one of those big glass hotels that seem to be obligatory in such developments. I half-closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene in a more flattering light; there was a café that might have looked the part with tables outside and the sun on its face. Instead a grim alchemy now turned the lead skies to iron, as a rogue shaft of celestial light picked out those vast petrochemical plants on the Humber’s opposite bank, their chimneys lined up like a smouldering bar chart.

  How absurdly deluded this whole project seemed. Did those who aspired to the yachting lifestyle really picture themselves bobbing out across the dun-coloured waters of the Humber Estuary, dodging container ships and hail storms and sucking in deep lungfuls of neat cancer? I shook my head, crossed the road, and found that at least some of them evidently did: the dock’s dark, wind-rippled waters were home to a pick-and-mix flotilla of small yachts, perhaps a hundred in all, masts swinging like metronomes.

  Nonetheless, it seemed a shame that a dock which made millions as the exhilarating interface between honest Yorkshire toil and hessian-bagged spices of the Orient should find itself scrabbling around for the odd fifty-quid mooring fee, beholden to plump and insufferable retirees in stupid caps with anchors on, and the wit of a cardboard dog. What kind of world is it where pleasure craft can be named Why Knot or Fishful Thinking, without those responsible being stuffed into a sack and battered with shovels?

  I struggled on into the wind, ever more bemused by the weird dissonance that had persuaded the city’s authorities to decree that Hull’s future lay in leisure, not labour, without stopping to ask themselves how its residents might go about spending money they hadn’t earnt. Whoever called those warehouse conversions home, or pottered around in the galley of Sir Osis of the River or Fuh Get A Boat It, it’s a fair bet they didn’t clock in at the oilcake plant or the caravan factory. Across into the off-wharf hinterland, where patches of old cobbles showed through the threadbare tarmac, I found myself presented with the most moribund, bankrupt vista of my tour to date: a snaggled hotch-potch of workshops and small warehouses of varying ages and in varying states of decay, from fresh corpse to bleached skeleton. All the shutters were down, and some had long since rusted off their hinges. At any rate, none were ever going up again. The only other living being in a broad radius was a man in overalls and a high-visibility jacket, decorating lampposts with laminated notices explaining that the many resident wholesale fruiterers had now relocated to some new industrial estate. He nodded an acknowledgement as I approached him.

  ‘End of an era,’ I said. ‘Sad.’

  ‘Yer jerkin,’ he replied, yanking a cable-tie home. ‘This earl area’s been a turtle dump long as I can remember.’ A damning statement indeed, once I’d decoded it, coming from a man of about my own age. He pulled another notice from a reflective satchel around his shoulder. ‘Some giggles durn ear as a lad, mind. We used to come up this rerd after skerl and chuck rotten fruit abert.’ He smiled distantly, then refocused. ‘So what brings Europe ear?’

  I made a querying sound that conveyed, as politely as possible, a desire for this sentence to be constructed afresh.

  ‘What yer dern appear in Ull?’ He pronounced his hometown as more of a brief noise than a word, like wool without the w. But his question was more or less clear, and I was ready with an answer. Too ready.

  ‘Bit of both.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Sorry – business and pleasure. No: business and … further business. Just business.’

  ‘What line of work yerin?’

  ‘Salesman,’ I said before I could stop myself. And then: ‘Pencils.’

  My companion whipped out a roll of gaffer tape from his bag, and tore off a strip that would have done very nicely for my mouth. Instead he used it to affix a notice to an adjacent set of blistered shutters.

  ‘More fun than it sounds?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s work, intit? Birruva shirtage of that rurn dear.’ He extracted another notice and sniffed wearily up at the awful sky. ‘Only two kinds of purple in Ull: them who can’t find a job, and the burn idol who dernt even try.’ We exchanged glum nods and he trudged off to the next lamppost. I watched him for a while: last man off the stage in the final act of Hull’s rise and fall, the centuries of breathless, slapdash growth, the long decades of decline and depression. A century before, when Hull was home to the world’s largest shipping lines, every square inch of this area had been vibrantly, vitally important. Now none of it mattered at all.

  The waterfront offered a snapshot of the old maritime grandeur, with a parade of smart and stately buildings that were home to the port authority headquarters and a couple of law firms. This was Hull in its Sunday best, the well-scrubbed face with which the city once greeted the world. Its subsequent decline was neatly projected by the faces now doing that job, belonging as they did to a bench-bound group of weathered winos, silently contemplating the broad and mighty Humber, that very brownest of rivers. Beyond them stretched the jetty that had welcomed the ferries from New Holland, and was thus now doing its bit to bolster the mood of aimless unemployment. The gloopy silt heaped up at its feet was slowly absorbing the weekend’s happy-hour haul of traffic cones and uprooted signage; a clutch of crispy, cellophane-sheathed old bouquets wedged in the railings told of a dare too far. The view across the Humber was fittingly lifeless. ‘Where sky and water and Lincolnshire meet,’ in the words of poet Philip Larkin, the famously miserable git whose Eeyore-like tendencies blossomed in the thirty years he spent in Hull. (Asked why he had chosen to live there, Larkin would always cite the geographical loneliness that so effectively deterred unwanted visitors: ‘Hull’s a difficult place to drop in on,’ he once said, through the letterbox.) Even at midday the streets felt haunted. In the open areas behin
d them towered piles of rubble that had clearly lain there since the Blitz, absorbed into the derelict landscape with a sense of monumental permanence. This was hairy-chested, hard-bitten urban decay, brownfield wasteland with tattoos and attitude. Regenerate THIS.

  It’s a strange fact of modern life that every town, county and nation now feels obliged to sell itself through a slogan, and that such slogans are always underwhelming, inane or deranged. An investment of £120,000 recently saw Nottinghamshire rebranded as ‘N’. In 2007, the director of the Scottish tourist board authorities silenced a press conference when she explained that the giant projected message up there wasn’t just an introductory screen-saver: six months and £125,000 really had been spent on coming up with the words: Welcome to Scotland. One assumes similar amounts of cash and mental energy went into the likes of Peterborough: think, learn, live!, Because Mid-Wales is as unique as you are and New Holland – Past Caring and Proud of It.

  Inevitably, this curious syndrome is most prominent in blighted and benighted cities, which seem incapable of setting out on that long road to regeneration without at least a couple of emboldening mission statements. Hull, I saw, was running three at once. At the outskirts I’d been ushered into The Pioneering City, a slightly half-arsed attempt to trade on former glories. Stepping Up, the prominent slogan around the desolate docklands, acknowledged that Hull found itself in a hole, but was at least trying to climb out. Crossing back over the dual carriageway and into the old town, I passed a flank of glossy civic billboards that welcomed me into Real Hull. Real Hull, so I was pictorially informed, was home to some real boats, a real footballer, and a real waitress carrying a tray of real drinks. It looked like a pretty nice place, if not quite as captivating as Surreal Hull, a city of screaming clockwork moths governed by a giant brass slipper.