One Hull Of A History

The Facebook group One Hull Of A City started in 2015, as a Hull themed off-shoot of a website I used to run called Weird Retro. A place to post quirky articles I’d written about the city, from the website, but also a personal blog of sorts where I could post what I loved about Hull. The idiosyncratic side of the city, the often literal off-the-wall parts of it. The Hull that passes many by, as the drive by. The Hull I loved as I walked the back streets, found objects, street art, the history many miss, I saw it all, soaked it in and posted it up. I expected maybe a few hundred friends would join me on my journey through my city, I never expected I would end up with over 40,000 people joining me in my madness.

As I went along, if I’m honest I began to need content, and so I became a guerrilla artist. Adding to the rich tapestry of strange on our city’s streets. All done with the irreverence and self-referential self-deprecation that makes Hull humour uniquely wonderful. The synchronous start point to this being the day back in May 2015 it was announced Hull was to host the Turner Prize during the City of Culture year. I heard the announcement, as I spotted a sofa dumped at the top of my street on Park Grove. I ran home, grabbed my son’s felt tipped pens and some paper and made a sign that read “HULL ENTRY: TURNER PRIZE 2017”. I went and stuck it on the sofa, and the rest is history. Photos of it went viral, people made YouTube videos about it, it was mentioned on the BBC, it appeared in various publications online and in print. I had got the bug, I saw writ large what Marshall McLuhan meant when in his bizarre and prophetic book from 1968 War and Peace in the Global Village, he said “the message is in the medium”. I knew how to manipulate the media, to play games, to have fun, to create art, to promote my city. That was the day I became an artist, and my medium was the media.

Settee of Culture (May 2015), became a viral symbol of the irreverent Hull humoured response to the City of Culture. It’s significance and symbolism even infected Coventry’s City of Culture, when the group Sitting Rooms of Culture contacted me and asked if they could create a Settee of Culture of their own.

In August 2015 I was approached by the then owner of 65 Taxis to create a viral publicity stunt for his firm. He had an old London black cab sat outside the office on Princes Avenue at the time. I came up with the idea of “spamming” it, by turning it into a giant can of SPAM. Created under the cover of dark, in the early hours, I covered the whole taxi in tin foil, added a giant key, and sprayed it in the SPAM colours and logo.

With faux-shock the next morning, Mark contacted the media, gaining column inches in the Hull Daily Mail and nationally in The Mirror.

The taxi remained in situ for around 6 weeks, during which time locals passing by were encouraged to take selfies with the SPAM Taxi, and post them on their social media.

Posts and comments on One Hull Of A City often spark tropes, themes and creative ideas that the members and the wider public of the city get behind. One example during the city realm works was Barry the Barrier. Among the many posts and threads moaning about the barriers in the city, we realised with just two cuts in a barrier, we could spell HULL. I contacted the company carrying out the works, who delivered a new barrier to me, for the project. Barry swiftly gained recognition that is still invoked to this day. And was recognised by the City of Culture as the “unofficial” mascot of the city.

Barry’s fame spread so far, that he was even invited to audition for Britain’s Got Talent. Honestly, true story! I chaperoned an orange safety barrier with googly eyes to audition for a TV talent show.

I did also interview Barry live on air when I worked at Hull Kingston Radio as a presenter. But that’s a story for another time.

The aforementioned Barry the Barrier was installed Trinity Hub, in Trinity Market, a creative space that preempted the cultural and creative space and events that have happened since the market’s refurbishment. Trinity Hub was established and ran by myself, poet Vicky Foster and Darren Bunting of music venue O’Riley’s.

In June 2016, after the huge global media attention that blew up around the Beast of Barmston Drain, the local skiffle band Black Kes approached me. I was originally going to create a night based around Barry the Barrier, but with the explosion of media interest in Old Stinker, I wrote a play and we used the music of Black Kes to create a rock operetta. I’d already worked with Black Kes on their Kanye West benefit gig (after it was reported Kanye had filed for bankruptcy), and I knew Mike Covell the local historian who brought the story to national attention. The rest, as they say, is history. We played a one-off at The Adelphi Club to a packed audience, that along with the Beast of Barmston Drain, has gone down in local folklore.

Also in June 2016, after being approached by the new owner of the former Huckleberry’s Cafe in Queens Gardens, artist Hannah Van Green and myself painted a tribute mural to Mick Ronson. It had long been said throughout the city that the memorial stage in Queens Gardens was a sad, drab insult to his memory. The mural which was unveiled during the Lord Mayor’s Gala, received extremely positive national and international attention from fans. Sadly the mural was painted over by new owners of the cafe in August 2017, 2 years before a fitting mural to the music legend was finally unveiled in East Hull in September 2019.

Sometimes stories write themselves right off the pages of social media. Picking up on the story of the announcement of the Drypool Bridge Venn Diagram design (August 2016), I used One Hull Of A City and its member’s suggestions to redesign the bridge with their ideas and repost them in the thread, as quickly as I could Photoshop them. The Hull Daily Mail picked up on it, and we got our story. One Hull Of A City as a collective developed a way of driving the news content of the local media. To the extent, it became an overt creative exercise in getting our community in the news.

In November 2016 City of Culture commissioned me to do the community consultation that informed how the future would be in Hull, in Brighton based art collective Blast Theory’s online interactive sci-fi film series and immersive city-wide experience 2097: We Made Ourselves Over. As they rang all the phone boxes in Hull simultaneously, whisked people off into the future in Tesla cars and asked Hull to imagine the city 80 years into the future.

Along with the now sadly departed Dave Bush, in March 2017 we painting our garages doors at the back of our courtyard all the colours of the rainbow, for Pride during City of Culture. To “celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the community”. We held a family fun day attended appropriately by our friend Andy Train as his Gold Man. We had plans to paint our gable-ends with murals, sadly it never happened. I think in some way Dave’s legacy is that just maybe the Rainbow Garages was the spark that ignited the many wonderful murals in our communities today, over 5 years later.

In 2017 I became a presenter on Hull Kingston Radio, swiftly followed a year later by my son Xav, who co-hosted the Saturday morning Culture Show with me for 2 years. At 6 when he started, he was the youngest radio presenter in the country. I’d had to move from my week-day show because of running my coffee shop and creative space Bean & Nothingness on Whitefriargate, to a Saturday, when I always had Xav. It was PeteMills at the station that suggested I bring him in and put him on air. The rest, as they say, is history.

On the night of the 2017 Turner Prize announcement Look North showed a segment of ordinary folk off the street reviewing the entries in the Ferens. Because of One Hull Of A City I got on the segment, and without telling the producers I took Xav along. A bit confused as to whether I wanted him on air, I said I did, as Kofi bent down and greeted Xav by name. Saying he knew who he was. Xav stole the segment, as expected. But it was for me the culmination of mine and Xav’s cultural adventure across the City of Culture, we’d done all sorts over 2017. But having that footage of him at 6 years old, my neurodivergent little lad reviewing the Turner Prize entries for the year his city was the City of Culture on the BBC. Fun times!

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