I WAS HEADING ever further north and into the year’s final month: from here on, no walk would be a stroll. The local breakfast TV weatherman predicted a vicious Arctic gale, in a tone better suited to revealing that Hull had just been awarded the 2016 Olympics. Just walking out of the Royal I felt my freeze-dried lips chapping up. On the plus side, the cobwebs of crapulence were blasted clean out of my living soul by the time I turned the first corner.
The streets around any main-line station are a sure bet for action, even if it’s the sleazy crack-and-kebabs variety. This is emphatically not so in Hull. Right opposite the Paragon’s taxi-drop-off side entrance stood an abandoned hotel I’d somehow missed the night before, a once-noble Victorian edifice with mature shrubs sprouting from the gutters, begging to be put out of its misery. The first pedestrian I encountered, 100 yards up the road, was an old man in carpet slippers, shuffling vacantly out of a hostel of some sort, a filthy plastic bag in one hand and a bloodstained rag in the other.
Adelaide Street, Canberra Street, Ice House Road: the addresses betrayed a cosmopolitan and bustling mercantile past, but the ice houses and warehouses and whorehouses were long gone. Instead I trudged down a mile-long stretch of Soviet-pattern tenement blocks, fourteen-storey concrete megaliths laid out in drab grey ranks under a drab grey sky. It was an eerily bleak environment to encounter so close to the centre of a city, and the scale of these estates suggested that some drastic and abrupt calamity had cleared the way for them, rather than any drawn-out commercial decline. In fact it was a bit of both.
As well as jutting out provocatively towards the Luftwaffe’s airfields, like an overconfident boxer’s chin, Hull had thoughtfully sited itself on an estuary so navigationally conspicuous that a drunk badger could have flown you there. It was Britain’s third busiest port, and its most feebly defended. The city’s principal anti-aircraft measure was a battery of seventy-two barrage balloons strung out across the Humber, which claimed its first victim in March 1941, when a dirigible broke loose and demolished the Guildhall clock tower. Between then and the end of the war, the barrage downed a total of four aircraft. None bore a swastika. Given an almost free rein, Goering’s boys set about literally wiping huge areas of Hull off the map. The city endured Britain’s first daylight bombing raid, and was the target of the Luftwaffe’s final attack. In between, a dumbfounding 95 per cent of Hull’s housing stock was destroyed or damaged, and over half of the 320,000 citizens lost their homes. Twelve hundred lost their lives. A single raid in 1941 destroyed no fewer than six cinemas (the shell of the National Picture Theatre still looks out onto Beverley Road, one of the last surviving Blitz-wrecked buildings in Britain). My wife’s grandfather, an Icelandic trawlerman, was a regular wartime visitor to Hull, and recalled looters doing a busy trade in the dockland shadows, hawking jewellery snatched from the city’s endless mounds of smouldering rubble.
Everyone knew about the London Blitz, but Hull’s greater traumas were blue-pencilled by the censors. Each pocket apocalypse that flattened another swathe of it was blandly reported as ‘a raid on a northern coastal town’. Peace laid bare the scale of the civic devastation, but also a harsh commercial reality that had been lurking since the 1920s, when three hundred years of uninterrupted growth first faltered.
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 behind 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.
The Hull and East Riding Museum, deep in the old town’s cobbled-alley core, introduced Living in the Past as a further civic theme, and ran with it, over the hills and far away. The Story of Hull, I gathered from a wall-filling tableau thus labelled, began with the Big Bang. I couldn’t dispute that this was literally the case, but it still seemed a trifle presumptuous: I pictured some robed deity effecting nucleosynthesis between his giant fists with a cosmic roar: ‘Let there be Hull!’ The story arc did not steepen, and seeing the third chapter in the making of Kingston upon Hull headed Earth’s Crust Forms, I involuntarily emitted a loud and disparaging noise. There were no other visitors around to hear it – none, indeed, in the entire museum – but a man in a name-badge quickly appeared. He gave me a cold look, and followed me at an indiscreet distance into the next room, in which Hull was exposed to carboniferous life-forms, and struggled against glacial erosion. Indeed, he went on to shadow my entire tour, making theatrical attempts to appear nonchalant and distracted whenever I glanced over my shoulder, rubbing at a spot on a glass case or flicking imaginary dust off a mammoth’s knee. He was there when something unique and definitive finally happened in the East Riding (four thousand years ago, when local traders set out across the North Sea in 45-foot plank-built craft: the excavated survivor on display is the oldest boat in Europe). He was there when a native British mosaicist copied a Roman pattern-book image, shown below, and when Northern European urban civilisation set the standards for Hull’s emergent merchant class, see left. He was especially there, right by my elbow, in fact, when I interacted with a miniature diorama portraying the 1643 Siege of Hull, in which many blue LEDs outlasted the encircling red ones. That was the final exhibit, and when I’d pressed every button twice he all but stomach-barged me through the exit.
Old Hull revealed itself as a pleasant little maze of tight lanes that occasionally threw you out into a bijou cobbled square, with a church at its heart and a border of gable-fronted houses betraying the city’s age-old links with the Low Countries (ferries still run to Zeebrugge and Rotterdam). The irresistible street names told Hull’s tale rather more evocatively than the museum had managed to: Whitefriargate, Bowl Alley Lane, Three-Crane Wharf, Land of Green Ginger. Some of the sympathetically renovated red-brick mills and warehouses that lined them were home to design agencies and the like, but a fair few were home to no one, which along with the vast and empty bike racks spoke of a well-meaning make-over that had stalled. I’m guessing sensory deterrents may have played a role in this. The River Hull, the modest Humber tributary that runs through the old town, had done a grand job as a mercantile artery back in the day. But as a picturesque aquatic backdrop – its current civic duty – it proved a truly horrible failure. With negligible river traffic, and hence no dredging, the upstream estuary’s silt monster had for unchecked decades been spewing its big brown guts out all along and sometimes right over the banks. Sometimes caked and crevassed, sometimes as moist and slurried as the loosest of loose stools. The gathering stench proved an unfortunate complement. I’d been told that Hull smelt of chocolate, but my wrinkled nose suggested otherwise, a suspicion later confirmed by my eyes when I Googled up details of the nearby ADM Cocoa Mass factory. Cocoa mass is to chocolate what magnolia emulsion paint is to gold-top double cream. It’s actually nothing more offensive than ground-up cocoa beans, but it sounds grim, and my word it smells grim, like plasticine fried in linseed oil. This difficult odour has hung over central Hull for generations, but naturally enough won’t be troubling local nostrils for much longer: a couple of months after I passed through, management announced plans to close the factory.
The miasma dispersed as the lanes opened out into the broad granite streets of imperial Hull, all Victorian heft and confidence. I noted with dismay, if not surprise, that almost every one of the grand old civic institutions, with their columns and domes and roof-mounted statues of Britannia in a chariot, had been Wetherspooned. The big banks had been first to succumb, and the magnificent general post office was now two bars and a snooker hall. I couldn’t find it, but Bevin House – formerly the regional headquarters of the Transport & General Workers’ Union – is apparently a casino. Isn’t that just beyond parody? Old Ernest must be spinning faster than the roulette wheels.
I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding from the Yorkshire winter in Hull’s many municipal museums. All were free, which in my book is half the battle won (no children in tow, no giftshop-crap-related bribery – and so the remaining half is won). At the same time, every single one of these museums was entirely deserted, which meant some awkwardness at the less captivating amongst them. A nice old lady at an entrance kiosk would welcome me in with a grateful smile, then I’d walk straight into a room filled with old buckets and ironing boards, or a gigantic gallery of full-length portraits of Edwardian harbourmasters. Stripped of the getting-my-money’s-worth factor that would have otherwise stubbornly detained me, it was tricky to know just how long to mill about before I could slink out past the kiosk without earning a look of disappointment or betrayal. Answer: never quite long enough.
By far the best was the Maritime Museum, which with poignantly impeccable timing emerged from the magnificent old Docks Offices in 1975 – the very year that the local fishing industry died and Hull’s marine associations became a past to remember, not a present to administer. I spent a happy hour poring over its maps alone, amongst them a contemporary depiction of the River Hull’s docksides in their copperplate pomp, a dense compaction of activity you could almost hear and smell: timber yards, coal staithes, cooperage works, breweries, cotton mills, sugar mills, corn warehouses, bonding warehouses, and a sperm candle manufactory that dated it to the city’s whaling boom, and doubtless entertained the school parties. And there were humbling reminders that whatever the downsides of the dole queue or a career in oilcake, the locals must at heart be very glad not to call the sea their workplace. I learnt that in 1830, nineteen of the whaling ships sent out to the frozen Davis Straits did not come home. The terrible winter of 1968 claimed fifty-eight fishermen’s lives. Between those two dreadful years, a trawler and its crew were lost on average every two months.
Tales such as these didn’t do much for my existing terror of the open sea, so it was a soothing pleasure to find the museum’s first floor almost entirely devoted to model ships in glass cases, which I happen to love. Especially when, eighty-six years after they were made, a restorer finds a note stashed under a funnel, and that note reads thus:
Oct 6th, 1913. To whom so ever find this may know that this is placed inside of the model of the Imperator, H&A Line, 828ft long, 87ft beam and 48ft depth. The model is built to scale by the writer in Fuhlsbuttel Hard Labour Prison with very odd and rough tools. Despise it not on account of roughness, it is a labour of love and helps to pass the time. I am here now two and a half years, having been sentenced in Leipzig to seven year for espionage for the dear old English Government. I am an English man and a ship owner residing in Coltman Street, Hull, Yorkshire, England. Wife a Hilton good and true, five children. Max William Schultz.
What a wonderful story, made more wonderful as I’d walked right down Coltman Street that very morning. Admittedly not quite so fab for Max, who was finally let out at the end of the war but died in Hull just six years later, aged forty-nine.
I’d left Craig outside the Royal Hotel, and picked out by a late, low shaft of sun he looked as good as he ever would, black coachwork against burnished Victorian limestone, every inch the British Leyland brochure cover. I imagined the strapline: The Austin Maestro – because you’re not worth it, or, Come on – it’s got four wheels and everything. Please? Who was Maestro man? Not for the first time I wondered why anybody at all had ever bought one. Ford and Vauxhall, British Leyland’s American-owned rivals, had for some years been making cheap family cars that were demonstrably more reliable and better equipped, so I could only assume that the customers who stayed loyal to BL did so out of dogged national pride. All the same, it was a little sad to realise that even the kind of people predisposed to engineering romance would be left entirely cold by the quirk-less, gawky, anti-charismatic machine sitting there before me. No prisoner would ever feel inspired to construct a lovingly detailed scale replica of an Austin Maestro, or if they did Mr Barraclough would inadvertently sit on it, to much canned laughter.
I’d read that half of Hull’s 250,000 inhabitants live in the 105 most deprived metropolitan areas in the country, a statistic that sounded dreadful but was quite hard to make sense of. Aside from the uninviting parade of windswept council blocks behind the station, Hull’s class-leading awfulness had only manifested itself through ghostly commercial desolation rather than living, breathing fucked-uppery. Perhaps sensing this, Ozzy’s chosen route out of town took me through Bransholme. Not so much a housing estate as a housing borough, even a whole county, an East Riding of Housing, Bransholme fanned endlessly out into the gathering gloom. I wasn’t surprised to learn later that it’s the largest post-war council estate in Britain. Every exit from every landscaped roundabout dispatched me into a little satellite Bransholme, all stubby cul-de-sacs of identical slit-windowed, wedge-shaped homes, laid out by the half-dozen in two-storey terraced slabs. Ozzy didn’t like it at all: ‘Turn around when f-f-fooking possible!’ he’d yell; I’d do so, then a minute later find myself surrounded by rusty lock-up garages, earning another shrieked reprimand and some more heavy work on Craig’s ever-reluctant wheel.
In between U-turns, I was scoring big points in my I-Spy Book of Urban Meltdown. Burnt-out car in playground? Tick. Pregnant teenager in tracksuit pushing pram? Tick. Smoking child idly flicking the Vs at buses? Mystery pile of mangled bar optics in middle of road? Knot of potato-faced hoodies by parade of boarded-up shops seeing man in stupid car taking pictures, then lumbering towards him en masse? Tick, tick, tick, eeek, screech, vroom, come on you useless crap-tent I said screech, vroom. The mood of ratcheting panic was fed by the in-car soundtrack, which now married Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ to Ozzy’s disorientated screaming. It was like karaoke night in Broadmoor.
Bransholme was built for the tens of thousands Blitzed out of their homes, but half of them had died or moved away long before the estate was finished. Vast areas of Bransholme were ghost towns from birth, and as the population dwindled further so its streets grew ever quieter. Craig’s clock said early-evening rush-hour, but my eyes said Sunday afternoon. People who definitely had jobs looked as vacant as those who probably didn’t: two policemen drove by looking like crash-test dummies in uniform, and I saw a postman standing motionless with the flat of his hand against a pillar-box, as if being recharged. Even the conspicuous absence of graffiti seemed consistent with the general air of sloth, as if the young people of Bransholme couldn’t be arsed to hate their surroundings enough to want to deface them. How tragic that these blank trudgers were the grandchildren of the dockers I’d seen scurrying around the holds of ships in the Maritime Museum’s newsreels, the embodiment of time-is-money commercial hyperactivity. Now everyone had far too much time, and not nearly enough money. The best I could say, in relation to their hometown’s table-topping achievements in over-indulgence and under-learning, is that nobody looked too fat or too drunk or too stupid, at least not all at the same time.
I wondered how long Hull could go on like this. You felt it was living on borrowed time as one of only six English cities deemed worthy of identification on ITV’s national weather map. The recession stamped on Hull’s fingers just as it put a hopeful hand up to haul itself out of the mire: from the start of 2008 to the end of 2009, more people lost their jobs in the city than anywhere else in the land. By 2010, advertised vacancies (oilcake taster, caravan-finder general) were outnumbered sixteen to one by jobseekers. And yet it could all have been so different.
In 1999, Hull council sold its stake in the city’s telecom operator, Kingston Communications, for a more than tidy £263 million. Overnight, one of our most destitute and desperate regions found itself blessed with the wealthiest local authority in Britain. It must have felt like a lottery win, and was certainly disposed of as such. The council listened to the sober voices of reason advocating steady investment in the city’s infrastructure, educational facilities and so forth, with a long-term view to creating jobs and otherwise bringing the regional economy back from the dead. Then it went out and blew £32 million on a state-of-the-art sports stadium, and another £45 million on an aquarium with the deepest fish tanks in Europe – I’d seen it marooned on the inert waterfront, angular and sinister, like a Stealth bomber that nosedived into the estuary mud. In a fit of morning-after remorse, councillors then vowed to do something for Hull’s long-suffering poor and needy. The citizenry expressed loud relief that their elected local officials had belatedly come to their senses. Except they hadn’t: Hull council promptly shelled out the balance of its windfall, an extraordinary £96 million, on double-glazing the Bransholme estate. Many of the houses thus enhanced had lain empty for years, and hundreds were subsequently demolished. In three mad years, they spunked the lot.
The mini-Bransholmes grew steadily more unsettling. One was entirely composed of boarded-up bungalows. Another had words like BELIEVE and FAITH signposted in the centre of every roundabout, creepily dystopian attempts to instil a sense of purpose and community by decree. It would have been about now that I recalled Hull’s hallowed reputation for ‘glassing’: when the city’s pubs took part in a two-year trial serving beer in plastic containers, the local NHS saved £7.2 million on eye-surgery costs. I sensed it was only a matter of time before my increasingly frequent and panicky about-turns would cause me to sideswipe somebody’s careworn Astra van or smoking child, and thus interact with the glass-toting zombies of Bransholme in a scenario heavily weighted to my disadvantage.
At last I hit the roundabout-roulette jackpot, and presently found myself in the realm of dark trees and the national speed limit. The road rose away from the Humber’s alluvial flatlands; I knew I’d definitively left poor old Hull behind when I passed a telephone box that wasn’t white. I sighed mournfully, but pathos was never easy to sustain with Craig’s jukebox up and running. Just past Beverley, Frankie Howerd launched into a rendition of ‘When I’m 64’, and I found myself greeting the black moors ahead with an expression of lobotomised disbelief that I must have picked up in Bransholme.
‘Sunday morning – go for a ride?!’ Frankie’s throaty, swooping innuendo introduced the soundtrack to a musical production so provocatively obnoxious and ill-conceived it made Springtime for Hitler look like Mary Poppins. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a 1977 production financed with the profits from Saturday Night Fever, put a work of lofty musical genius into the hands of oafish has-beens and never-weres, and weaved in a storyline so shed-eatingly inane that after some deliberation I’ve decided I cannot bring myself to describe any part of it. Except for the happy ending: the trumpeting enormity of the film’s box-office failure bankrupted its producers.
The cast of this ungodly travesty reads like a veritable ‘Why Them?’ of late 1970s popular culture: Methuselan cigar enthusiast George Burns, frog-eyed pocket whisperer Donald Pleasence, any number of shirt-averse period pretty-boys from Paul Nicholas to Peter Frampton. Earth Wind & Fire appear as themselves; legacy-shredding keyboardist Billy Preston as ‘a magical golden weather vane come to life’. To put the project’s comprehensive awfulness into perspective, the Bee Gees – the sodding Bee Gees! – repeatedly begged to be released from the film, and later sued the producer for $200 million. In a state of mesmerised horror I led a queue of impatient motorists northwards through the night, past Scarborough and Whitby, into and out of mysterious little coastal towns where silver waves crashed in under a full moon. George Burns fixed a hole where the rain got in; I gripped the wheel harder as the brothers Gibb read the news today, oh boy. The remaining tracks had all been fed through a vocoder, the ‘Mr Blue Sky’ voice manipulator that held so many period artistes in its idiotic thrall. This at least had the benefit of muffling the final contributions into an unintelligible stream of twangy robotic flatulence.
Things were getting bleaker, more serious. Every seaside settlement was a mean and moribund ex-mining village; I drove down into one and found a huddle of pebble-dashed terraces staring out at a terrifying sea, black and white and furious. The shingle was bulked up with hunks of masonry and what I first took for lobster pots were balls of rusted chicken wire. I was, it now occurred to me, definitively in the north-east: where the wind was always cold, the people largely unintelligible and the front gardens – a nation-besting 47 per cent of them – entirely paved over.
Just up the road I passed another jaunty seaside attraction: Redcar steelworks, home to Europe’s largest blast furnace and the dominant local employer for a century and a half. Though not for long: the day after I drove by, Tata Steel announced the plant’s imminent closure. It’s now fairly clear that by this point I had evolved into something more than just a curious tourist on a last-chance-to-see trip around his nation’s neglected nether regions. I was the very angel of death, dispatching chocolate factories, wholesale fruit markets and any number of venerable hotels with my life-sapping aura. Sorry, Britain.
I approached Middlesbrough with a level of expectation appropriate to its table-topping position in the Erection, Erection, Erection chart: the very worst place to live in all of Britain. On cue, a thin, gritted sleet began to spatter the windscreen, scraped into cloudy mush by Craig’s flapping rubber twigs. The roundabouts were embellished with sculptures paying dour tribute to the area’s metallurgical heritage – molten iron pouring forth from a giant bucket and so on – and the night was distantly bordered with gleaming, steaming petrochemical cathedrals. In twenty-first-century Britain you’d imagine poor air quality as something you’d need a white coat and a big machine to detect, but when I creaked down the steamed-up window an inch for a better view, a gust of soured brimstone smacked straight into the back of my throat.
Local lad Chris Rea once imagined himself standing next to a stagnant, poisonous river. In lyrics that I’ve been forbidden from quoting directly, he articulated these ponderings in a tribute to the Tees, whose concrete-walled banks lay just to my right. That was in ‘The Road to Hell’, his biggest hit, a song inspired by pairing the M25 rush hour with this very stretch of the A66. Though it might just as easily have been a premonition of The Road to Hell – Part 2, the follow-up album whose opening track now appositely burbled from Craig’s under-dash speakers.
Chris Rea seems like a decent bloke who did pretty well for himself by appealing to the durable MOR millions – you know who you are – who like a bit of husk on their vocals, and a lot of slide with their guitar. The Road to Hell – Part 2 duly kicked off with a good long minute of quavery axe-twang. But it was the dumbfounding minutes that followed – all seven of them – which explained why the album peaked at number ninety-six in the Swiss chart, and did much, much better than that in Q’s Worst Ever rankings. Random electronic bleeps, warbling lift-music saxophone, no fewer than twelve consecutive repetitions of one phrase … this was a work of startling, fanbase-bewildering lunacy, the sound of MOR going AWOL. Like his home town, Mr Rea struck it rich, then completely lost the plot.
It was difficult to tell when I’d arrived: Middlesbrough is less of a stand-alone city than the central chunk in the industrial agglomeration known as Teesside. One minute I was following signs to Middlesbrough, and then I wasn’t. Last stop on the road to hell. The sleet had devolved to steady rain by the time I found the station, with its Hull-ish encirclement of dead hotels and empty streets. The taxi drivers queuing in the rank outside had their chins on their chests, and might have been lightly shrouded in cobwebs.
There was a curry house at the end of the road, next to a drop-in centre with a couple of doorstep smokers who jeered unkindly as they watched me secure Craig with the Autolok (this was always happening: I felt I should have some flyers printed out, explaining that the most commonly stolen cars are both old and crap). It was a tiny place with blotchy red carpets and a wobbly table that would shortly account for the top fifth of my pint of Kingfisher. A certificate by the bar read 2002 Middlesbrough Curry Chef: semi-finalist, and the only other customer was an unsteady wobble-chops in a paint-spattered puffa jacket, awaiting a takeaway order. Hunger may well have diminished my critical faculties, but I’m nonetheless prepared to state on record that this unpromising environment yielded one of the finest meals it has ever been my pleasure to cram into a nan-crumbed, jalfrezi-smeared maw.
As a bonus, halfway through the unsightly dining process two glamorous and wealthy-looking young Sikh couples came in and were deferentially ushered into a curtained-off side chamber. While I dabbed the last rich and spicy sauces into my hot mouth, wafts of rich and spicy conversation lodged in my hot ears.
Wife B: ‘Stubborn, angry depressive he was – typical Taurus. He ripped them off for four million.’
Husband A: ‘I heard it were five.’
Wife A: ‘We’re bad, bad people, but we’re not the worst. We’re the best of a bad bunch.’
Husband B: ‘You know, I like this town. It’s not complicated. None of those Hartlepool mindgames.’
I came away enthralled and replete, and extremely pleased not to have been caught eavesdropping, which would have meant being bundled into a boot and driven away to Hartlepool for some complication. There was clearly more to Middlesbrough than met the eye.
On the other side of what I had to assume was the town centre, I at last found a hotel – a squat Travelodge that looked spanking new but did have an en suite Aldi, which for my purposes seemed a decent compromise. It was a predictably soulless establishment. The reception area – shiny white floor tiles, slightly overbearing illumination – felt like somewhere you might end up if you were apprehended trying to enter Norway illegally. I had the opportunity to savour this ambience at length, while a man in sweat-circled pale-blue poly-cotton arranged the loan of ironing apparatus with the moon-faced receptionist. Their negotiations were conducted with the brisk urgency of rustics appraising a half-finished drystone wall. There was the question of what time he’d need to return the board by, and who might be on duty when he did, and precisely where to leave the iron and in what position, depending on the temperature of its metal surface, with a run-down of all associated hazards to flesh and furniture. Cheerfully oblivious to my increasingly mobile proximity and gathering tuts of exasperation, the receptionist moved on to a ruminative tutorial on the iron’s steam function, and how it was still a little temperamental despite the recent descaling. I’ve seen mortgages drawn up and signed off in less time. At last the man patiently coiled up the iron’s flex and put the board under his arm. I surged forward but it was a false alarm: he had neglected to request instructions on how to adjust the board’s height, a wrong that was now fulsomely righted. When, finally, I was allowed to pose the receptionist my simple question, it came out in a strangled voice pitched an octave or so above my usual.
A room? A room for the night? Her ample brow furrowed as if I’d asked for the name of Britain’s smallest owl. After some consideration she turned to the PC monitor before her. A minute of tapping fitfully at the keyboard’s down button procured a brief sigh and a single word. Shortly after I was slumped behind Craig’s wheel, weighed down with chicken jalfrezi and hopelessness.
I’d given up on Middlesbrough by the time I found a bed. The Metro Inn Teesside lay across the river in Stockton, and just after 10 p.m. I spotted its illuminated sign while en route to a twenty-four-hour Asda, and the car park I was resigned to calling my home for the night. The hotel, a noun I could already sense the Metro Inn would not have dared claim for itself, was hidden away at the back of an industrial estate, its architecture very much in sympathy with its environment: a two-storey pre-fab with tiny windows, like a cardboard box someone had stabbed holes in with a biro. I parked between a rusty Transit and a stack of broken pallets, and pushed my way into the reception. It was dingy in the extreme, and smelt as if someone had wrapped a jumbo sausage roll in an old sock and wedged it behind a radiator. The avuncular but rather defeated chap at the desk gave me an apologetic smile and told me it would be £24.50, ‘for up to three people’. Handing over my debit card I experienced an epiphany. The location, the design cues, the ambient odour and that quirky pricing policy …
‘Did this place used to be a Formule 1?’
He winced, then replied in the tone of a man recalling a disastrous first marriage. ‘Few years back.’
If you’ve stayed in a Formule 1 more than once, you’re either a French lorry driver or a career skinflint whose grim enslavement to economy has flayed from his soul the last clinging shreds of dignity. I’ve stayed in five.
‘I’ll be taking breakfast in my suite,’ I announced airily, scribbling the room’s six-digit entry-code on the back of my hand with a flourish, then heading off to Staircase B.
I approached my room increasingly baffled by the reluctance with which the receptionist had confessed his establishment’s ancestry. Apart from the sign outside, every fixture and fitting shamelessly flaunted its origins as a branch of the French-centred chain of ultra-budget motels. Blue carpets, red handrails, yellow doors: spartan but aggressively colourful, the mood pitched somewhere between the lower decks of a cross-channel ferry and a prison for Teletubbies. Many years of targeting the cheap-slob market had taken its toll. The corridors appeared to have hosted a keenly contested race between a drunken horse and a motorcycle powered by gravy. Opening my bedroom door I was confronted by a wall of stench, the nasal equivalent of finding out the hard way that last night’s half-finished can of cider has been pressed into use as an ashtray.
Women don’t stay at a Formule 1 (unless, as suggested by some of the more shell-shocked TripAdvisor reviews I later read, they’ve been paid to). These places are grubby monuments to a kind of anti-Gillette masculinity, a lowest-common-denominator celebration of the worst a man can be. As toilet attendants the world over can confirm, leave a man to his own devices and he will rarely do himself credit. In a budget hotel environment, it’s men who steal the batteries from TV remote controls. They etch bed frames with terrible words and crude depictions of sexual acts. They get drunk and forget how to operate the electric radiator’s control panel, then get more drunk and kick it off the wall. They spot the little sink in the corner and think: That’s my en suite sorted out. And in a Formule 1, up to three of them share two bunks, egging each other on to new excesses of slovenly vandalism and alcoholic flatulence.
In fact, the Metro Inn’s management had thoughtfully provided an insight into their painful experiences of a very British strain of male-pattern badness. It came in the form of a checklist by reception, detailing behaviour that would lead to the forfeit of a deposit (a deposit the receptionist hadn’t asked me for – more fool him!).
With the thankful exception of the last, each transgression had featured in the TripAdvisor reviews. How glad I am that I only read these after I left. Three separate guests reported that they’d woken in the night to find strangers stumbling about in their room.
Why did the British have to behave this way? As I knew from experience, the typical guest at a French Formule 1 was an unshaven boor who left smouldering cigarillo butts in the shower and felt uncomfortable wandering the corridors in anything more than pants and an Amstel T-shirt. He’d have the TV on too loud, and would consider it a point of principle to piss in the sink, but he wouldn’t assault anyone or systematically destroy property. Violence, vandalism and drugged-up incontinence were our own gifts to the low-end accommodation market, and I couldn’t help thinking that the parent group’s decision to offload its UK outlets might be connected to them.
‘Awake? Then sod off.’ From the strip lighting to the bright blue walls, from the single plastic stool to the relaxation-proof foam mattress, a Formule 1 room is a seven-foot cube of joylessness, purpose-built to deter the lingerer. It feels like the result of some painstaking scientific study to establish the environment in which caged rats exhibited the most profound levels of unease, stopping just short of the point where they began to eat themselves. The Metro Inn variant added a patina of neglect and abuse that blurred this boundary. Huge and complex stains blotted my carpet. The malodorous air was also frozen, with the equipment to render it otherwise rendered impotent. Those unwholesome assumptions regarding the en suite sink took on the horridest possible significance when I ran the tap and watched the water immediately back up.
I pulled back the blind and peeked out through the little square window. Below was a patch of frosted grass bordered with rodent-baiting stations and the odd shoe, engulfed on all sides by a misty sea of tarmac bestrewn here and there with a skip or a stoved-in shipping container. I removed some clothes, reappraised the conditions, and put most of them back on. Then I flicked off the horrible strip light, and made a painful error of judgement by flomping back on the bed.
A dusty little telly hung from a ceiling bracket, craftily located in the one place I couldn’t see when I lay down. The sound was no more than a forcefield buzz of interference, and someone had saved themselves the bother of levering off the battery compartment by having away with the whole remote. I wearily rose to switch it off, a movement that introduced my forehead to the edge of the top bunk. As I levered myself back into the chilled and stinking darkness, a tattoo of muffled thuds rumbled up from the floor below, crowned by a ragged, furious shout and a heavily pregnant silence.