Walking about the edge

If you’re talking about the edge of Hull then you’re talking about the edge… Hull, a city which consists almost solely of outer estates (because there’s barely any sort of inner core), has just carried on building outwards, northwards, eastwards ever since WW2 bombings flattened 5,300 homes and damaged 80,000 more, and half the city centre was destroyed. Hull, a city which is not in competition with any other (because there’s no other city around), has taken its time reconstructing itself. In fact, bomb-site car parks are still in evidence, indicating ‘that development pressures in the city centre have been weak’ [Spooner, 2005], a nicely understated, perhaps typically Hull-like way of putting it.

I’ve spent a fascinating afternoon talking about these things with Andy Dorton on the very edge of Hull. Bransholme is regarded as outer Hull but North Bransholme isn’t on most people’s register at all. And Andy and his family live on the very edge of North Bransholme. It really literally is all fields from there; it’s also The East Riding of Yorkshire, just across the grass verge beside Cumbrian Way, where a young mum struggled to get her child’s buggy off the bus after our long journey from town.

Cliches abound, of course, about seemingly abandoned places like North Bransholme. Too tiresome to repeat them. Instead I’ll quote from an Unlock paper which I suspect may have Andy’s hand in it, Hull – “the pioneering city” [pdf]:

As one of the poorer cities, Hull has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the UK.
With house prices being one of the lowest in the country, people aren’t as crippled by mortgages.
With the high rate of teenage pregnancies, the population at least is remaining stable in spite of the numbers leaving the city.
Even though it’s just sold off its own telephone system, Hull is the only UK city with its name on a mainline train and the only city with a first-class football ground owned by the people.
Hull’s low church attendance, rather than a sign of flailing spirituality, is arguably a sign of a desire for authenticity rather than religiosity.

On a roundabout at the southern edge of North Bransholme, just across the road from the entrance to Kingswood High School, the city council have placed a sign which carries one word: PRIDE. It’s about all that’s in evidence here of the city’s Wilberforce 2007 campaign, it’s one-quarter of a slogan which is everywhere in evidence fluttering large and colourfully on city centre buildings, PRIDE FREEDOM BELIEF CHANGE.

Our walk around the vast and spacious North Bransholme estate demonstrated each of these things: PRIDE – in the well-tended gardens of many little terraced homes; FREEDOM – of expression in the way that most council tenants have individually fenced around their properties (and in the way that graffiti artists have creatively adjusted the outlook of supermarket side walls); BELIEF – a neighbour of Andy’s bravely launching herself into a new role as a childminder, her first-ever customer arriving as we sat sipping tea; and CHANGE – North Bransholme is a place which has barely had a settled existence since the early overflows of West Hull’s failing fishing fraternity began to move here, so the occupants who have stayed have learned to adapt, and though ‘community’ is a much-overused and abused term, perhaps are learning how to build it, in a typically ponderous Hull-like way, right there on the very edge.