In this blog series, we talk to people about their connections to Hull and what the city means to them. In this post we’re chatting to our very own Dr James Greenhalgh, Project Leader for The Half Life of the Blitz on Hull.

First things first – tell us a bit more about you. 

I’m a historian at the University of Lincoln and the principal investigator on the Half Life of the Blitz project. I’m interested in the history of town and cities and the people who live in them, and I’ve written a couple of books about urban history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Urban historians like me are particularly interested in how people inhabit and understand the places they live as cities change and grow. We see towns and cities as not just being an area or, perhaps, a container in which stuff just happens to occur, but instead see urban spaces as literally shaping how and why certain things happen. A good example of this would be if we consider the way that the layout of certain streets produces or discourages certain forms of crime, but we could apply it to almost any historical event or movement in the last 250 years.  

Great. What’s your relationship to Hull? 

Most of my connections to Hull come down, one way or another, to rugby, both league and union. I’m from Bury, just to the north of Manchester in Lancashire, but over the last twenty-odd years I’ve continually been linked to Hull, mainly because of the oval ball. When I was an undergrad at the University of Manchester, I captained the rugby league club and two of my best friends, team members and later housemates – Spence and Dobbsy – were from Hull. What I immediately found unique about them – apart from their baffling East/West Hull rivalry – was the way they spoke about the place. Hull was a character in their stories, they talked about places in Hull all the time, despite the rest of the lads in the house having no idea where (and sometimes what) the Boulevard, East Park or L.A.s were. This idea of Hull as somewhere people talk about in this specific way is one of the foundations of the Half Life of the Blitz project. Later, when I got my first job after University at British Steel (then known as Corus and later TATA) in Scunthorpe – I’ve not always been an academic – I played rugby for Scunny RUFC. This meant Hull kept pulling me back over the Humber week after week to play teams like Hullensians, Ionians, Hull, Hessle and Marist. These trips, of course, involved spending time in and around the city, which I hadn’t done much before. I started to connect the places from Spence and Dobbsy’s stories with real places, and again experienced this way that Hull people had of relating to the city. I also started to notice that Hull had these remaining ‘Blitzed’ areas that had either been left or redeveloped in specific ways. This wasn’t an unusual feature of the cities like Manchester and Liverpool when I was a child in the 1980s, but it was increasingly rare by the mid-2000s, except in Hull. When I decided to go back to university to do my PhD on the redevelopment of British cities either side of the Second World War, there was Hull again, at the front of my mind as a case study alongside Manchester. I studied Hull between 1920 and 1960 in great depth, I spent days in the archives in the city itself – at Hull History Centre – and in London reading the files on Hull. I came to really like the characters like Alderman Schultz and Councillor Body, Patrick Abercrombie and Max Lock who all had these different views and priorities for the city, different understandings of what made Hull tick. Again, I thought I was done with Hull when I finished my PhD and turned that study into my first book, but I then got my job in Lincoln and I was sucked back east again. That meant that when I wanted to do a project on cities and local identity in the post-war, Hull was calling to me again. I never thought I’d still be working on it 13 years after I started, but it just has this habit of drawing you back in again and again. It’s a fascinating and, in my view, pretty unique place. I’ve grown very fond of it over the years. 

Can you tell us about a place in the city that’s special or memorable to you? 

I think that for me, apart from Hull History Centre which is one of the nicest archives you’ll find in any city, it’s the shell of the National Picture Theatre on Beverley Road. I first came across it years ago when I started working on the history of the Blitz on Hull. It’s important because it encapsulates a lot of the issues and features of how post-war Hull has been shaped. On one hand, it’s a very rare example of a bombed-out building that hasn’t either been rebuilt, demolished or memorialised – liked, for example Coventry cathedral. In another sense, because there has been a 20-year campaign to turn it into some sort of memorial it also represents a tangible reminder of what the city went through and a very material expression of Hull’s feeling that it has been excluded from the story of the Blitz. To other people it’s an eyesore that merely remind them how little investment there has been in Hull, because other cities that have been more favoured by inward investment haven’t still got derelict, bombed-out buildings. It’s a fantastic metaphor for so much of what makes Hull the subject of this project and one of the inspirations behind this idea that the Hull Blitz has this extended lifetime in memory and identity. 

What’s one thing we absolutely need to include in a history of Hull? 

I’ll avoid the obvious and not say the Blitz. Instead, I’m going to go for Rugby League, KR and FC. There are great rugby league towns with huge rivalries, like Wigan and St Helens, but aside from Sydney, I can’t think of any other that has two major, historic clubs both playing at the top level. It’s also unusual that Rugby League is the dominant football code in a northern town, where soccer tends to be the prevalent ball game.  

Finally, what’s your favourite thing about the city? 

I love how everyone is still so proud of having turned away King Charles I in 1642. It speaks to both a really strong sense of local rebelliousness and also a broader dislike for being told what to do by anyone in authority – especially the national government – as well as a degree of antipathy towards anyone considered a bit posh or arrogant. People from Hull will tell you this story, quite unbidden, any time you mention you’re a historian and it always seems to me to be a way of saying ‘don’t underestimate us, you’ll come a cropper.’ 

Thanks so much! Is there anything else you’d like us to know? 

I still don’t know what an ‘Airlie Bird’ is , mainly because anytime you ask anyone from Hull ‘is it just the name of the street?’ they tell you this story about it being some sort of local bit of exotic wildlife, unique to Hull, all the while with a wry smile on their face.