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In Defence of Hull

It may be the punchline to a nationwide in-joke, but I'm proud to call Hull home.

St Andrew's Quay, Hull (Photo by Paul Glazzard via)

When I was 10 or 11, my mates and I used to explore the bombed-out buildings near where we lived. Sometimes we'd take a scrunched up copy of Razzle or Escort, nicked from under an unsuspecting relative's bed, this being a time before broadband started beaming strangers' genitalia into every British household.

Our activities fit in perfectly with the nation's general impression of Hull: derelict and a bit scuzzy. Both of those things it may have been, but we were also having a ball.

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During WWII the Nazis bombed the shit out of Hull because it was a strategically important port. In the 1990s, when I was growing up, evidence of the Blitz was still there to see. It might have been cleaned up quicker, but in the 1970s the city's workforce was hit with a double whammy. First, the arrival of container ships and forklifts decimated employment for the dockers who, until then, unloaded the incoming ships by hand. This was followed closely by the collapse of the fishing industry.

Hull went from being the world's biggest fishing port to being fuck all in the space of just a few years.

Since then, reports about unemployment, teenage pregnancies, alcohol and drug abuse, cigarette consumption and obesity have become depressingly familiar to Hull's inhabitants, and a point of ridicule for everyone else. But then, getting hammered, smoking, eating and having lots of sex always sounded like an attractive proposition to me – especially if you've got nothing better to do.

As kids we were playing among the ruins of an interrupted culture, as well as the odd smashed up building. Local history sat next to the loss of purpose that permeated the city in strange and poetic ways. At 14, for instance, I used to walk my fat labrador in an untended cemetery containing a headstone that tells the story of whaling skipper John Cravill, whose ship got stuck in the Arctic in 1866.

Cravill's headstone reads:

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"His death resulted from exposure, anxiety and shortness of provisions and fuel during a four month imprisonment in the ice, surrounded by all the dreariness and perils of a cold and desolate Arctic winter. The subsequent death of 13 of the crew from scurvy and starvation rendered the voyage one of the most disastrous and melancholy on record."

The first time I saw Cravill's resting place I noticed another old gravestone nearby. It had "Kelly woz ere" scrawled in marker pen over the dedication.

John Cravill's headstone (Photo by Ryan Fletcher)

I went to Trinity House School, an all boys naval academy that was set up by Henry VIII to tend to the offspring of poor sailors. On the last day of school it is tradition to give each 16-year-old two oranges to ward off scurvy as they set off seafaring. Most of the oranges got lobed at buses and passersby.

Nearly all the boys I left school with were not destined to go to sea, but a lot were up for comical carnage. We were little feral bastards getting pissed on our dads' booze, stealing our mams' fags and pilfering our brothers' weed. By 15 we were comparatively accomplished drinkers and had an absolute blast being socially anti-social.

There was no sense of responsibility or repercussions, and there were many like us in Hull. Much of it was typical of any inner-city upbringing. However, an important part was a hard-living ethos left over from the days when the city's trawler-men performed one of the most dangerous jobs on earth. Six thousand fishermen died in the 150 years that trawlers worked out of Hull, with a mortality rate that was 17 times higher than coal mining. They were our forefathers and they were nails.

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Hull seafront (Photo by Jack Taylor-Stafford)

In 2009, The Lonely Planet guide described Hull as a "tough and uncompromising city" with an "almost lunatic nightlife". You only have to gaze upon Herbert Draper's masterpiece "Ulysses and the Sirens", which takes pride of place in the city's art gallery, to understand the ideal that underwrites Hull's historic (and flawed) vision of its men. The best parts of the city's hyper-masculine subculture are expressed through its love of rugby (Hull is the only city to have two Super League clubs), the worst parts through reasonably high levels of alcohol-related male-on-male violence.

Admittedly, when I was young I enjoyed the fighting more than the rugby. Watching 10 amateur rugby league players dressed as rabbits walk into a disco on Easter bank holiday before starting on everyone around them is a defining moment of my youth. As was the time I was given a broken nose, two black eyes and a bloated ear after being dared to go drinking in town wearing a Portuguese football shirt just after they'd knocked England out of some international tournament.

However, both of those examples were unusual; 99 percent of the time, people on a night out are as friendly as you like, and always have been. You can be outrageous, because being polite is boring, and people are quick to strike up funny conversations.

Things are changing in Hull again. When I went to visit Cravil's grave recently there was no evidence of graffiti on any of the headstones nearby. There's still plenty of disused industrial buildings, but now they're attracting urban explorers and street artists. The functional ones are being turned into fashionable venues and art galleries. New businesses are springing up, led by young entrepreneurs encouraged by cheap rents and emerging markets that are established in other places but haven't yet taken hold here. There's room to be cool and successful – a rare thing in today's world. The 2017 City of Culture title is only going to help that situation.

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Hull's economic fortunes and culture will always be connected to the sea, and, because of that, globalised markets. Diehard trawler-men may not like to admit it, but the city's first attempts to work within those markets were doomed to failure. There were simply not enough fish in the sea to warrant the factory fleets.

Now, there's been a reconnection to the water, and this time it's sustainable – the city is to be home to Europe's largest offshore wind-turbine factory and a whole host of other renewable energy-centred businesses. Hull MP Alan Johnson reckons it's going to turn into a boom town like oil-rich Aberdeen.

I wouldn't change growing up in Hull, even when it was a UK in-joke, standing for every depressing and downtrodden aspect of British life. It was an exciting, if somewhat dysfunctional, place to be young.

Mind you, I don't want those times to return, either. I was lucky that my circumstances were such that I can look back fondly on it. For those at the bottom it wasn't nearly as much fun, and while a more prosperous city won't help everyone, all most people need is a job and a sense of purpose. But boom or bust, Hull's mad character shines through. Once you've lived here you'll never be short of a story to tell.

@RyansFletchers

More stories about the beautiful UK:

A Bittersweet Love Letter to the London Suburbs

You Need to Get Out of Your Small Town This Summer

In Defence of Southend