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City of culture, city of transformation: bringing together the urban past and urban present in The Hull Blitz Trail

Part of: Surveys and Speculations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

Charlotte Tomlinson Open the ORCID record for Charlotte Tomlinson [Opens in a new window]
Charlotte Tomlinson*
Affiliation:
School of History, Michael Sadler Building, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

During World War II, Hull suffered from an intensity of bombing which made it one of the most heavily blitzed cities in Britain. Air raids fundamentally reshaped the history of the Yorkshire port city. In 2017, 75 years later, Hull's year as UK City of Culture marked another period of change and development. This article explores how one public history project, The Hull Blitz Trail, brought these two moments of urban transformation together, and reflects on some of the benefits and challenges of taking urban history beyond the academy. It outlines how public engagement projects can become more meaningful, more engaging and more ‘impactful’ if we carefully consider the physical and cultural landscape of the city today, as much as the histories themselves. However, combining the urban past and present influences our work in powerful ways, shaping the histories we are able to share, and how we share them.

Type
Survey and Speculation
Information
Urban History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 351 - 363
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) (2020). Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

I am very grateful to the Hull History Centre for their support throughout the project, and permission to use the wartime images of Hull which are featured in The Hull Blitz Trail and in this article. Financial support was provided by Leeds of Life and the School of History at the University of Leeds. I would also like to thank Laura King and Jessica Meyer, the organizers and attendees of the ‘Urban history beyond the academy’ symposium, and the editors, for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

1 In the UK, the ‘impact agenda’ is a criterion used in higher education to measure the contributions made by academics to the economy, society and culture. It plays an increasingly central role in how research is funded and how performance is assessed. The term ‘impact’ continues to fuel rich and complicated debate among academics – on how it should be defined, if it can be measured and the problematic nature of many models of ‘impact’. Yet it remains important to the historian, both as a practical institutional objective and measure, and an individual researcher's desire for their work to have significance. This article takes a broad approach to defining ‘impact’ which attempts to understand how The Hull Blitz Trail engaged public audiences and opened up discussions about Hull's urban past and present. For more on this issue, see King, L. and Rivett, G., ‘Engaging people in making history: impact, public engagement and the world beyond the campus’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2015), 218–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hayden, D., The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 9Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 46.

4 Ibid., 18.

5 Connelly, M., We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004), p. 128Google Scholar; Noakes, L. and Pattinson, J. (eds.), British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (London, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Geraghty, T., A North-East Coast Town: Triumph and Ordeal: The Story of Kingston upon Hull in the 1939–1945 Great War (Howden, 2002), 7Google Scholar.

7 Beaven, B. and Thoms, D., ‘The Blitz and civilian morale in three northern cities, 1940–1942’, Northern History, 32 (1996), 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tiratsoo, N., ‘Labour and the reconstruction of Hull, 1945–51’, in Tiratsoo, N. (ed.), The Attlee Years (London, 1991), 132Google Scholar.

8 Atkinson, D., ‘Trauma, resilience and utopianism in Second World War Hull’, in Starkey, D., Atkinson, D., McDonagh, B., McKeon, S. and Salter, E. (eds.), Hull: Culture, History, Place (Liverpool, 2017), 267Google Scholar.

9 The UK City of Culture programme is run by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and designates a city approximately every four years to hold a year-long cultural event, which aims to ‘attract media attention, encourage national tourism and change perceptions’. UK City of Culture typically sees funding invested in public realm works and regeneration, major national and international arts commissions and events, as well as local community projects. www.gov.uk/government/consultations/uk-city-of-culture-consultation, accessed 16 Aug. 2018.

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11 Culture, Place and Policy Institute, Cultural Transformations, 126.

12 Historic England, ‘£6m national heritage drive to bring economic growth across England’, https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/national-heritage-drive-to-bring-economic-growth, accessed 21 Aug. 2018.

13 Culture, Place and Policy Institute, Cultural Transformations, 10.

14 The Hull Blitz Trail is available in print and online via Visit Hull, or using the following link: http://providerfiles.thedms.co.uk/eandamedia/YS/2056290_1000_1.pdf, accessed 20 Oct. 2018.

15 The Hull Blitz Trail, http://providerfiles.thedms.co.uk/eandamedia/YS/2056290_1000_1.pdf, accessed 20 Oct. 2018.

16 The Hull History Centre houses Hull's Local Studies Library, University of Hull archives and City Archives and is open to the public for research, learning and leisure: www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/home.aspx, accessed 2 Oct. 2018. The Hull People's Memorial is a research centre and exhibition space in Hull run by local volunteers, focusing on histories of World War I and World War II: www.hull-peoples-memorial.co.uk/, accessed 2 Oct. 2018.

17 The Hull Blitz Trail, http://providerfiles.thedms.co.uk/eandamedia/YS/2056290_1000_1.pdf, accessed 20 Oct. 2018.

18 Although it is impossible to know exact number of users, more than 14,000 copies of The Hull Blitz Trail were picked up from distribution sites during 2017, while online statistics show that the app version of the trail has been downloaded more than 3,000 times. This does not take into account users who downloaded PDF versions of the trail through the Hull UK City of Culture website during 2017.

19 MacLeod, N., ‘The role of trails in the creation of tourist space’, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 12 (2017), 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 The idea of ‘selling’ places has a long history, but the terms ‘placemaking’ and ‘place branding’ have emerged more recently as ways of thinking about defining, shaping and most importantly promoting towns and cities. Warden, S.V., Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850–2000 (New York, 1998), 1–7Google Scholar; ‘Place branding for local government – the basics’, www.local.gov.uk/our-support/guidance-and-resources/comms-hub-communications-support/place-branding/place-branding, accessed 21 Aug. 2018; Project for Public Spaces, ‘What is placemaking? What if we built our communities around places?’, www.pps.org/category/placemaking, accessed 21 Aug. 2018.

21 ‘Place branding for local government – the basics’, www.local.gov.uk/our-support/guidance-and-resources/comms-hub-communications-support/place-branding/place-branding, accessed 21 Aug. 2018.

22 Savenije, G.M. and Bruijn, P. de, ‘Historical empathy in a museum: uniting contextualisation and emotional management’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23 (2017), 834CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Sussex, Mass Observation Archive, File Report 844, Hull, August 1941, 3.

24 Markham, J., Hammonds of Hull: A Store of Good Things for the Family and Home (Beverley, 2005)Google Scholar.

25 Hayden, The Power of Place, 33.

26 Ibid., 9.

27 Evidence gathered through emails, social media and face-to-face feedback suggested this identifiability was a powerful element of the trail which allowed people to imagine more fully the past. One user commented that it was ‘fascinating to match up the photographs with places in Hull today’.

28 Academics from a range of disciplines have studied the social, cultural, political and material legacies of blitzes in Britain. For a useful introduction to the topic, see Clapson, M. and Larkham, P.J., ‘The Blitz, its experiences, its consequences’, in Clapson, M. and Larkham, P.J. (eds.), The Blitz and its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to Post-War Reconstruction (Farnham, 2013), 1–15Google Scholar.

29 Sheppard, T., Guide to the Municipal Museum Royal Institution (Hull, 1913)Google Scholar.

30 The Hull Blitz Trail, http://providerfiles.thedms.co.uk/eandamedia/YS/2056290_1000_1.pdf, accessed 20 Oct. 2018.

31 After the war, many bomb sites in city centres became surface car parks. Clapson and Larkham, ‘The Blitz, its experiences, its consequences’, 3.

32 Jones, P.N., ‘“…A fairer and nobler city” – Lutyens and Abercrombie's plan for the city of Hull 1945’, Planning Perspectives, 13 (1998), 311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Feedback gathered from a trail user in June 2017.

34 The task of measuring the ‘impact’ of a project is an extremely difficult one that cannot be covered here in due detail. However, statistics and anecdotal data gathered on The Hull Blitz Trail do provide some insight. More than 14,000 print copies of The Hull Blitz Trail were used during 2017, by a diverse range of people including school groups, elderly members of the community, tourists, corporate business employees, locals and former residents returning to the area, among others. Of those downloading the trail online, two-thirds were visitors from outside of Hull, mainly from Yorkshire or London and the surrounding areas, and 4.5% were international.

35 Culture, Place and Policy Institute, Cultural Transformations, 9, 68. See also Culture, Place and Policy Institute, University of Hull, Creating the Past: An Evaluation of Cultural Programming Inspired by Heritage within Hull UK City of Culture 2017.

36 Culture, Place and Policy Institute, Cultural Transformations, 8, 49.

37 MacLeod, N. and Hayes, D., ‘Understanding self-guided trails: two explorative typologies’, Managing Leisure, 18 (2013), 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Miles, S., ‘Remembrance trails of the Great War on the Western Front: routes of heritage and memory’, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 12 (2017), 447CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/research/research-guides/civil-defence-personnel.aspx, accessed 20 Aug. 2018.

40 Siblon, J., ‘“Monument mania?” Public space and the Black and Asian presences in the London landscape’, in Ashton, P. and Kearn, H. (eds.), People and their Pasts: Public History Today (Basingstoke, 2009), 146Google Scholar.

41 MacLeod, ‘The role of trails in the creation of tourist space’, 424.

42 Hayden, The Power of Place, 46.

43 Ibid., 46.

44 For more on this approach, see King and Rivett, ‘Engaging people in making history’, 225–6.