Per the BBC article linked below.
Hull ‘worst place to live in UK’
I mean it’s in England! You guys have history and stuff!
Is Hull really that bad?
Well apparently some people love them in a backhanded, halfhearted kinda-sorta way.
At a recent football match, Hull City was playing Queen’s Park Rangers, a central London club. Some Hull fans, estimated about 200 or so (out f many thousands), started doing callous chanting with respect to the recent London bommings. They were a minority but it caused quite a stir and the football team management reacted well condemning the perpetrators.
I watched the Channel 4 programme last night and thought it was flawed in many respects. In the case of Nottingham they used gun-crime statistics that were two years old and this only referred to the inner city. There was no mention of the very desirable suburbs that ring the city. Westminster was high on the best list, even though they said the local schools were bad , the property prices sky-high and the whole place is polluted.
I like this quote from Alison Graham in the *Radio Times * :-
…though I had heard enough to bridle at (Phil’s) sneering tone. For instance , Easington in County Durham is in the bottom ten " it’s one of the 88 most deprived areas in the country" says Phil in an inappropriately jaunty tone. Well , Phil , that’s what you get when your town’s biggest employer is closed at a stroke , as Easington’s colliery was in 1993.
Its Canadian namesake, Hull, Quebec, was such a shithole that combined it with another city to dump the name.
Look, any of those city rankings are bogus. They involve taking a bunch of factors, giving them rankings, deciding on how to weight the rankings, and coming up with a number. But the list of factors is arbitrary, as is the weight of the rankings. And the slightest change in any of them will usually bring up a completely different name to the top.
Hull has an enormous suspension bridge across the Humber estuary, longest in the world for some years, allegedly built as a giantic bribe to enable the government to win the Hull by-election in January 1966. The levels of traffic using it have never justified its construction.
As a music lover and an American ignorant in the finer points of UK geography (for $400, Alex!), the only Hull-related thing that comes readily to mind is this rather nice LP, suggesting that even the crappiest of towns have had their moments… if only in a sporting context.
That must’ve been some game, huh?
Isn’t Hull that place whose entryway bears the slogan “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here”?
Let’s make like a ship, and get the Hull outta here.
I always remember the entry in Viz’s Profanisaurus for “Humber Bridge”. I don’t think I can repeat it here, but you may be able to find it online - it refers to both Hull, and its neighbour Grimsby, in a rather derogatory manner. And it makes me laugh. If you must look it up, warning - crude.
And South Cambridgeshire is 7th best - w00t!
I have visited Hull 3 times in my life: once for an interview at the University (1977) and twice (1978 and 1980) to play cricket against the University.
The Hull away game was always the first fixture of the season, probably in April, when the weather was never exactly tropical. I recall mone of the games taking place in horizontal sleet streaming in off the North Sea.
Apart from that, Kingston-upon-Hull (to give it its proper name) looked like any other city in England. In fact, I would personally rate it well above Middlesbrough, which came 5th. I am very fond of Middlesbrough - I have been a regular visitor there since my Aunt moved there in 1965 - but in reality it’s a shocker.
OK, what about Slough?
I suspect part of it’s bad reputation is because people can’t resist jokes like “Hull on Earth” and “I’ve been to Hull and back.”
I wouldn’t read too much into those surveys, my town (Fakenham, no you haven’t heard of it) was voted most boring town in the UK then 7th best place to live within a couple of years.
I imagine Swindon is thrilled not to have made the bottom 10.
The huge suspension bridge was built upon the premise of there being an East Coast Motorway (Freeway) through to Newcastle and Scotland being constructed, this is because there was, and to an extent, still is, a need for such an artery as the alternative - the M1 stops just outside Leeds, and joins the A1 at Aberford.
The A1 is the other alternative but it does not have anything like the capacity and is just an A class road rather than motorway, it really is not adequate.
It was thought that upgrading the A1 to motorway standards would take too long, the planning procedures including appeals would prevent it, and it would be too expensive and impractical, especially when you consider that an alternative would have to be constructed parallel to it to enable non-motorway classified traffic to be able to move(farm vehicles especially)
Under such considerations, and along with more than a few heavy politcal hints, the Humber suspension bridge was constructed, and with it came the expectations that there would be much needed regional development around Hull(more correctly called Kingston - Hull is the river upon which the city stands)
Instead, the motorway programme was deferred and delayed until it was eventually cancelled, and the existing A class road is still the link across it.
So the Humber Bridge is a bit of a white elephant really.
Kingstons problems in terms of development are mainly geographical, prior to the Humber Bridge, it was pretty much in a dead end alley, the port was not modern enough for the emerging container based system of import/export, and the unions militancy during this time ensured that no-one would put their money into an older, unionised existing port, so the huge container terminal was built at Immingham, which is at the other side of the Humber estuary, and as far as Kingston is concerned, a million miles away.
Large companies with lots of goods to move around, and distribution centres didn’t go to Kingston as its nationwide road and rail links were far surpassed in places like Leeds etc.
Result is that Kingston is a city with quite a past (English Civil war started there I believe) it had been a major port up until the 1950’s and has since been in decline.
Kingston has a extremely large council estate( housing scheme) called Brandsholme which is one miasma of crime and unemployment, its really notorious, and when the inhabitants take themselves out for a night in the pubs, lots of terrible violence ensues, and it does this most weekends and also commonly every alternate Thursday when fortnightly state benefit payments are made.
The drug problem is massive, gun crime for the UK is not too bad compared to places such as Leeds and Bradford, but lots of blades are used.
Kingston during the daytime is a nice place, not so after dark.
As soon as i saw your post, i knew the album you were going to link to. I love the Housemartins, and that’s a great album.
I lived about an hour away from Hull for about a year, and went there a couple of times. I must say, it never struck me as somewhere i’d want to spend much time. Then again, i could have said the same about Doncaster, where i was living at the time. Although, in my experience, one thing that makes up for the grey, depressing atmosphere of those Yorkshire towns is the friendliness of the people. I was taken in and treated really well by everyone in the area where i lived and worked.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but … I lived there for a few years when I started work, and it was a great place to live. Sure, there were some rundown areas, but then there were beautiful parks and broad, tree-lined avenues. On the edge of the North Yorks moors, at the start of a fantastic coastline that runs past Redcar, through Staithes to Whitby. A short drive from the pennines.
Honestly, I’ve lived and worked in many-a-place, but Middlesbrough was pretty damn top in terms of quality of life, although (IWANAUSW).*
Hull, on the other hand, is just dull.
(*I was not an unemployed steel worker)
Yes I have 
, went past it on a school Geography trip to Sheringham once. Well, twice, coz we came back, too. I seem to recall we made jokes about Fakenham orgasms, or something - it was a long time ago.
Because we didn’t actually stop there, I’m not in a position to rate it’s boringness or nice-place-to-liveness.