Hull City of Culture 2017: What the Legacy Looks Like Now
Nine years on from the year that changed how the city saw itself, we look at what actually stuck.
City of Culture 2017 was not a single event. It was 365 days of programming that ran from a spectacular opening night in Queen Victoria Square — white powder, fireworks, thousands of people — through twelve months of exhibitions, commissions, concerts, theatre and a lot of arguing about what culture means in a city that has spent decades being told it doesn't have any.
The infrastructure changes are the easiest to measure. Ferens Art Gallery closed for refurbishment before the year and reopened transformed: new galleries, better storage, a Caravaggio on loan that queued around the block. The Humber Street Gallery was new. Hull Truck got a new building. The Maritime Museum was refreshed. The investment was real and most of it has lasted.
The harder thing to measure is confidence. Hull before 2017 had a complicated relationship with its own reputation — funny about it, defensive about it, sometimes genuinely beaten down by it. What the City of Culture year did, at its best, was give the city a year of taking itself seriously in public. Artists from outside saw something worth engaging with. Artists from inside felt something worth staying for.
Not all of it held. Some of the volunteer culture that built up during the year dispersed. Some of the cultural organisations that grew in 2017's atmosphere found the years after harder. But the Fruit Market kept growing, the gallery programme kept its ambition, and the city that you can walk around today — the waterfront, the Old Town, the art on the walls — has 2017 running through it whether people track the connection or not.
