Roots and Wings – Or How Hull Is Enjoying Its Overnight Success

Roots and Wings – or how Hull is enjoying its overnight success, from Isabelle Tracy …

You can’t always remember where you first met, who introduced you, or what that conversation was that told you – this is someone who ‘gets’ the challenges, and potential joys of making creative things happen in this city. How and when relationships started gets lost in the mists of time in this ‘small world’ city, where you’re hard-pressed to find more than two degrees of separation between yourself and any new Hull person you meet.

Because I left Hull in 1981, and returned in 2000, I missed out on some of the building blocks of Hull’s overnight success. Rupert Creed’s City Play, for example, and many of the acts documented by Chris Dimmack in ‘One Man and His Bog’ – the definitive story of the Adelphi, in words and pictures.

What I didn’t miss out on, because I heard it every time I came home, was the utter frustration of Hull’s creative people in the independent sector – musicians, artists, writers, promoters, community activists, and just well, people – with something they called ‘hitting the wall’. They got so far with what they were trying to do, and then – no further. Some badgered on, some went to look for greener grass, some became cynical, and some settled, for a truncated version of their vision, adapting to survive.

Since I have been home, I can see that ‘the wall’ is made up of a mix of pernicious building materials – a flat economy, a disjointed approach to marketing and communications, a lack of confidence or skills in securing grant or loan finance, and sometimes, a lack of willingness amongst potential audiences to try something new. All of this is usually boiled down to “The Council”.

I’m not going to delve into that rich seam here. Instead, I’m going to tell a story; a story about hope, trust, honesty, possibility, and the alchemy of change. I play a part in this story, but it was going on before me and it will go on after me, so it’s really not mine. My part has been to scatter seeds and see what happens; to provide ‘small injections of wherewithal’ – money, information, knowledge, links; to watch and listen; to introduce people to one another; and to act as a catalyst, when all those ‘small networks’ began to link up with one another. In the end, it was to grasp the opportunity, when it came my way, to act as a ‘loudhailer’ for all those Untold Stories – not mine, they belong to Hull’s independent sector – and write them into a bid – Roots and Wings – to Creative People and Places.

This ‘Just So’ story could be called – ‘How The Creative People of Hull Proved That It’s Not All About ‘Council’, It’s About Doing It For Yer Sen’.

A year ago, Mark Page (Mak) wanted to celebrate 10 years of championing local live music through The Sesh in a one-day street festival of Arts and Music, so he spoke to Dave Mays of Fruit, the theatre, art, film, live music and club space in the old Fruitmarket, the Humber Street Arts Quarter. Dave said – ‘Let’s talk to Isabelle’. I gave Mak and Dave one of those catalysing ‘small injections of wherewithal’ – in this case, a small chunk of knowledge. One day later, Mak had set up a crowdfunding facility through peoplefundit, and 10 weeks later, the one-day arts and music festival ‘Humber Street Sesh’ had been an unqualified success, with around 15,000 people in attendance. Created, bottom up, by Hull people, because they wanted it, and attended by Hull people, because they agreed with the idea.

So how did Mak know to talk to Dave, and how did he know to talk to me? How did all the musicians, technicians, graphic designers, photographers, graffiti artists, street artists, promoters, pop-up cafes, art galleries, bars, pubs and venues get together, secure the sponsorship they needed, and reach their audience, in those few short weeks? Because as we always say about Hull – sometimes in frustration – ‘everyone knows each other’. And because social media make it possible to mobilise ‘a coalition of the willing’ quickly, and without much fanfare or to-do about it.

There is no ‘I’ in team, they say, but there were hundreds of ‘I’s involved in making Humber Street Sesh happen. ‘I and I’ is not just a Rastafarian concept – there is no individual without community, and no community without individuals – ‘I and I’ got the team together. Then I took a short film of Humber Street Sesh to the Arts Council interview for Creative People and Places – to show them – ‘this is an example of how bottom-up engagement in the arts will happen in Hull through Roots and Wings’. The full amount of £3M was approved – subject to business plan.

So when a little piece of spin, planted in Arts Professional by the consultants writing Hull’s bid to become City of Culture in 2017, hints that Hull’s independent sector only got its act together in recent months, maybe whilst an ex-Arts Council officer has been commuting from Sheffield on a maternity cover appointment, a sense of outraged déjà vu from the independent sector – about Hull City Council’s addiction to the top-down political fix – was probably to be expected. It looked to a lot of people as if they were about to ‘hit the wall’ again.

Or we could just indulge ourselves in a wry smile.

Roots and Wings was not approved because of anything recent, done by any individual, but because of long-term development work and long-standing relationships – sometimes a bit scrappy, sometimes a bit sceptical – in overlapping networks of common interest and increasing trust. Those networks, and that trust, all of the ‘I’s in the team, are what will see Roots and Wings delivered, as per the bid.

In the meantime, Humber Street Sesh 2 is upon us, and this time we’re hoping to showcase Andy Sawyer’s work in constructing Gordon Young’s Comedy Carpet for Blackpool, plus some Hull icons through artists, makers and playwrights Pinky, Chris Dimmack and Rupert Creed, and some East Riding cloudscapes – ‘We do good skies, in the East Riding’, said John Godber – through recycled materials artist Bob Swann. So we’ve got some networking, some marketing and some fundraising work to do. Together. Because this is how we roll.