ABSTRACT
Returning to the northern city where I grew up, it now looks superficially the same as any other. Stagecoach buses plough through its one way system. Identikit chain stores, sporting household names, line the high street alongside customised shopping malls, fast food outlets and multi-storey car parks. At night, young men, wearing shirt-sleeves in December, cruise the pubs and clubs in gangs, in search of a laugh, and alcohol and girls. Young women, dressed in short and tight and lacy high street fashions, occupy more space in public places, make more noise than I remember doing, even in the 1960s. There are people begging in doorways, holding up bits of cardboard that read ‘homeless’. The main picture house, which became a night-club and a bingo hall for a while, is boarded up and waiting for redevelopment; its redundant Sale notice banging in the wind. An eight screen cinema and retail park now draws the city’s crowds to where the fish docks once made Hull a thriving fishing port, landing cod and haddock by the ton from the fishing grounds off Iceland, before the Cod Wars of the 1980s were fought and lost by the Thatcher government. American style diners, DIY stores and cheap electrical outlets, staffed by part time workers, mostly women, compete for conspicuous consumers, offering customer loyalty schemes and interest free credit.
