Place as a critical tool for urban historians

In recent years, place has become an increasingly important concept for those working outside of the academy, particularly in cultural and heritage industries, but also far beyond. Trails, tours and other forms of so-called ‘linear tourism’ have proliferated since the 1980s, with trails becoming a commonplace feature of travel and tourism on a global scale.Footnote ¹⁹ The concepts of both ‘placemaking’ and ‘place branding’ are becoming increasingly influential ideas used by local governments, business owners, urban planners and entrepreneurs, among others.Footnote ²⁰ Proponents of these concepts have argued for their value in creating jobs, attracting businesses and visitors, supporting economic growth and regeneration and improving quality of life for local residents.Footnote ²¹ But place can also be a powerful tool for the historian. If urban historians are concerned primarily with the primacy of place, then places and spaces in cities today can provide a useful, and natural platform on which to communicate our research and collaborate with external partners. This first section of this article focuses on several ways that The Hull Blitz Trail used place and the impact of these.

When creating The Hull Blitz Trail, it was important to choose locations which had meaning in the present, both physically and symbolically, as well as in the past. Heritage trails of this type, self-led with the aid of a printed guide, are typically made up of a combination of text, images and locations. The text of the trail provides the story – the context, information and guidance for the user which is necessary to navigate and understand the trail. The locations provide the essential ‘nodes’ onto which the story can be attached, adding tangible and practical markers which the user navigates between. Images, usually photos but also often maps and illustrations, then provide the critical links between the past and present versions of these sites, helping the user to identify a location and imagine its past life. In the case of The Hull Blitz Trail, photographs of wartime Hull were used to illustrate how the sites looked during aerial bombardment, and included images of buildings destroyed and lost, streets that were heavily damaged, as well as ordinary people at work and play in the city. The locations chosen therefore acted as anchors for the stories I wanted to share, but also as bridges between the past and present which created space for historical empathy, imagination, emotional engagement and understanding.

In the museum industry, several strategies are employed in the design of exhibits to provide users with links between the past and present that heighten engagement. This ‘mnemonic bridging’ takes many forms such as the display of artifacts, practices of imitation and emphasis on the same place through time.Footnote ²² The third stop, or node, on The Hull Blitz Trail, Hammonds Department Store, provides a good example of how the latter technique was effective in this project. During the Blitz, Hammonds Department Store was badly damaged in fires that were said to have engulfed the whole of Ferensway, a major Hull thoroughfare. The department store, and its glamourous top-floor dance hall were almost completely destroyed, leaving a shell of twisted iron (and also a ghost story) behind.Footnote ²³ Crucially the site, despite the destruction wreaked upon it during the Blitz, remains strikingly similar in appearance today. Wartime photographs of the damaged building, held in the Hull History Centre, provided an almost identical vista of the store from Paragon Square, its front stretching down Jameson Street, today one of the city's main shopping streets (Figures 1 and 2). Therefore, the site provided substantial material from which to build a node on the trail which spoke to both the past and the present city. The identifiability of the site opened up space for users to compare its past and present lives, and thus more deeply imagine, engage with and understand Hull's experience of aerial bombardment. This act of comparing, in addition to inhabiting the place in which ‘the history happened’, helped to move the trail's content from an abstract narrative to one which the user could relate to, adding a sense of ‘realness’ and potential for historical empathy.

Figure 1.

Jameson Street from Paragon Street, 1941. Source: Hull History Centre, C TSP.3.437.1. © Hull History Centre, Hull, reproduced with permission.

Figure 2.

The Hull Blitz Trail compared with Jameson Street, 2018.

Yet to maximize the impact of using place in our work beyond the academy, we can look to locations with cultural significance as well as visual similarity. If place can be used to provide a ‘mnemonic bridge’ between the past and present, choosing places that users are already familiar with and have their own experiences of further reduces the sense of distance between history and audience. Hammonds Department Store was an institution in the city in the early 1930s and has remained so through the post-war period and to today, where it is now a busy department store and prominent building in Hull's city centre.Footnote ²⁴ In the case of the Hammonds store, using a location which generations of Hull residents had their own memories of meant that users were more interested and more emotionally invested in the stories shared. Furthermore, using familiar locations which users had personal experience of allowed emphasis to be placed on the people who had lived through the Hull Blitz, not simply the buildings and streets which had witnessed it. Dolores Hayden argued that places can be ‘a more evocative source than any written records’ because of the material, social and imaginative attachments people develop to them.Footnote ²⁵ Urban landscapes, she suggested, are ‘storehouses’ for social memories.Footnote ²⁶ In The Hull Blitz Trail, if users were able to draw on their own experiences of a shopping centre, street or square, they were more able to imagine and engage with the experience of individuals and communities in wartime Britain.Footnote ²⁷ While choosing sites with visual similarity, or identifiability, was an important strategy for prompting the imagination of users, choosing locations that were still important to the city today gave the content much greater meaning to those users who were residents of Hull and the surrounding areas. Thus by designing a trail that was incredibly personal to Hull today, not simply in the past, the project was able to have a much deeper and more meaningful ‘impact’.

Using place can therefore be a powerful tool for the historian in connecting the public to the past. But place was also used in The Hull Blitz Trail to communicate urban change and the legacies of World War II in Hull, rather than simply its history.Footnote ²⁸ The fifth stop on The Hull Blitz Trail, the Albion Street Museum, is one such example. Hull's Royal Institution, and the Municipal Museum it housed, stood proudly on Albion Street (another major Hull thoroughfare) from the late nineteenth century until World War II.

Designed by leading architect Cuthbert Broderick and home to many thousands of rare and precious artifacts, the Institution and museum signified the importance of Hull as one of Britain's major port cities and cultural hubs in the early 1900s.Footnote ²⁹ The Hull Blitz Trail tells of how ‘on the night of 24^th June 1943, the museum took a direct hit. Firefighters were unable to save the building from the blaze that followed and the museum collapsed, thousands of its collections lost to the fire.’Footnote ³⁰ It also shares the rather delightful story of a staff member of the museum who managed to recover his lost motorbike four decades later, when 1980s building works on the site recovered many of the museum's lost treasures. However, unlike other stops on the trail, the site today provides not the rebuilt remains of a grand museum but, instead, a car park.Footnote ³¹ The grandeur of the site's history stands in contrast with its rather unappealing modern function. Yet it remains one of the most popular points for users. The contrast between the past and present at the Albion Street Museum demonstrates to users how the legacy of the Hull Blitz is extensive, and can be found where it might be least expected. This stop illustrates the huge physical impact the aerial bombardment had on the built environment of the city, but also alludes to the urban transformation that has happened since.

Further points in the trail similarly aimed to tell the story of urban transformation, including the former site of the Hull Royal Infirmary, now a shopping district first outlined in post-war reconstruction plans, and the former warehouses and docklands along the river in Hull's Old Town which are today home to a busy area of pubs and restaurants.Footnote ³² Together, these places tell an urban history which is not simply concerned with the past, but one which has relevance and resonance in the city today. These stops functioned as striking visual signifiers of this change, again prompting imagination and engagement from trail users, but in very different ways to stops built on visual similarity such as Hammonds Department Store. One user's feedback made this clear: ‘[I enjoyed] comparing sites like Albion Street, where there's nothing left of the museum. I had no idea, that really brings home how much the city has changed since the blitz.’Footnote ³³ Choosing content with contrast, as well as similarity, was therefore fundamental in opening up conversations about how the city has transformed over the past eight decades. Engagement with questions of historical change was shaped by the locations chosen, which prompted users to think not only about Hull's urban past, but also its urban present, and the space in between.

Successes, limits and challenges of working beyond the university

Thinking carefully about the wider form and design of urban history projects can also maximize the impact of historians’ work beyond the academy, by attracting larger and broader audiences to engage with academic research. In the case of heritage trails, this might be achieved through consideration of the timing of a project, careful planning of the route according to the present layout, use and accessibility of urban space, and taking into account the various motivations of potential users. On the other hand, considering the present so deeply in these ways does pose challenges to us as creators, and places limits on how we work.

In the case of The Hull Blitz Trail, the context in which the project was launched was critical to its success. Launching the trail during Hull's year as UK City of Culture 2017 meant that the trail reached a much greater audience, and as a result had greater ‘impact’, than would have been likely at another point in time.Footnote ³⁴ As a major arts and culture programme spanning the entirety of 2017, Hull UK City of Culture attracted unprecedented numbers of visitors to the city centre, including tourists and locals alike. According to reports evaluating the programme, more than 75 per cent of City of Culture audiences were residents of Hull and the East Riding, with nine in ten residents engaging in at least one activity over the course of the year.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, not only did the programme draw a much larger pool of potential users into the city centre looking for leisure activities, but its focus on exploring and celebrating Hull also stimulated interest in local urban history and culture in particular. Researchers found that around half of Hull 2017 commissions were ‘inspired’ by the city's heritage, and 65.6 per cent of residents reportedly ‘felt their knowledge of Hull's history or heritage had increased as a result of UK City of Culture’.Footnote ³⁶ The combination of these two factors meant that a public history project which asked users to explore the city on foot was particularly appropriate and appealing. The programme thus provided a crucial platform for the project which undoubtedly contributed to the number of users the trail managed to attract, by increasing footfall in the city centre, and fostering a local appetite for a retelling of Hull's wartime story.

The design of the route itself was also carefully plotted to complement what was happening in Hull's urban space during 2017. In most public history projects, the elements of our academic research that we want to share typically need to be adapted or shaped to fit particular objectives and formats. Here, shaping the history of the Hull Blitz into a heritage trail meant forming 12 stops from a mass of potential material, and organizing these into a coherent narrative which, crucially, also worked as an engaging and practical walking route. With this in mind, the trail was designed as a circular route which covered most of the city centre to provide users, particularly visitors, with an overview of the modern urban landscape of Hull, as well as the area's history. Locations were chosen for their practical as well as historical purposes; for example, the trail started and ended in Queen Victoria Square, the geographical and cultural centre of the city. There were a number of reasons for this choice. Engaging photographs were available of the square in the midst of destruction in 1941 and during victory parades in 1945, offering an ideal site from which to introduce and conclude the trail's historical place-narrative. Today, the square is a popular public space, surrounded by attractive civic buildings including the City Hall and the award-winning Ferens Art Gallery, and is the location for countless events and activities. It was the hub of City of Culture 2017 activity and is also, conveniently, home to one of Hull's Tourist Information Centres where the trail was stocked. The choice of Queen Victoria Square as the start and end of The Hull Blitz Trail therefore carefully combined the site's history with its current purpose.

When adopting an approach which considers a city's urban past and present, thinking about the various functions that a trail can serve, and the differing motivations of its potential users, is also key. Scholars in heritage and tourism studies have noted the diverse range of roles that trails can play for users, which range from providing education and enjoyment to fitness and remembrance, as well as helping users to discover a new city, or at least new perspectives on it.Footnote ³⁷ In self-guided tours in particular, users can ‘pick and mix’ the content they choose to engage with depending on their own motivations, taking divergent routes from node to node, skipping sections entirely or combining other elements of the urban environment into their experience – and research shows that they do.Footnote ³⁸ The Hull Blitz Trail not only considered this, but actively encouraged it, guiding users along a route which took in the Hull History Centre, Museums Quarter, historic Old Town, shopping districts and the Ferens Art Gallery. At the Hull Minster, the trail text prompted users to step inside the church, a hub of cultural events in the regenerated Trinity Quarter, in search of a memorial stained-glass window. At the Hull History Centre, it suggested users make a visit to trace their own family histories of wartime Hull, after more than 91,000 Civil Defence records were catalogued and made available to the public.Footnote ³⁹ The decision to launch a self-guided trail which took place in the city centre was therefore grounded in principles of flexibility, allowing users to combine the trail with other events and activities. The impact of considering the city's present in this way – particularly its Hull 2017 context – was that the trail was accessible and appealing to as wide an audience as possible. The trail benefited from the promotional opportunities of being launched in Hull's UK City of Culture year and in turn actively supported the cultural, social and economic regeneration happening in the city. Building these considerations into our projects at design level can ensure that our outputs are meaningful to users living in or visiting the city today.

However, while taking such an approach to The Hull Blitz Trail may have afforded the project many opportunities and successes, considering the present as well as the past in any public history project equally poses limits on the stories we are able to tell, as well as how we can tell them. At its simplest, using the form of a heritage trail places restrictions on the amount and type of material we can share with a given audience. The Hull Blitz Trail featured 12 nodes comprised of only 150 words and one image each. These nodes needed to be attached to locations that were physically accessible, identifiable and evenly spaced over a manageable distance. Choosing the content and shape of the trail therefore required a delicate balance between the historical content selected and the locations that were available and appropriate to anchor the content to. Urban space is dynamic, prone to transformation and regeneration, and while this was an important takeaway of the trail itself, working in an urban setting can make sharing particular histories especially challenging. The modern urban landscape of Hull's city centre, for example, offered little potential to tell personal stories of individuals living through the Blitz, with large amounts of residential space lost to redevelopment in the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, the surviving buildings of modern Hull, like many urban spaces, are more appropriate for exploring the physical effects of bombardment and civic responses to war. As a result, communicating stories of personal experience through place demanded creativity, with a node at the Central Fire Station exploring voluntarism through the story of one fire-watcher, Albert. Another node used the former site of air-raid shelters to discuss the impact of war on family life, describing the experiences of wartime housewife Harriet and her son Kenneth who lived in city centre terraces now long demolished. Moreover, in response to very small amount of content that could be included in the trail, the text encouraged users to follow up with their own research in Hull's museums, libraries and archives, and increased awareness of these resources by marking them out along the route. The trail was designed as an introduction to the history of wartime Hull which fostered audience participation, rather than as a comprehensive guide.

These issues draw attention to the power that academics hold when we take urban history beyond the academy, and the potential to influence particular narratives of the past. While working in the public spaces of cities may afford us access to wider audiences, the visibility of this type of public history can, as John Siblon points out, also create ‘spaces in which entangled personal and national histories are contested’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In tourism studies, Nicola MacLeod has written about the specific influence that the design of trails has in this respect, which is undeniably important to consider: ‘As attractions which move visitors through space, organizing and unifying the built and intangible heritage through place-narrative, it is interesting to consider how trails might contribute to the processes inherent in the construction and experience of tourist space.’Footnote ⁴¹ Applying this idea to our academic projects, it is clear that creating a historic trail organizes the urban environment along particular lines, giving certain spaces and locations new physical and symbolic meanings. Each choice made on the shape and content of the trail directs and manages the audience experience, posing important questions of power that we need to consider as creators and co-creators.

The audiences themselves are not without agency, or their own ‘entrance narratives’, and the flexibility of the self-guided trail model allows for some democratization in how the particular narratives offered are experienced and interpreted. By walking a route of familiar places, the user brings their own memories, stories and experiences into dialogue with the historical themes raised. According to Dolores Hayden, this is ‘the key to the power of historic places’.Footnote ⁴² Public spaces can trigger memories, fostering a sense of shared ownership of a common past, while the public nature of the trail itself, taking place on the street rather than behind the often intimidating walls of a museum, archive or university, can act as an equalizer between the public and the academic as a perceived ‘gatekeeper’ of history.Footnote ⁴³ As a format, trails can help public engagement projects to move away from linear and paternalistic transfers of knowledge and towards models of ‘making history’, even where the academic is not in direct conversation with their audience.Footnote ⁴⁴

As directors of these projects, we can actively pursue this more collaborative approach to working with the public. In The Hull Blitz Trail, promotion on social media directly asked users to contribute their own stories of Hull's history, with dozens of individuals sharing stories through tweets, Facebook comments or via email. One elderly user, who had himself lived through the Hull Blitz as a child, chose to complete the trail with family on his ninetieth birthday, as a way of both reminiscing and sharing his own experiences with loved ones. Throughout the planning process meetings were held with community groups and history societies, as well as consultation with the public through social media, the feedback of which fed into the content that was eventually shared. This collaborative approach was powerful in encouraging a sense of shared ownership between all stakeholders, including the audience. Nonetheless, considering the present as well as the past in public history projects will continue to limit the stories that are told, and how they are told. Trails privilege certain sites and certain stories over others, and in following the route of a trail the audience accepts, to at least some degree, the interpretation offered by this route. This is not only the product of the curatorial choices made by the academic, but is also influenced by the physical and cultural landscape of modern urban space. Historians must recognize the power these issues hold to understand fully the impact of their public work.