Exclusive: Development schemes launched for Hull creatives as new culture boss aims to boost talent
PLANS: Kath Wynne-Hague, new Head of Culture, Place and City Centre at Hull City Council. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography
Hull’ s new culture chief Kath Wynne-Hague is hitting the ground running with the launch of a new development scheme for musicians and creatives, and plans to develop a new cultural strategy for the city as a whole. She spoke exclusively to Simon Bristow
Musicians and freelance creatives in Hull are being invited to take part in a new development support programme aimed at improving their sustainability, collaboration and connectedness both within and outside their fields.
Funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund after successful bidding from Hull City Council, there will be twin, two-year programmes, one for musicians and another for those in the creative industries.
A survey inviting participants to help shape the delivery of the programmes is being launched on social media, with an engagement event also planned, with the aim of launching the schemes in September.
SUPPORT: From left, Antonio Tombanane, founder & CEO, The Edge Hub; Elly Taylor, operations director, The Edge Hub; Councillor Mike Ross Leader of Hull City Council; Stew Baxter, director, Hinterland Creative; Shaun Larvin, founder & chairman, The Edge Hub
Contracts to deliver the programmes have been awarded to The Edge Hub for creatives, and to experienced musician Stew Baxter – director of Hinterland Creative – for musicians. Each has been awarded £20,000.
“It’s really exciting,” said Kath Wynne-Hague, new Head of Culture, Place and City Centre at the city council. “They are both aimed at your SME, freelancer market and it’s about building skills, training, disruption events, speaking events, networking, and it’s about that kind of sustainability in both the creative industry sector and music as well.
“Hull is a place where you can live and exist as a creative, but we can help you think about what it is to be commercially viable, and all those kind of things that mean you can exist in the field in Hull, but your work might come from anywhere in the UK or anywhere in the world. So we become more resilient and sustainable in what we’re doing in Hull.
“We’re going out with a survey to see what would people want to see – is it marketing, communications, is it business skills, is it about how to learn how to export your stuff, about intellectual property?
‘I’M HUMBLED TO BE WORKING WITH SOME AMAZING PEOPLE’: Kath Wynne-Hague. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography
“We’ll ask people to tell us what they want and then we’ll shape a programme, and the idea is we’ll run it in seasons, so each season we can learn from it and think what do we need to do now, how do we need to evolve, what are the new things that we need to do?
“We’ll share the survey out, reflect on that, devise a programme and then launch in September.”
As someone who is originally from the south bank of Humber but considers Hull her “home city” having lived here in her teens, Kath is reacquainting herself with Hull after working elsewhere. And with a lifelong appreciation of the arts, she is as well-placed as anyone to take Hull’s cultural temperature now.
She said: “I love it. There is so much potential. I think when people have been in the city for a long time I think you get used to the assets, you get used to what the offer looks like and you think ‘this is normal’. I’ve lived in Edinburgh, I’ve lived in Plymouth and in West Yorkshire – the offer that Hull has from a cultural perspective is not normal, it is super exciting and it massively punches above its weight.
THEMES: A Freedom Festival event in 2021. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
“So I’m really pleased and honoured and humbled to be in the city working with some people who are doing absolutely amazing stuff.”
Asked about cultural events and organisations that excite her about Hull’s cultural offer at the moment, she highlighted Freedom Festival, Humber Street Sesh, Back to Ours, Concrete Youth theatre company, and The Herd Theatre.
Kath said: “If you think about what Freedom’s doing, nowhere is doing a festival around the agendas that Freedom does, the challenging questions they pose and how they do that – that’s amazing.
“The Sesh is fantastic about supporting new talent and emerging talent. I can’t think of many other festivals that are a driving force supporting local bands on their career. We really are a space of emergent and developing works and talent. Hull Truck have their GROW programme around talent development. And what Back To Ours does about being asset-based and community led is really great practice.
GOING GREEN: A packed Humber Street Sesh, which has slashed 90 per cent of its carbon emissions this year by switching from diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to generate power. Picture by Jason Shipley
“Concrete Youth are phenomenal. They work with people with multiple learning disabilities. They serve four-thousand young people in the city but they are so exciting and innovative. They are invited to international conferences to talk about their work, so they are championing Hull on an international scale.
“Herd Theatre specialise in theatre for young families. They are doing a big piece of work at the South Bank Centre in London. We are pushing the boundaries and being recognised outside of the city.
“One thing we do need to do better is showcasing that and telling ourselves how amazing we are as well as telling everybody else, that this is a place where you can make work, you can produce work, you can experience culture, and develop a practice and be amazing.”
Looking forward, Kath said the city was in need of a new cultural strategy that recognised things had changed as a result of the Covid pandemic.
‘GREAT PRACTICE’: A Back to Ours event. Picture by Jason Shipley
She said: “I know everybody’s bored to the high neck of the word Covid but it completely changed how people access and experience culture, and so we have to reflect that, we have to respond to that situation. We can’t just carry on behaving the same way as a sector and saying ‘why is nobody coming?’ – their demands and their needs are different.
“So we need to do a new cultural strategy that reflects the shifts and changes of what’s happening across the board. We need to think what does that mean for us if we want to compete as a cultural city, because we’re not just competing at a local level, we’re competing at a national level and beyond in some of the audiences, the talent and investment.
“We have got to be really fleet of foot and innovative in what we’re trying to do. But we also have to be sustainable so I think there’s an absolute need for us to think about how will we be sustainable in our practices and that’s about resilience, but environmentally sound in our practices because ethical choices are also going to be impactful from a creative perspective, a programme perspective and delivery – we need to be carbon-neutral in that space, and that supports the council agenda as well.
“The cultural strategy is something that we hope to start exploring at the end of this year.”
‘IT’S TIME TO BE BRAVE ABOUT THE FUTURE’: Kath Wynne-Hague speaking to The Hull Story. Picture by Neil Holmes Photography
Yesterday, Humber Street Sesh provided a glowing example of how ethical choices around the environment and sustainability can be embedded in Hull’s cultural offer by announcing it had slashed its carbon emissions by an incredible 90 per cent for this year’s event – its tenth anniversary – by switching from diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to generate power.
Kath added: “Everything in the past is great because everything in past has got us to where we are now. But we have to learn that we have to evolve and grow because the environment has changed. So we need to think radically, we need to be brave about what the future can be and how we can work together and what we can do. That’s our next challenge.
“Other places have come out of Covid, their foot’s on the gas and they’re going for it and I think we need to be in that space.”
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