Magnificent: Maritime Museum ‘like we’ve never seen it before’

STUNNING: The court room

This Place, a column by Vicky Foster

Inside Hull’s refurbished Maritime Museum

On a freezing, sunlit morning as Robin Diaper, curator of maritime and social history, guides us around the renovated but still-empty Maritime Museum, he tells me that he knows a lot of people were nervous when the closure of the museum was announced back in 2020. I have to admit to him that I was one of those people.

Like most residents of Hull, the museum is kind of woven into my life story. I spent a lot of time there as a teenager, mucking about with my friends on Saturday afternoons. Then as a young mum, it was one of a handful of places I could take my children for free when they were small. As I got older, it found its way into poetry and stories about where I came from.

Not every town or city has a magnificent Victorian building at its centre, where you can wander around whale skeletons and mermaids. It’s a special place, and part of the reason I was nervous was that I knew I’d miss it for the four years it was due to be closed.

Over the course of those four years though, I’ve had snippets of how it was shaping up. Videos on Facebook of the interior works, reports from friends who volunteer there, and the gradual revelation of the cleaned-up exterior. But none of these prepared me for the experience of actually getting to go inside and see what they’ve done to the place.

GRAND: The entrance stairway

There are rooms where intricate starfish, scrolls and flowers dance across the ceilings, revealed to the light after having 150 years’ worth of detritus removed.  There’s a new light-filled atrium, with balconies designed to look like whalebones or the ribs of ships. There are small circular rooms where displays will create more contemplative spaces. There’s an education room, which feels like being in the belly of a boat, with flickering lanterns to enhance the effect. There are “gold” areas like the dome of the building, where rope detailing deepens the maritime links. And these are just some of the changes to the actual building, all designed to make it lighter, airier and more accessible.

Robin also talked us through plans for the reinstatement of the artefacts and exhibits, and the way he described them demonstrates the care and thought that have been taken over these too. The centrepiece juvenile whale skeleton, that most of us will remember as the crowning glory of a visit to the museum, will retake its place in the main gallery. It will languish on a new plinth, tail stretching up towards the ceiling, where a projection of a fully-grown whale will give perspective on the size it would have grown to if it had reached adulthood. Another smaller whale skeleton will be suspended in the atrium, where you can view it from below or from the balcony.

Corridor spaces will have life-size fish projected on the floors – the fish that would have been caught on trawlers out of Hull. A huge globe in one gallery will show the routes these trawlers would have taken; just one of the ways they plan to emphasise the city’s global connections. Another small, circular gallery will hold a planetarium, where you can view the planets and stars, and also gain an understanding of how they would have been used to aid navigation.

LANDMARK: The Maritime Museum

There’ll be a “magic window” looking out over Queen’s Gardens that shows how it looked when it was still a dock, and another looking onto the top of Whitefriargate that shows how Beverley Gate would’ve looked.

Everything is designed to capture the interwoven stories of the water and the land, the people and the place. As well as underlining the global connections, the artefacts and collections will demonstrate the contributions of local people, and the effect our maritime history has had on the city.

There’ll be a memorial room to remember people who lost their lives in the maritime industries – with a window that looks away to the marina, where the masts of ships can be seen swaying in the winter sunshine. There’ll be a huge portrait of the Headscarf Revolutionaries, and another of a female Humber Pilot. Robin tells me that as well as celebrating the men who went away, they also want to celebrate the matriarchal society that made their absence possible.

DIZZYING: An upward look at the new atrium

There’ll be a whole room dedicated to the docks, because unless you worked there, despite their importance to the city, most of us will know very little about their workings. There’ll be talking-heads films of trawlermen and dock workers, poetry from local children, information about Hull’s bombing and the city in wartime.

Robin tells us there will be fifty per cent more artefacts on display than before the restoration – due partly to the fact that the museum will now have more floors open to the public. There will be three whole floors open daily, and it felt really special to visit the second floor for the first time and peer out from the porthole-shaped windows. The idea is to make these rooms feel like “the best attic you’ve ever been in”, and they already felt that way to me – I can’t wait to see what they look like once they’re full of the eclectic mix of objects they have planned.

MAGNIFICENT: One of the refurbished rooms

But maybe the most exciting part of the whole morning was when we climbed the spiral staircase into the dome of the building and looked out across the city’s rooftops – a view that very few people have been lucky enough to see until now.

If all that wasn’t enough, there will also be guided trips available down into the basement to view the racks of artefacts there still isn’t room to display. But, for now, we’ll have to wait a little bit longer before we can see everything. The reopening is planned for spring 2026, after being delayed by unexpected works on the roof.

I can say for absolute certain though, that it sounds like it will definitely be worth waiting for.