Hull Fair project diary blog no. 1

Posted: 28th May 2020

Hull Fair project diary blog no. 1

Hello!

I’m Jocelyn, a Research and Documentation Assistant at Hull Museums and the project lead on the Hull Fair project.

Lockdown closed the museums back in March, and since then we’ve had to drastically change our plans for the project.

The team were working on loads of different things – trying to get opinions, stories and memories of Hull Fair from as broad a cross-section of Hull as possible. All of these contributions were going to go into an exhibition in the Open Space in Streetlife Museum from July-October 2020.

We’ve had to rethink this, and while I still hope that we will get a physical exhibition out of the project, for now, the exhibition has gone digital!

We still have all the memories, stories, photographs and artwork we were going to use on the walls – but now they’re going online!

We had been to our older people’s reminiscence group, Community Café, the Hessle Road Network, and primary schools across Hull. I had spoken to showmen from Hull and beyond, and visited the Showmen’s Guild. We had some stories and photographs from Facebook and Twitter. We had loads of drawings from two half term activities. And we had a film from Hull Fair 2019! Basically, we had a really good base of contributions already!

When lockdown started, we had just commissioned a filmmaker, Nova Studios, to work with a writer, Russ Litten, and go out into the community and schools and speak to people about the fair. Obviously this couldn’t happen any more! So we moved it online. Nova Studios and Russ made a short call for submissions film we could use on social media, so Russ could have phone conversations with people and Nova could make a film from the result, which can then go in the online exhibition.

We’ve already had some great responses, and I’m excited to see what the film will be like.