‘I was put on this planet to make culture accessible to people’

WHEN IT comes to her favourite City of Culture event, Lee Corner, the chair of Hull’s newly rebranded culture company, finds it impossible to single out a specific occasion.

A list of some of the shows staged in Hull last year rattles off her tongue, including a “hysterically funny and very moving” workshop featuring two singers from Opera North and a small group gathered in a room on the city’s Bransholme estate.

“I loved the Blade, Lily Bilocca at the Guidlhall, I loved walking down the street and the little vignettes in the windows. I really liked arriving in the city and seeing the scandalous blue people (volunteers) walking about.”

A year on, the dust has settled and normality has returned. Some suggest momentum has been lost and that it has been decidedly lacklustre for the first five months of the year.

“You can understand not much going on for the first three months, but into the sixth?” said one blue-coated volunteer at a recent event. “A lot of people think it’s all over – but it isn’t, it’s going on for another three years.”

But Ms Corner maintains there was always going to be a change of gear, and says: “I don’t see it as any kind of delay or loss of momentum. The idea of a City of Culture for a year is to have that really focussed intensive activity.

“Certainly when I looked at the website, there was half a dozen things to choose from.”

Ms Corner, who was appointed to her voluntary, part-time role in March, adds: “Martin Green (chief executive of City of Culture 2017) and Rosie Millard (her predecessor) did what was absolutely right for 2017 – it was high-octane, high-profile.

“Now we have come down off the mountain, and say: ‘Right, we are part of a mix – along with all our other colleagues, the city council, all the other cultural organisations.’”

Absolutely Cultured has a budget of £3m a year for the next three years. Employing 25 people, its mission statement is “to create ambitious, surprising, and challenging artistic work that brings people and communities together”.

A key theme is collaboration, not just in Hull, but across the UK and internationally.

The organisation is talking to the Liverpool City Region about a major project on the lines of Land of Green Ginger – a series of enigmatic outdoor “happenings” staged across Hull last year to audiences of more than 50,000, which grew out of stories from communities.

“It’s about Liverpool, a former Capital of Culture, and Hull, immediately after being City of Culture, coming together and saying ‘what can we do to work together?’,” says Ms Corner, an arts consultant, who has held a number of senior voluntary roles including as the chairwoman of The Media Centre in Kirklees.

In Hull, the focus is on building on last year’s successes. The Big Malarkey children’s literature festival, run by the council’s library service, returns to the leafy surrounds of East Park from June 20 to 24 and the BBC’s Contains Strong Language poetry festival will be back from September 28 to 30.

Absolutely Cultured also announced this week what should be a quirky and joyful outdoor event on August 11 by Station House Opera. will see thousands of breeze blocks used to create a moving sculpture over nearly two miles in the city centre, weaving in and out of private homes and public spaces, running up staircases