City of Water: Learning from the past to live better with water today

Artwork produced during our Risky Cities project was integral to two inspiring exhibitions recently programmed by Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery, attracting a total of 60,000 visitors who came to explore the city’s watery history and artwork. Dr Ed Brookes and Dr Stewart Mottram reflect on the partnerships that helped produce these watery-themed exhibitions and the key role that arts and culture can play in opening up conversations about climate resilience and how we can live better with water today.

As part of the teams delivering the Risky Cities and Rising Tide of Humber projects at the University of Hull, we have a wealth of experience and expertise in drawing on local histories, literatures, and cultures to encourage community engagement with flood risk. Teaming up with the Ferens Art Gallery, we reflected on Hull’s centuries-long experience of living with water, and how it has shaped the visual culture of the city, past, present, and future.

The City of Water and Hull on the Rise exhibitions at Ferens Art Gallery explored a variety of watery themes, highlighting Hull and East Riding's centuries-long relationship with water and the sea. The exhibitions uncovered 800 years of flooding and flood risk management, in a region where large areas of land are below sea level at high tide.

We were pleased to be able to contribute a range of Risky Cities materials, artwork and research to the exhibitions. Woven textile artwork created by community workshop participants, a series of commissioned artworks by Emma Garness and Laila Jabbari, live performances by Dave Windass, Jay Moy, Sarah Johns and Martin Lewsley, as well as the ‘Wet Feet, Warm Hearts, Strong Places’ community flood resilience zine, all sat alongside the Ferens Gallery’s extensive collection of watery artworks, complemented by new commissions by the Future Ferens young artists group. A virtual reality recreation of one well-documented Humber flood from 1646, produced at the University of Hull as part of our Rising Tide of Humber project, was also featured.

Underpinning these artworks and the exhibitions were crucial questions around the impacts of environmental change – how communities can live with water and flood in the future, and what that future might look like.

Risky Cities: Learning from the past

Along with our Ferens partners, we were keen to explore how we can learn from the past and Hull’s history of water in a way that encourages future knowledge and adaption to flood risk.

This is increasingly important for a city second only to London for flood risk and with a long history of flooding stretching back to the town’s origins in the 1200s. The Hull floods of June 2007 remain the most memorable and devasting in living memory, and Hull’s risk from flooding is likely to rise in future, as climate change increases temperatures, sea levels, and the frequency and severity of storm surge events in the North Sea.

Over the past few years, our Risky Cities team has been fully immersed in what we call a ‘Learning Histories’ approach. It’s a way of connecting with communities, blending historical insights with personal experiences and local creativity, to raise awareness and inspire action around floods and the environment. Think hands-on textiles workshops, creative writing sessions, and zine-making gatherings – each brimming with artistic expression and heartfelt contributions that ultimately found their way onto the walls of the Ferens Art Gallery.

Follow the thread, flow of words and watery conversations

Throughout our Risky Cities project, what has been important is not just how we start conversations around water and flooding in Hull, but how we sustain them. We have sought to do this creatively by inviting artistic responses to the community work that has been created – often through public events and commissions.

This includes the Follow the Thread Textile Exhibition at Freedom Festival in August 2022, which first showcased the textile artworks from the project’s community workshops. Likewise, we commissioned artists to respond to the creative writing produced on the subject of flooding by East Hull communities in our Flow of Words community workshops in the summer of 2022. Commissioned artists reinterpreted writing produced for Flow of Words through music, visual art, mapping and opera. Our collaboration with Ferens has continued these watery conversations, with many of the artists from Flow of Words showcasing their work as part of the City of Water Exhibition.

Water Cultures: Water as a creative as well as destructive force

Water is often seen as destructive, and reflections on Hull’s long history of flooding can evoke people’s experiences of loss and damage. This can be seen in the comment cards completed by visitors to the Ferens Art Gallery’s City of Water exhibition, some of which contain personal stories of how the Summer 2007 floods affected individuals and communities in Hull.

‘I was at school and we were sent home. The waters rose to my knees, nobody knew what was about to happen until it did.’

‘Anywhere there was a drive, a space, there was a caravan. The rain had gone, but the mould had only just started’

‘I decided to drive my car through the flood water in Hessle. Bad Idea! It needed to be recovered!’

But Risky Cities and the Ferens Art Gallery exhibitions also demonstrate how water can be a creative force. The fabulous watery artworks created by artists and members of the community emphatically demonstrate this.

Some visitors to the exhibition also became part of the creative process. Using the comment cards, they chose to express their experiences of water creatively through their own artwork. 

Sharing these conversations, artworks, and memories of living with water in Hull can also be empowering. Many of those who took part in Risky Cities activities and events highlight the transformative impact of the project, and welcomed the opportunity to think differently about water in the city within a safe, community space.

‘I think that whole thing…about having something to do. You, you're being creative but you're listening to these stories. It's a safe place.’

‘It created togetherness’

‘It's been a truly really good experience. We've all loved it.’ 

What can we learn?

But what can we learn from all this? Why think about water in creative ways?

Drawing upon Hull’s strong connection and history of living with water and flood provides a powerful mechanism through which to collectively engage people with future flood and climate resilience. Artistic and creative ways of engaging with water and the past are an important part of creating community action around flooding for the future. For City of Water, this was emphasised by visitors who left comments calling for change:

‘We need Climate ACTION’

‘Our everchanging east coast must be protected!’

‘Climate change is a huge issue. We need to act now before it is too late!’

What this demonstrates is how the creative and destructive power of water can be channelled in ways that enable reflection and solidarity, and which creates a sense of community that can be mobilised to create more resilient and sustainable water futures.

As we look to the future, we are also delving deeper into the region’s rich history of living with water with the recently funded project, ‘From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities’. This exciting endeavour involves collaborating with primary schools in Hull and Grimsby to stage performances of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Noyes Fludde (1958), at Hull and Grimsby Minsters. It's more than a performance project; we’ll be unravelling how the experience of living with flood risk has woven its way into the literature and culture of Hull and the wider east coast over time. Through creative exploration, we aim to integrate these insights into classroom settings, engaging students with vital aspects of the Climate and Sustainability Education curriculum. 

Dr Ed Brookes and Stewart Mottram were both on the project team for the University of Hull’s Risky Cities Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and the UK Climate Resilience Programme.

Dr Ed Brookes holds a HIKE Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at the University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute and is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC Noah to Now project. His current work is looking at extending the community and policy impact of the Risky Cities project. This sits alongside his wider research which explores socially engaged art in Hull and its impact on urban and environmental liveability.

Dr Stewart Mottram is Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project, ‘From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities’ (AH/Y004779/1).