Hull City Council has been successful in securing funding, including National Lottery Heritage funding, for the development of the Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City project, which is to include a major placemaking and regeneration intervention – including the renovation of existing buildings, including museums, places, and historic ships linked to Hull’s maritime history.

This exciting and wide ranging project will see the regeneration of some of the major attractions in Hull – the Maritime Museum, Arctic Corsair and Spurn Lightship – and the development of a city-wide tourism strategy that is a wonderful legacy for the UK City of Culture 2017. The project has the potential to significantly alter the lives of residents living in the city of Hull through the cultural regeneration and programme built on building social benefit.

Tricolor has been involved in the project since before the Round 1 submission – creating the vision and mission for this groundbreaking project. We were invited back to undertake several threads of the Round 2 Heritage Grant application, following on from our work in the pre-development phase, and are preparing the Activity Plan, Business Plan, Catering and Retail Strategies, Consultation and Community Engagement Strategies, preparing the project evaluation plan and are providing NLHF mentoring.

The Business Plan will need to balance all of the social value activities, whilst also interweaving placemaking, income generation and the visitor experience. We are working closely with the design team to ensure that the income generation activities are actively built into the wider fabric of the project – to ensure it is financially sustainable for the future.

Activities will, through volunteering, offer people the chance to gain practical skills for employment, access training and development, and build confidence in a variety of settings from on-board ships and in a refurbished Hull Maritime Museum to localities across the city.

Skills building opportunities will include heritage as well as transferable public-facing skills from event stewarding to conducting guided tours. Activities will offer a depth of engagement that will make a meaningful difference for participants while also responding to people’s needs in terms of the amount of time they have available for volunteering.

Across the city, the project will promote ambition and civic pride, raising aspiration through activities offered to local communities, schools and colleges, and organisations working with young people, older people, unemployed people, people with disabilities and people and communities facing isolation.