Hull History Centre - Pevsner Architectural Guide to Hull (David and Susan Neave)
Arts & Civic
Hull History Centre
Kingston upon Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire
Pringle Richards Sharratt completed the New History Centre at Hull, following a design competition.
This project is a joint venture between Hull City Council and Hull University to provide new accommodation for both the city archives and local studies collection and the University’s collections (which include the Larkin Archive and the records of Liberty and various political groups). The building is located on the eastern edge of the city centre, on a key route linking the city centre and the east bank of the River Hull. We provided key support in the successful Stage 2 Heritage Lottery Fund application.
The History Centre provides integrated, state-of-the-art storage and public access facilities for the archival, manuscript, book and local studies collections. It includes storage, conservation, binding, digitisation, IT, teaching and learning facilities, as well as office space and room(s) for visitors to consult material. The design includes a repository on the upper floor, designed to provide a high degree of environmental control to comply with BS5454, with all the public spaces at ground level. These are flanked by a linear arcade running along the south face of the building and a new park to the south.
As a key requirement of the brief, above all, the centre is a highly visible and accessible focus for the local community, instilling pride in the history of Hull for generations to come.
Client Name
4,170 sq.m
£7.5 million + £250,000 park
2005
2011
Consultants
In the press
Pevsner Architectural Guide to Hull (David & Susan Neave)
Hull Regeneration post-1980
It is through buildings such as the Hull History Centre, 2009 by Pringle Richards Sharratt [26] with its elegant curved timber arcade that Hull can best demonstrate its architectural and cultural renaissance (p35).
Walk 4: Queen's Gardens and the Northern Suburb
...opposite the stylish Hull History Centre, 2009, by Pringle Richards Sharratt [26,92]. A long two-storey building with an elegant wide glazed arcade running full-height along the s side formed by twenty-four curved laminated timber beams covered with three-layer inflated ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene, a transparent polymer) cushions. This superb resource centre contains a local studies library, search room and education spaces on the ground floor with the archives of the city and the University of Hull stored above (pp 128-129).
Review by the Heritage Lottery Fund of the first 100 projects to receive a major award:
"The building itself represents a remarkable achievement. The build went smoothly and finished on budget. The design is very contemporary and, although it was somewhat controversial on the grounds that it was so modern for a ‘heritage’ space, it has already become a popular icon of the city, and has won a Civic Trust award as a project that “makes an outstanding contribution to the quality and appearance of the environment”.
"The impact of the project is easy to discern: the archives are now much more accessible, and receiving around 30,000 visitors a year, which makes it one of the busiest archives in the country, outside London. And while the quality of the collection was previously known only to a select few, it has now been embraced much more by the city. “People feel a sense of ownership of the archive now”, says Green, and the University has a much stronger profile in the centre of the city."
HLF review of Hull History Centre
Hull History Centre1.56 MB
