POV: I’m from a shithole, that’s the point.

Words by Ellis Jack Newlove.

Hull's the kind of place people laugh at in conversation. Usually they haven’t been. Or if they have, they obviously don’t stay long enough to get its charm. There’s a character to the place that feels like a film about post-war Britain that never ended. The people are sharp; their humour's quick, and no one likes being told what to do.

You can’t romanticise it. It’s not beautiful. You see headlines now and again — worst place to live in the UK — as if that wasn’t already obvious to the people from there. But the worse they make it sound, the more loyal you feel to it. It’s a shithole, but it’s yours. There’s a pride in coming from somewhere no one expects anything from. Especially if you start making things.

Growing up somewhere like Hull, you figure out how to make something out of nothing — because no one else does it for you.

No one tells you to be an artist. They don’t even really tell you that you can be an artist. There are more and more things happening in Hull now, but when I was younger there wasn’t much that felt like it mattered. No one was thinking about art. So, instead, you learnt to notice things, and you learnt to reframe the ordinary. I remember realising I could take something in my head and turn it into something real. And that felt like magic.

When a place is always at the bottom of the list you have to look at it sideways. Humour becomes a way of coping, so you stay quick on your feet. The bleak stuff becomes punchlines, not because it’s funny — because that’s how you stay above it.

That attitude seeps into my work. My lighter series, for example — that’s Hull. Hull has one of the highest smoking rates in the country. Everyone smokes — or used to. It was just part of the background noise growing up, and I think there’s something quietly poetic, and also a bit gross about that.

Everyone in Hull wants to get out; there’s a feeling that things happen elsewhere. And when I did get out, I moved to London. It made sense at the time. If you want to be an artist, you go where the art is. But in terms of pursuing a life as an artist, it was the worst thing that I could’ve done because I stopped making work completely. Whatever Hull had given me — that thing of just getting on with it — disappeared. It’s not that London was hostile. Just expensive. Performative. Relentless. There was too much noise to see the small, ordinary moments I used to build my artwork around.

Basing myself in Yorkshire again, it all started to come back quite naturally, and I notice something else too — the people who stay. I used to think leaving was the goal. Now staying put looks like the harder thing to do...and probably braver. I respect it. The ones who stick around and still manage to do something interesting are more inspiring than anyone else. There’s less performance to it. No one’s trying too hard. They’re just getting on with it.

Hull might be a shithole. But being from somewhere like that sticks with you. It shapes the way you do things - you get used to working with what’s in front of you. You don’t expect much, so you learn to make the most of whatever’s there. That’s not a disadvantage. If anything, it’s what keeps you going.

Words by Ellis Jack Newlove.