Old Town, Kingston-on-Hull, medieval street, October 2025. Photo: The author.

The contradictions of growth

You don’t see many tourists this time of year in Kingston upon Hull; Hull for short. It’s a port city of about 275,000 in Yorkshire, Northern England, and the birthplace of William Wilberforce, father of British Abolitionism. His house in picturesque Old Town, has been made into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery and its abolition, and my wife Harriet and I lingered an hour and a half or so among its fine exhibits – prints, paintings, documents, models, medals and medallions. There were one or two other visitors – no more.

Old Town is a conservation district with brick or cobbled streets dating to the late Middle Ages, and buildings mostly from the Georgian and Victorian periods. When Harriet and I were there last week, it felt throttled, the former hue and cry of seamen, dockworkers, peddlers, peelers, mountebanks, fishwives and urchins long silent. The only sound that afternoon was the hum of distant traffic and the click-clack of Harriet’s boots on the uneven brick-blocks. In addition to its museums and historic houses, the district boasts many pubs, bars and nightclubs, but they were closed or empty. The publican at Ye Olde Black Boy (est. 1729; opening time 6 pm) told me he makes all his money on weekends. It’s the same, he said, with the other drinking establishments. The origin of the pub’s name is obscure, but all sorts of benign suggestions have been offered.

A slow weekday evening at Ye Olde Black Boy, a pub in Hull, October 2025. Photo: The author.

Leave the historic district and riverfront, and it soon becomes apparent that Hull is among the most impoverished cities in England. There are struggling or shuttered shopping centers, empty storefronts on pedestrianized streets, run-down row houses and apartment blocks, and an over-abundance of re-sale shops, hair salons and convenience stores. Though the number of homeless (“rough sleepers”) in Hull is low by U.S. standards, it’s higher than the national average. Statistics shows that Hull has high unemployment and low wealth, and that its residents suffer from poor health. Decades of de-industrialization and government austerity have taken their toll, here as elsewhere in the North.

There are, however, three industries in Hull that are thriving. The first is the so-called “hospitality” sector – the above-mentioned pubs, bars, and nightclubs; the second is hospitals; and the third is prisons. Each exists in symbiosis. Because Hull has one of the highest ratios of bars and pubs per capita in England, it also has one of the highest rates of alcohol related hospital admissions. Patients are treated at either Hull Royal Infirmary or Castle Hill Hospital. Unsurprisingly, there are also a lot of alcohol linked crimes, and no less than five nearby prisons to house offenders.

If you are nicked after getting into a barroom brawl, you’ll probably be taken to His Majesty’s Prison Hull, where you may be kept on remand until trial. If you are convicted of “common assault,” you’ll go to HMP Humber, a minimum security, or C-level facility. If you’re guilty of assault resulting in “grievous bodily harm,” you’ll go to HMP Millsike, or one of the two B-level prisons at HMP Full Sutton. Unfortunately, these three economic sectors don’t raise productivity or increase aggregate demand for goods or services or make people happier and healthier. They aren’t the “engines of growth” – to cite a cliché beloved of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves – required to spur the sluggish British economy.

For sustained growth, Parliament and Whitehall would need to make large, new investments in green industries, affordable housing, improved healthcare, sustainable agriculture, education, transportation, and culture. Instead, it was announced recently that in a bid to boost growth and support the hospitality sector, U.K. restaurants, pubs, clubs, gas stations, and other business selling alcohol, will be allowed to remain open later. It’s almost enough to encourage the revival of Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice (est. 1787), dedicated to the reduction of “excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, [and] profanation of the Lord’s Day”. In practice, the Society was mostly concerned with suppressing speech critical of the government and resisting calls for democratic reform of parliament. It would be superfluous in the current U.K.

Abolition vs Reform

The reason I was in Hull last week was to give a lecture about prison abolition to a group of community activists and scholars at the University of Hull. For about six years, from 2008-13, I was one of the leaders of a successful effort to reform Tamms Supermax prison in Southern Illinois. The head of the campaign was Laurie Jo Reynolds, a Chicago artist and activist of remarkable energy and imagination. We worked closely for five years — drafting legislation, organizing........

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