Neil Armstrong, our contemporary cynical historian writes:

For the time being, the trauma of Hull’s flood crisis of 2007 had passed, yet it left a dawning awareness that modern life; travel, eating red meat, and using plastics had a frightening and damaging effect on climate, which in turn saw a national and international economic crisis. Social mobility had stalled, zero-hours contracts fully effected. Job loss and homelessness increased exponentially.

Paragon Station, once tatty, now modernized with a smart new Interchange, witnessed its Victorian alcoves filling with people living rough in sleeping bags.

Dread was felt by ordinary people who were still relishing the last of postwar Britain’s stability. Social media networks and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, had made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. As a society we had become more fretful. Expectations were diminishing, people would not necessarily become richer than their parents due to the economic slowdown.

As in other big cities, the impact on online shopping had taken its toll on Hull’s high street. Big names such as House of Fraser, British Homes Stores, Littlewoods had all disappeared. while others downsized.

During the decade, Britain began to eat comforting foods: bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, made cooking with carbs and sugar respectable again. Even clothes had become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats were de rigueur while customers sought bottomless brunches to obliterate their day. Hull like other city centres, emptied out by online commerce during the early twenty-tens, had been replaced with cafes full of people silently working on their mobile devices rather than socialising.

New consumer devices for collecting personal data, such as the Fitbit Watch, promoted self-improvement and self-presentation. “athleisure” became a potent status symbol. Drinking coconut water, green juices, and several types of fake milks was a must-do. A new phenomenon became a common sight; food delivery services like ‘Deliveroo.’ The delivery cyclists whizzed around the streets with their huge, insulated containers strapped to their backs, resembling snail shells on wheels.

Hull’s old Fruit Market’s incredible transformation changed the landscape, leaving behind empty Humber Street which had proved difficult to re-let, and filled it with independent traders taking a punt on the back of investment, as also happened in Hull's Trinity Market and Paragon Arcade.

2017 was destined to be a rollercoaster year for Hull, delivering more art and culture in a 365-day spectacular hullabaloo, as the ‘City of Culture.’ Implying to be “immersive” (that favourite promotional term of the decade) by putting you inside the spectacle. A different immersive craze had been the ‘ice bucket’ challenges, captured on mobile phones on selfie sticks for all to see.

Meanwhile, Queen Victoria Square had been sliced in two with an enormous Siemens wind turbine blade. Smith & Nephew opened its new £9m medical device research and development centre in the same year. Croda invested in a new polymer manufacturing process in the City. Albeit the closure of the bio-ethanol plant at Saltend in 2018 was a bitter blow.

The City makeover was well underway; a re-designed dry dock converted into an amphitheatre. While the New Theatre and Ferens Art Gallery received upgraded facilities together with the Bonus Arena.

Citizens in their boiler suits, jumpsuits, metallics, peplum pieces, maxi dresses, bike shorts, linen, short shorts, and trainers, scurried around to see the varied and colourful giant plastic moths in Hull's streets.

Men sported large, but carefully maintained beards. Often tying their hair in a high topknot which was known as a “man bun”, while aimlessly doing laps around the streets, so their Fitbit would measure their 12,000 arbitrary number of steps, while they listened on their smartphones to Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Adele.

The 2010s, was our age of crises. And if things hadn’t been shaken up enough, the decade taught us that all the powerful forces of the wider world, would wash through humanity in a way that would shape the next decade . . . that frightful spectre of ‘Covid-19’ was just on the horizon.
 

The Minerva Lodge flourished. The efforts put in by the Brethren to promote the Lodge saw an increase in younger people taking down the average age of the Brethren, and ceremonies regularly worked. At the 2014 election night five United Grand Lodge Certificates were presented in open Lodge, the year that Jeffrey Gillyon took over from Richard Anderson as Provincial Grand Master.