A site specific, playable exhibition that explores Hull’s historic fruit market that operated at Humber Street for 250 years.
Humber Street Gallery occupies 64 Humber Street which was built on a WWII bomb-site by fruit wholesaler T J Poupart in 1956. The company sold fruit and vegetables and the site housed a banana ripening room on the first floor. This was the jumping off point for the exhibition which uses bananas as its inspiration. A costumery inhabits the Space 1 on the ground floor where visitors can dress up as colourful characters from the fruit trade and upstairs in Space 2 is and exhibition of historical research and a maze of banana boxes.
Bananas have deep connotations in our culture, probably because we’ve been eating them in the UK for hundreds of years. Today they remain the most widely consumed fruit in the work with 5 billion being consumed in the UK alone. Bananarchy! is the smooshing together of the words ‘banana’ and ‘anarchy’: bananas because in this country they’re associated with slapstick humour or ‘an explosion of happiness (ie someone’s gone bananas); and anarchy which can be defined as a non-hierarchical society.
Space 1
Nicknames were common place at the fruit market. Mike Freeman in his book ‘The Humber Street Legacy’ recalls a close-knit community ‘everybody in the fruit trade seemed to have a nickname and this was all part and parcel of an everyday market environment… These names applied to buyers, sellers, bosses and directors… if you were not ‘christened’ with a nickname you were deemed to be inconsequential.’
In this gallery visitors are invited to dress up as Raggy Tash, Slippery Stan, Cyclops and Semtex or to create their own banana-themed alter-ego with nickname, character and skills.
The creation of disguises and characters emerged in medieval Venice back in 1162 where masks and costumes became popular at parties, hiding the identities of party goers and allowing them to transgress rigid class boundaries. The parallels continue today: the idea of creating characters to hide or enhance our identities is now commonplace in the online world of social media and gaming where we create skins, gamer-tags and filters to represent ourselves in the digital public realm.
Space 2
Explore a maze created using 1560 banana boxes designed for the exhibition that allows visitors to experience banana ripening rooms of the past. Chase your friends and family around the space and see if you can find the knitted bananas hidden in some of the boxes. If you do, you can redeem one for a prize in the cafe! But beware, there are spiders lurking in some of the boxes, knitted ones of course. Visitors are also invited to share their favourite banana jokes by writing them on the boxes.
Also on this floor is an exhibition of historical research plus photographs and publications loaned by local people. The gallery is interested in creating an oral archive of people who worked in Humber Street fruit market, so if you or anyone you know worked there, please get in touch via info@absolutelycultured.co.uk or phone 01482 692285.
Events
There are loads of events taking place during the exhibition. Please click here to find out more.
Exhibition
The exhibition runs from 20 June – 21 July 2025 at Humber Street Gallery, 64 Humber Street, Hull, HU1 1TU, UK
