Visitors to Hull will be given a first glimpse of the city’s new-look maritime attractions when its historic Spurn Lightship re-opens as a floating museum in spring 2025, before the whole of the £40m scheme is fully revealed in 2026.
Hull Maritime – one of the UK’s most challenging and complex restoration projects – has taken over five years of work but will see the city become home to some of the country’s best-preserved seafaring attractions.
As part of an ambition to become a world-class ‘Maritime City’ destination, the Spurn Lightship – which guided vessels as they navigated the Humber estuary, one of the world’s most treacherous waterways – has been given a new lease of life.
Now moored at a purpose-built site near Murdoch’s Connection footbridge, which links Hull Marina to the city centre, the Spurn will feature new projections, film, immersive sound and graphics telling the story of its 48 years helping vessels safely sail the Estuary.
A local landmark after first opening as a museum in 1986, its refurbishment has been so extensive that the vessel is seaworthy for the first time since being decommissioned in 1975 and is set to be one of the best experiences of its kind in the country.
More attractions will follow over the next year as part of Hull Maritime, which will eventually create a trailthrough Hull exploring and celebrating 800 years of seafaring history.
The city’s other nationally significant ship, the Arctic Corsair, is expected to open late 2025 as part of a new £3.8m visitor attraction, featuring one of the most energy efficient buildings in the UK’s cultural and heritage sector. Completing the line-up will be a totally refurbished Maritime Museum, with new-look galleries and extra facilities, which will welcome visitors in early 2026.
Originally a phased opening was planned to start in 2024, but the complexities and sheer scale of the project has meant the timeline has slipped. Among the challenges created by one of the biggest maritime restoration schemes in any UK city has been moving two ships that had not sailed for decades.
The Spurn Lightship moved for the first time in 35 years to a repair workshop in October 2021 before returning to a temporary mooring at the Marina in 2023. It was towed to its new permanent base earlier this year where final landscaping and interpretation work is now nearing completion.
Even more challenging has been work around Hull’s last remaining sidewinder trawler, the Arctic Corsair, which was moved for the first time in more than 20 years to a temporary berth in 2019. From there it was towed by two tugboats in a three-hour journey to Dunston Ship Repairs at William Wright Dock in Hull, where extensive renovation continues.
Dubbed Hull’s own ‘Cutty Sark’, the ship – which was caught up in the Cod Wars with Iceland in the 1970s and once recorded a world record catch – will set sail for her final berth at the new visitor attraction in the former North End Shipyard in the Old Town in summer 2025. Moving the Corsair will entail removing silt from the riverbed, closing the Humber flood gates, and three bridges, as well as ensuring a maximum water height in the River Hull to enable the ship to safely reach, and be manoeuvred, into the new dock.
In another major investment, a £21m scheme at the city centre’s Queens Gardens – originally the city’s first public dock and at one time the country’s largest – which is seeing its biggest transformation since it was turned into a picturesque garden space in 1930.
Due to be completed in late 2025, the redevelopment will reflect the history of the gardens, as well as increasing biodiversity within the city centre, and will connect the Maritime Museum with the new visitor centre at North End Shipyard.
Hull Maritime is funded by Hull City Council and The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
For more information visit maritimehull.co.uk
For all other tourism information about Hull, see www.visithull.org
Photos: above, Arctic Corsair in dry dock, and below, the Spurn Lightship almost ready for its final reveal. Credit for both images – Neil Holmes Photography/Hull City Council
