How did an isolated, left-wing city in the northeast become a global high-tech pioneer?

If Hull were an independent nation, it would be the country with the fastest universal broadband in the world

Sneering southerners (and the occasional person from West Yorkshire) used to have a deeply irritating way of categorising Hull as “the place that time forgot.” Stepping out of Hull’s main (and only) station into the blistering East Riding wind, they would clock newspaper sellers hawking the local paper, doughty cafes selling buns, and bargain clothes stores alongside the lack of a John Lewis and dismiss it as pathetically behind the times.

However, Hull has the knack of surprising people. The City of Culture that two years ago engaged 90 per cent of its citizens and welcomed visitors from Kofi Annan to the Queen has quietly done it again, by becoming the first city in the UK to make universal high-speed fibre broadband a reality.

This is where a fibre-optic cable comes right into your house rather than a nearby box on the street; and this service is now available to every house on every single one of the modest streets of Hull.

It is delightfully ironic that it is in Hull, rather than in the opulent squares of London, the hills of Edinburgh or the high-tech offices of Cambridge that this achievement has been reached.

A city out on the North Sea coast, a low-income city with no cathedral and only one university, a city isolated, determinedly left wing and doggedly frugal has effectively snatched the digital crown from underneath everyone else’s nose, even neighbouring Leeds, forthcoming home of Channel 4.

If Hull were an independent nation, it would be the country with the fastest universal broadband in the world.

The clue is in the independence, signalled by its famous cream phone boxes; Hull was the only city to triumph in its own phone exchange, which for years was run by the (Labour) city council.

When it was sold off to Kingston Communications, (and the resultant money ploughed into two sports stadiums), the public boxes stayed cream and the phones continued to be an independent entity.

KCom, as it became known, focused on investing £85m into putting high-speed broadband down every single street. It took time. People scoffed. Hull stayed at the bottom of the high-speed league tables. KCom carried on regardless. Now the city is at the top of the table and is reaping the benefits, with all of its 200,000 homes having access to ultrafast broadband, something that only 8 per cent of the rest of the country can enjoy.

And where speed leads, money follows. It’s estimated that during the past five years, a burgeoning high-speed offer has given Hull a financial advantage of nearly £500m.

Half of this has come in salaries to staff employed in new local businesses. Suddenly Hull’s high levels of available working-age people, and disused industrial buildings are looking like rather sensible business options for enterprise.

With this sort of connectivity, there is no need for a crazily expensive high-speed train link across the Pennines or to the capital. When you can kick off your startup from the kitchen table because your broadband is the fastest in the world, you don’t need to commute. You just need to turn your laptop on. You can bring it home without leaving home.

And in Hull, where the average house price is £150,000, (compared to the national average of £300,000), having a home is actually an achievable aim for a young person hoping to start out on the housing ladder.

Ah, say the snooty southerners. Hull might have big skies and rapid broadband. It might have the Humber Bridge and an underwater aquarium. But where is the culture? My friends, it has also come to the city. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of leading abolitionist and local MP William Wilberforce is hanging in the main city art gallery, the Ferens, on loan from the National Portrait Gallery. The Courtauld Gallery and the Royal Collection also have a rolling programme of loans to the Ferens.

Opera North and the Royal Philharmonic are regular visitors, and this time next year sees the arrival of the West End, in the memorable and musical form of Les Mis, playing for a month at the town’s main theatre.

It would be good if more politicians, both local and national could look at the long-term planning that has resulted in such a satisfying result for a city once foolishly written off by The Economist as a hopeless cause.

Because Hull never redeveloped its docks during the buy to let boom, it never took part in a surge in house prices. Because it kept its phones independent, it could swiftly manage to upgrade to super-fast fibre. By keeping its eye on regeneration, not gentrification, by preferring to give local trading licenses to small independent shops rather than chains, (even if those independent shops sometimes failed), by carrying on ploughing money back into the infrastructure and by refusing to be tempted by vanity projects, the city has steadily continued to grow.

And that has happened even though House of Fraser has closed down and even though Marks and Spencer pushed off this year.

Last month this faith in Hull from both the council and corporate sectors was repaid by the arrival of a further grant of £13.6m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to the city, so that the Maritime Museum and other important sites could be refurbished.

It is the perfect picture; a city which is contained, local, cultured and cheap, with lots of affordable housing stock and where you can achieve lightning speed online connections, to anywhere. Forget about dormitory towns, vast cityscapes, remorseless mortgage repayments, daily tailbacks on the motorway or living in a shoebox.

Hull, which was recently still so unknown that Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC, felt moved to acknowledge its existence by putting it on the TV weather map, has revealed an alternative lifestyle is possible.