The monks of Meaux Abbey founded the place in the late 12th century, picking the spot where the River Hull meets the Humber because it was a good haven for ships full of wool. They called the little settlement Wyke, from a word that meant either inlet or dwelling. In 1293, King Edward I bought the town from the abbey, and on 1 April 1299 he handed it a royal charter that renamed it Kingston upon Hull, King's town on the Hull. The original charter still sits in the Guildhall archives. From those medieval beginnings Hull traded with Scandinavia, the Baltic and the Low Countries, exported wool and woollen cloth, imported wine and timber, and tied itself permanently to the Hanseatic merchants of northern Europe. The de la Pole family rose from Hull merchants to royal financiers. By the time Edward needed a forward base for his Scottish campaigns, Hull was already one of the busiest ports on the east coast.

For a long stretch of the 18th and 19th centuries, whaling drove Hull's fortunes. Ships left for the Greenland grounds and came back stinking of oil. When whaling faded, the port turned to the new business of moving people. Between 1850 and 1914, more than two million emigrants from Scandinavia, Germany, the Jewish communities of the Pale, and the Netherlands stepped off boats at Hull, passed through processing sheds, and travelled by train to Liverpool to board ships for the Americas. Some never left and quietly stitched themselves into the life of the city. The Wilson Line, founded by Thomas Wilson in 1825, monopolised the North Sea routes and by the early 20th century was the largest privately owned shipping company in the world, with over 100 ships. Hull was granted city status in 1897 at the peak of this confidence, a port town that finally insisted on being called a city.

Hull's most famous son was born on the High Street in 1759 in a merchant's house that still stands as Wilberforce House Museum. William Wilberforce served as MP for Hull from 1780 to 1784 and spent the rest of his Parliamentary career arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and then the institution of slavery itself across the British Empire. The work was finally finished a month after his death in 1833. The men, women and children whose freedom he advocated for were Africans seized, sold, shipped and worked to death in colonies across the Atlantic, and the museum centres their lives as well as his. Every year since 1995 the city has held the Wilberforce Lecture and awarded the Wilberforce Medallion to people working against modern human rights abuses. Kofi Annan received it in 2017.

Hull was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain during the Second World War, and almost no one outside the city knew. More than 1,200 residents were killed in air raids and around 3,000 injured. Most of the centre was reduced to rubble. The radio reports and newspapers called it a North-East town or a northern coastal town, never by name. The worst of it came in 1941. Survivors rebuilt the centre after the war, but the city still carries the geography of what was lost. After the war, deep-sea trawling took over from whaling until the 1975 to 1976 Anglo-Icelandic Cod War effectively shut the fleet down. The economic decline that followed shaped the next forty years. By the early 2000s, Hull was regularly listed among the most deprived local authorities in the United Kingdom.

On 20 November 2013, the Culture Secretary announced that Hull had beaten Dundee, Leicester and Swansea Bay to become UK City of Culture 2017. The Turner Prize came to the Ferens Art Gallery. Festivals filled the squares. Productions filmed in the Old Town, where the medieval street pattern survived the bombing, gave Hull a new nickname, Hullywood, that the residents wear with a degree of self-mockery. The Deep, an aquarium with around 3,000 species, juts out over the Humber where the River Hull joins it. The tidal surge barrier, lowered eight to twelve times a year, keeps roughly 10,000 homes from flooding. Hull came second in Time Out's 2024 list of the 15 best places to visit in the UK. Rough Guides put it in the world's top 10. The city that nobody named during the Blitz now insists, loudly and a little stubbornly, that you don't sleep on it.