John Prescott cut the ribbon. It was 1989, the deputy prime minister still a few years off, just then the MP for Hull East, and he was opening a new transport museum in a purpose-built shed on the High Street. The collection was older than the building, older than the man, older than the cars it housed. Streetlife has spent the years since pretending to be a street, or several streets, with horse-drawn carriages waiting beside Victorian shop-fronts, a tramcar interior smelling faintly of varnish, and a bicycle gallery that gets visitors who came in for the cars and stayed for the penny-farthings.
The museum has over 200 years' worth of motor transport on display. The earliest end is dominated by horse-drawn carriages, hackney cabs and the kinds of vehicles that once filled Hull's cobbled lanes when the High Street really was the high street. Then come the Veteran cars, the brass-and-leather generation built before 1905 when motoring was an eccentric hobby for the rich. Tramcars and early buses cover the moment when public transport became democratic, and a small army of bicycles tracks how working people actually got to work. The galleries lean into recreation rather than label-heavy curation; you walk past parked vehicles inside reconstructed street scenes, the way you might walk through a town that has somehow lost its present tense.
Streetlife is one of four museums clustered along Hull's High Street in what the city calls the Museums Quarter. Next door is Wilberforce House, the birthplace of the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The Hull and East Riding Museum a few doors down covers the archaeology and prehistory of the region, including the Iron Age Hasholme logboat. Moored on the adjacent River Hull is the Arctic Corsair, a deep-sea trawler converted into a museum ship in 1999 to remember the city's fishing fleet. A redevelopment of the quarter between 1998 and 2003 cost 5.1 million pounds and was opened by the Duke of Gloucester. All four museums are managed by Hull Museums on behalf of the city, and admission to every one of them is free.
Streetlife sits on what was once a working merchants' street running parallel to the River Hull, where wool, wine and timber moved between warehouses and quayside for six centuries. The High Street still has the slightly narrow medieval pattern that survived the Blitz, and walking the museums quarter is one of the best ways to read the shape of Hull's old town. Streetlife is open Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and like the rest of Hull's civic museums, it costs nothing to enter. The reward for going in is a building that quietly insists Hull's history isn't all civil war and trawlers; for a couple of centuries it was also the noise of horses' hooves and the bell of a tram.
The Streetlife Museum stands at 53.7439 degrees north, 0.3297 degrees west on Hull's High Street, in the old town between the River Hull and the city centre. From the air it's hidden inside a tightly packed grid of brick streets a few hundred metres from where the River Hull meets the Humber Estuary. The tidal surge barrier is the easiest landmark. Humberside (EGNJ) is the nearest field, 16 nautical miles southwest across the estuary. Recommended altitude 2,500 to 4,000 feet AGL to see the museum quarter and the surviving medieval street pattern of the old town.