It was the third busiest Port behind Liverpool and London with goods being exported to the value of £28.6 million and those arriving from around the globe at £69 million.
As a fishing port the total catch in 1938 was at five million hundred weight which represented the largest of landings in the UK.
The industrial base of Hull included 14% of the total of those employed in the fishing sector nationally, 7% of the nation's paint manufacturers and seed crushers and 8 percent of makers of heating and ventilation equipment.
The unemployment rate in 1938 was 11% and in the same period 80 percent of the Hull workforce earned less than £4 per week.
The 1936 Census recorded the highest number of bicycle use of any location in Great Britain with over 7300 cycles noted within a typical 16 hour day.
Public Transport was in its heyday with 75 million passenger journeys per year on the municipal bus, trolley bus and tram services which equated to 235 journeys for each of the head of population clocking up some 5 million vehicle miles.
Railway patronage was at a similar volume with the Central Terminus collecting at the gate some 2 million tickets every year.
However, a major disadvantage of the high levels of passenger and freight trains to and from the network of stations around the city and the Dock areas was the regular closing of crossing gates on the main arterial routes, so much so that in a typical 15 hour day there were 500 individual gate operations and an accumulative delay of nearly 1000 minutes.
It was recorded that 80,000 vehicles were held up as a consequence. Worst offender was the main Hessle Road crossing where the gates were closed for the equivalent of six hours daily.
The City had a housing stock of 86,600 houses.
Of these the level of private renting was 56.4% and a further 11.6% managed by Hull Corporation.
Just over a quarter of the houses were over 60 years old, therefore dating from the mid to late Victorian era and of which about the same proportion were deemed to have exceeded their economic life, ie slum standard.
In fact applying a measure of six adverse factors of blight as to condition or habitability around 10% of the housing should have been condemned. The later estimate for slum clearance was for around 5000 houses.
As an indicator of poor amenity standards the figure of 39.3% of houses in Hull lacked a bath or hot water.
To serve the large city population there were 3653 shops although one third of these were empty. 52% of the shops sold food and of this number 42% traded as traditional grocers. This in effect supported the characteristic of the UK being a nation of shopkeepers although the original commentator used it as a derogatory term.
The 278 Public Houses in Hull had a concentration of 35 percent in the central area of the City.
There was also what was described as an appalling level of road traffic and pedestrian accidents. In 1939 alone there were 3137 accidents resulting in 1275 injuries and 38 fatalities. The most probable cause was attributed to the ribboning of shops along the main City roads and the increasing volume of road traffic along these routes. The main involvement in the accident record was of course private cars but with pedal cycles a close second.
Source; A Plan for Kingston Upon Hull 1945 (Lutyens and Abercrombie)
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