Hull City Council

Hull City Council, or Kingston upon Hull City Council, is the local authority for the city of Kingston upon Hull (generally known as Hull) in the ceremonial county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. Hull has had a council since 1299, which has been reformed on numerous occasions. Since 1996 the council has been a unitary authority, being a district council which also performs the functions of a county council; it is independent from East Riding of Yorkshire Council, the unitary authority which administers the rest of the county.

The council meets at the Guildhall. It has been under Liberal Democrat majority control since 2022.

Hull was an ancient borough. It was granted its first charter in 1299 by Edward I. He had acquired the small port town of Wyke upon Hull six years earlier in 1293, and had renamed it Kingston upon Hull to reflect its new royal ownership. The 1299 charter gave the borough certain rights of self-government. A subsequent charter in 1331 gave the borough the right to appoint a mayor.

In 1440 the borough was given the right to appoint its own sheriff, which made it a county corporate and removed it from the jurisdiction of the Sheriff of Yorkshire. Seven years later, in 1447, the county corporate was extended to also include an adjoining rural area lying to the west of Hull itself, which became known as Hullshire. Although independent from the Sheriff of Yorkshire, Hull remained part of the geographical county of Yorkshire and continued to form part of the East Riding for the purposes of lieutenancy until 1974.

Hull was reformed in 1836 to become a municipal borough under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which standardised how most boroughs operated across the country. The town was then governed by a body formally called the 'mayor, aldermen and burgesses of the borough of Kingston upon Hull', generally known as the corporation or town council. The reformed borough was enlarged to match the Kingston upon Hull constituency, which had been expanded in 1832 to take in areas including Drypool and Sculcoates. As part of the same reforms, Hull lost its jurisdiction over the parts of Hullshire outside the enlarged borough boundary (the parishes of Hessle, Kirk Ella and North Ferriby and their associated townships), which were returned to the jurisdiction of the Sheriff of Yorkshire.

When elected county councils were established in 1889, Hull was considered large enough for the existing corporation to also take on county council functions, making it a county borough. The borough boundaries were enlarged on several occasions.

In 1897, Hull was awarded city status, after which the corporation was also known as the city council. In 1914 the city's mayor was awarded the honorific title of lord mayor.

Local government was reformed in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972. Hull kept the same boundaries (which had last been expanded in 1968) but was reconstituted as a non-metropolitan district and placed in the new county of Humberside, with county-level functions passing to Humberside County Council. Hull's borough and city statuses and its lord mayoralty were all transferred to the new district and its council.