Hull Maritime Museum has reopened after a £20m refurbishment, revealing a permanent gallery centred on a 40ft skeleton of a North Atlantic right whale that visitors, including children, can walk and crawl through. The reboot celebrates the city's long relationship with the sea, tracing its history through trading, whaling and fishing, and connecting that past to Hull's present-day role in offshore wind turbine manufacture and as one of the UK's busiest port complexes.

Alongside the giant whale skeleton, the museum displays delicate scrimshaw carvings made from whale teeth and walrus tusks by sailors during long voyages, plus objects such as narwhal tusks fashioned into hatstands and bedposts. The North Atlantic right whale, once hunted almost to extinction for its oil and buoyancy after harpooning, now numbers fewer than 400 in the wild. The museum's new galleries, including one called This Place Called Hull, also explore the city's identity and its ties to poet Philip Larkin, set against a backdrop of docklands still recovering from wartime damage and economic decline.