OCEAN DEEP.

A museum devoted to the oceans is intended to help revitalize what was the world's greatest fishing port.

Once, Kingston upon Hull was the greatest fishing port in the world and Britain's largest shipbuilding city. Because of the natural decline of fish stocks (and an absurd series of decisions taken about European fishing policy by successive Conservative governments), the place has deteriorated. Perhaps it was never wonderful architecturally or in terms of urban form, but it was vigorous, and the birthplace of William Wilberforce, the English MP who got Parliament to outlaw slavery in the British Empire in 1807 and set in train one of the greatest world convulsions of the nineteenth century.

The Deep is proposed as an urban regeneration scheme, a welcome project which will radiate energy into the somewhat forlorn city. (Coincidentally, the place has become much less desperate recently, since Hull's telecommunications company, in which the city has a large stake, has become one of the largest 100 companies in Britain.) At Sammy's Point, the crucial confluence of the little river Hull and the huge mouth of the Humber through which Yorkshire drains into the North Sea, the new centre is to be a complex organism, built on a desert site. An icon was asked for, and that is what the citizens are to be given by Terry Farrell & Partners. It is to be a place to visit, an educational and research resource.

The architects talk about an evolving morphology. A huge prismatic monolith is supposed to have emerged: a mass of rock bearing a crystal (which becomes a look-out point for views over the rivers and the great bridge over the Humber). Metaphorically, the mass is supposed to have been eroded by time and weather, so revealing its strata, and allowing openings to be created for access and light. Metaphors continue inside, where the spaces are supposed to have been influenced by the nature of the ocean: surging, fluid, changing as you move round, non directive, with a life of their own.