Professor Graham Chesters was a university colleague of Larkin’s and is Vice Chairman of the Philip Larkin Society. Larkin is linked in the national consciousness with the city of Hull, which he called ‘the town that lets you write,’ although after his appointment as the University Librarian in 1955 he had little good to say about the place. From 1958 onwards, he began to find a rich vein of urban inspiration in the architecture, people and parks of the city and something special in its isolation and surrounding countryside. This talk looks also at how Hull has responded to the iconic legacy of the poet.