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Chris Maynard's interest in music began at the age of ten. Chris comes from a family of well-known fruiterers and vegetable merchants in the city of Hull. His father returned home one day clutching a violin, telling Chris, that he didn't want to him selling cabbages for the rest of his life and to take music lessons. He was suitably sent off to work with music tutor Marjorie Percival to learn his instrument. He showed enough promise to be sent to music college in Glasgow to continue his studies.

There, he studied under James Durrant, a viola player and member of the Scottish National Orchestra. He later returned to Hull and to the Youth Orchestra and says he was fortunate enough to be appointed as a senior instrumental teacher to begin with and eventually became head of Hull's Music Service.

In his early days he played with the Hull Youth Orchestra and the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra. He also played in orchestras supporting local amateur dramatic society productions in the area.

Chris is keen to highlight the success of people who have learned and studied music in Hull. Stuart Calvert from the city is currently the associate musical director of the London production of Mamma Mia!

Another famous student is Gay Yee Westerhoff who is now with the classical music group 'Bond'. She featured in one of the quartets that Chris taught in the late 1980s and 1990s and Chris is proud of the fact she played at his wedding.

When Hull's original Albemarle Centre was demolished to make way for the new St. Stephen's development, the replacement centre was to far exceed Chris's expectations. Unique in concept, the music centre was to be given pride of place amongst the retail shops and the transport interchange in the heart of the city.

Excited by the project, the architects employed by the developers relished the challenge of giving the city something out of the ordinary in the design of the building. Its funnel shape design called on all their talents to build something pleasing and yet at the same time acoustically satisfying. Ferensway is a huge traffic artery through the city centre and it was important the musicians inside were isolated from the noise outside, something the architects were able to do with its design.

Chris says the centre far outweighed his expectations of what they were hoping to achieve when they had to move out during the build. He's impressed with the way Hull supports its musical ambitions and hopes that in the future student numbers will swell from the current three to four thousand to around 10,000.