Liverpool Rising

Liverpool Rising

By Torcuil Crichton (Sunday Herald 26/02/08)

The city that spawned the Beatles is hoping the arts can once again breathe life into its passionate heart

WITH EACH tide, the Irish Sea covers the iron-clad men, some of them already half-buried in the rippling sands, and then reveals them anew. They create an immediate sense of company, of belonging, on what would otherwise be a bleak shoreline. The distant thump of heavy machine-gun fire from the army range further up the coast, and the dawn mist in the estuary, add to the surreal atmosphere.

"Someone's stolen the sea today," says Cook, straightening his back and making a stab at the trademark Liverpudlian humour. The high blades of Burbo Bank offshore wind farm can just be seen, poking through the fog. Cook, a plasterwork restorer, loves being by the sea. He likes the feeling of freedom and possibility that the coast gives him. "That's Wales down there," he says. "Beyond that is Ireland and then you don't stop until America."

It takes a while - several visits, in fact - for Liverpool to click, but in that sentence, the beachcomber has captured the essence of the place. Like the iconic Liver Building at Albert Docks, Gormley's statues look to the horizon, to Ireland and the Atlantic: the two huge influences on the city. That combination, that ebb and flow across the sea, shaped Liverpool into the least English of England's cities. To understand Liverpool you have to acknowledge that Britain, for the most part, lies to the east of it.

Liverpool and its inhabitants have a tricky reputation. Poverty-stricken, mawkish, bolshy, mongerel-rooted, whiplash-witty, aggressively proud and criminally selfish are just some of the stereotypes Scousers delight in playing up to. The place has produced some of the most brilliantly creative people the country has seen - great artists, musicians, actors and writers. Like that other port city, Glasgow, did in 1990, Liverpool is trying to use the arts as a springboard for reinvention in the 21st century.

After years of internal feuding, Liverpool's City of Culture celebrations kicked off earlier this month with a street party and a city centre performance of Liverpool - The Musical, with Ringo Starr topping the bill. A programme of more than 350 events is planned for the coming year, including the Tall Ships race and the National Ballet of China performing on Merseyside. Paul McCartney is to play at Anfield in June, the Turner Prize is in town and the party has begun.

Phil Redmond, the Brookside creator drafted in to quell the artistic fratricide, said it was typical of Liverpool, like a dysfunctional family, to start with the recriminations and end with a glorious knees-up. More than £100 million has been ploughed into the festival, which will, hopefully, bring more than two million visitors to Liverpool and boost the economy of a city still blighted by long-term unemployment and deprivation.

You could never fall easily for this city of concrete flyovers, bisecting carriageways and avenues of boarded-up houses. Despite the attentions of post-war planners, it retains glorious architectural monuments to a wealthy past: the Georgian inheritance of empire, the grandiose Victorian pubs and shops and a waterfront worthy of its world heritage status.

It also has a still-working dock area. Before walls were built out into the Mersey in 1715 to control the huge tidal fall, Liverpool was a fishing shantytown. "That's how it began and quickly after that, Liverpool overtook Bristol and London as the leading player in the slave trade," explains David Fleming, director of the National Museums Liverpool, an expert in the place's history. "The city was cranked up on the back of slavery but it really became mega-wealthy on industrialisation and empire. Every time something came in or out of Britain, Liverpool made money."

The 20th century delivered shock therapy, first from bombing raids, then the disappearance of the Atlantic shipping trade. The end of empire and Britain's focus on Europe - coupled with the city's own demented determination not to change - sealed its demise. Liverpool went from being one of the richest places of the country to one of the most deprived. Can the arts reverse that decline?

LIVERPOOL is home to an international biennal: a festival of contemporary art. It has its own Tate gallery and Philharmonic Orchestra. But poverty is unavoidable here, which explains the emphasis on ensuring that the year of culture embraces Liverpool's entire population. "I walk out of my front door and if I go in one direction I pass the homes of judges and lawyers," says Professor Drummond Bone, a garrulous Scot who is vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool and also sits on the board of the culture company that delivered the festival. "If I go the other way, I come to a chemist with a sign asking people to arrive for their methadone before 9.30am."

Sipping a pint in one of the city's great pubs, he ruminates on how little distinction there is between poverty and wealth in the city, and on the lessons learned from his experience of Glasgow's city of culture. "People here have a sense of things belonging to them from the very beginning," says Bone. "They do feel they own the city and anything that goes on in it, including a cultural agenda."

Locals refer to Toxteth now as L8, an ironic reference to the postcode cachet encapsulated in other metropolitan districts, such as Dublin's D4 or Glasgow's G11. Underneath, it is still the same old Toxteth, but not quite as menacing as during the riots that shook Britain during the 1980s.

In this part of town, Fact, an independent film theatre that nestles in the now trendy Ropeworks area, has been involved in a community television project. Tenantspin is, as it says on the tin, no ordinary television station. It allows the inhabitants of the high-rise blocks surrounding the Sefton Park community centre access to their own studio, and pipes their discussions, interviews and ceilidhs into each other's homes. The contributors, like Margo Hogg, who was a professional cabaret singer until she retired in 1991, are priceless.

Dolly Lloyd, a well-known Liverpudlian community activist, is also involved in Fact's community programme. Talking, which is often mistaken for a profession in Liverpool, is what she's about. "I get all nostalgic for what we had," admits the oral historian. "Things are better, but don't be fooled. There's still loads of poverty in this city."

Back on Crosby beach, the Gormley sculptures bear witness to another example of Liverpudlians' ambivalent relationship with art. The local council in Sefton wanted to get rid of the statues, and it took a citizens' uprising to persuade them otherwise. Now it looks like the sentinels will stay there for the time being. People vandalise the statues and adorn them with Liverpool or Everton tops, but the sea repairs them and equalises the score. It says a lot for the memory of David Sheppard, the late Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, and the ecumenical efforts in the city, that you might have to ask twice to know which of the football teams is Catholic and which one Protestant. Despite the architectural frisson of two cathedrals overlooking the city - one a Gothic Anglican cartoon and the other a modernist Catholic science fiction fantasy - Liverpool has little of the sectarian politics that bedevil other places.

Football kept the city alive in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Beatles were just a memory and politics and the economy were going down the pan. Between them, Liverpool's two teams - Everton and Liverpool - make this the most successful sporting city in England, sharing 27 league championships and shelves of European trophies. The Hillsborough tragedy and Heysel Stadium disaster represent the flipside of a footballing legend: two grotesque turns in history that caused the city to bare its emotional soul, something that always leaves the rest of the country feeling uncomfortable.

How do you define a city's cultural identity? In Liverpool, you start with the wholesale Irish immigration that began in the1840s. Before the influx of Irish, and Welsh, people in Liverpool spoke like natives of Chorley in Lancashire. Mixing boatloads of Irish and Lancastrians in a booming city that ate up the poor in a rush for profit is what created the Scouse accent. The inheritance is there in that distinctive nasal sound that distinguishes a Liverpudlian wherever in the world you find them. It's there in the names of the city's heroes - Gerrard and Rooney and Lennon and McCartney. (Harrison and Starkey - later changed to Starr - had Irish connections too.) There are other influences, whose traces can still be found in the long-established Chinese community, and in streets that bear the names of Welsh valleys left behind generations ago.

The distinctive Liverpudlian character that resulted exhibits itself in a peculiarly un-British kind of behaviour. "There is a lot of empty rhetoric about Liverpool's identity but behind that there a lot of emotional truth, too," says Mike Stubbs, the director of Fact. "People do identify with the place. They all feel they're in it together."

Sometimes, these binds manifest themselves in the most prosaic way. The city's evening newspaper, The Liverpool Echo, carries an inordinate number of death notices and memorium columns. The tributes, carefully penned and paid for, underline the fact that each of these people mattered, demonstrating a sense of belonging almost completely gone from other cities.

Sometimes, yes, the city can wallow in its own misery, but as Boris Jonhson discovered, it doesn't take kindly to being told that. "Some poor guy gets his head cut off on video and Liverpool takes it personally, I don't see anything wrong with that myself," says taxi driver Peter Clancey, referring to the death of murdered hostage Ken Bigley.

For a price, Clancey offers me an alternative tour of the city, taking in the parts Charles Dickens knew, and which come alive at night with crack dens and vice. Here, on the opening night of the City of Culture celebrations, an hour after Ringo Starr had set out Liverpool's stall to the world, shots rang out. Two men were wounded in a gang dispute but as the survivors are unwilling to co-operate with the police the crime will remain unsolved. The same wall of silence greeted police, the "bizzies", when they investigated the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Croxteth five months ago.

Phil Redmond, the creative chairman of the Culture Company, talks of an oppositional culture in the city, an irreverence for authority, which means Liverpool doesn't really care what the rest of the world thinks. That stubborn self-identity has created some peculiar politics in the city. In the 1980s while Britain was re-electing Margaret Thatcher, Liverpool chose Militant, the hard left, to run the city, with disastrous results but a strange cultural outcome.

When Margaret Thatcher abolished England's large metropolitan county councils, their functions, and their valuable arts collections, were due to be transferred to municipal authorities. Derek Hatton, the Militant city council leader, promised to sell Liverpool's unrivalled museum collection and build council houses if the treasures fell into his hands. In response, the Thatcher government nationalised the museums. As a result, one of Britain's best municipal collections is also one of the best-funded.

Behind the Corinthian columns of the city's Walker Gallery and World Museum, David Fleming is laying plans for the new £70 million Liverpool Museum: the biggest to be built in Britain in a century.

Squinting against the rare winter sunlight that streams into his office, Fleming argues, along with almost everyone in this city, that the Beatles could only have come from Liverpool. "Granted they contained two, maybe three geniuses, in their number but it was no accident that these lads came from this city," says Fleming. "They couldn't have come from Leeds. In Leeds not every house had a piano, or sailors coming back from the States with vinyl records with the latest Buddy Guy music."

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cunnard Yanks, as Liverpool sailors were called, came home weighed down with American music that was not available in London. The influence of emerging rock music was felt in the Cavern Club long before it hit Carnaby Street, and that is what shaped the most critically acclaimed group in the history of popular music.

Liverpool may be pivotal to popular culture, but the amazing thing about the city is that it never seemed overawed by the Beatles' phenomenal success. There was tons of talent waiting to follow them down the runway to fame, from Cilla Black to Echo And The Bunnymen.

The Beatles legacy is unavoidable in the city. The homes of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison are museums. But one house - that of Ringo Starr - is lived in, and defiantly protected by, his former neighbour, Margaret Grose.

Outside the anonymous terraced house on Admiral Grove, children are playing swords with giant carpet tubes. But they all know who once lived here. Inside the small front room, an Elvis Presley wall clock is front and centre, just to reinforce the point that Grose was never really a Beatles fan. The timepiece is surrounded by photos and clippings tracing the life of Starr and his connection back to Admiral Grove. "These are portraits of my friends. I don't suppose you know Cilla Black?" says the elderly Grose, pointedly directing attention away from the former Beatle. She is in a curmudgeonly mood and feeling snubbed by Starr. "I am disgusted with Ringo, just disgusted," she says. "He was in the city for that opening and he never even bothered to come here. He goes on that he loves Liverpool and writes songs about it, but he's never been here to see the work I've put in for him. Well, he can just stick his record."

Outside, the streetlights are coming on and the kids are being chased away by a neighbour. This city might be able to produce cultural legends, but it seems that Liverpool will never let anyone forget what they owe the place.

Do you think this piece sums up the City well or not?