Liverpool, My Home Town

by Peter Bolderson

Does ethical tourism require one to merge into the background and leave other cultures unaffected? If so, then Liverpool is no exception. If a Scouser gives you any service, then 'tis they who have done a great favour and it is you who should be truly grateful. Realisation and acceptance of local custom will solve all problems.

The two cathedrals are a great landmark, keeping an uneasy balance on the seesaw of Hope Street. The brutalist one was built in the early 60s when I went to the nearby College of Bricks. It was a required visit. The column reinforcement was so dense, there was difficulty getting the concrete to go around the steel. Scousers quickly christened it "The Rocket to God" or alternatively, "Paddy’s Wigwam". The other one is a magnificent neo-Gothic creation on an heroic scale, a hundred years in the building but begging the question, "why build it here?"

In the 1960s on July 12th the place was indistinguishable from Belfast. Not now, though. Phew!

Birkenhead, sometimes called the one-eyed city, does have a gem in Hamilton Square amongst otherwise nondescript buildings. But Birkenhead Park was the pattern for Central Park, NY. I left my home town in the late sixties for "the smoke" at the height of Beatle Mania. There, I was greeted with, "but you don't talk like them". "No, I don't," was my response," and neither did they!" It's one of the affectations of our time.

When I lived there, Scouse "as it is Spoke" was only spoken in a relatively confined quarter of the town, known in geo-political terms, as Exchange Ward. When I next returned, about twelve years later, the Council had B52'd Exchange Ward while my back was turned, decanting its luckless inhabitants to peripheral estates. One might expect this to have diluted the dialect, but to my astonishment, it had infected most parts of the body like some unmentionable disease. The place has never been the same since; in fact, it spreads ever wider, bolstered by an introverted pride and an endless soap opera.

Lennon, I only knew because we went to the same school where he was a complete pain in the ****. He was certainly completely unaware of me, being three years younger. I well recall looking after the stage lighting for a Prefects' dance in my fourth year when we had The Quarrymen performing. This was Lennon's embryo; a lookalike of Lonnie Donnegan's skiffle band - acoustic guitars, washboard, tea-chest and broom-stick bass, and a handful of kettle drums. Any notion of what was to follow was inconceivable then. Our teachers or parents would have had us certified for having such far-fetched aspirations. In fact, Lennon's broken background was probably his release.

At the time Penny Lane created no upwelling for me; it was just an inconvenient node where one had to change buses. Thanks for the shelter because it was usually raining. I didn't live in that part of the city whereas most of the Beatles did. Clearly, they saw it only on other days. And Strawberry Fields was, I think, wartime vegetable allotments, falling into patchy disuse. If only I had had their imagination!

Slavery is only half the story of the growth and decline of Liverpool. Unrelated colonial trading was the other, which persisted right into the seventies. Modest and enterprising people grew into rich and powerful shipping families over the years and then mostly departed to more amenable climes, leaving their companies to carry on. A blot, yes - but, before we atone too much, it should be remembered that the slave trade had been established for thousands of years across Africa before we became involved.

In the fifties, there used to be an overhead railway on the Chicago pattern which ran the full length of the docks; about 14 miles. This was a great treat for us children since, from it, you could look down into every dock where ships from the Americas and the Far East crowded the quays in an exotic display of colour. All gone now; through changing trade patterns and containerisation.

Liverpool also has a number of gems not mentioned. St. George's Hall; a masterpiece of neo-Grecian-Roman architecture à la Parthenon with a famous mosaic that is only uncovered now and then (in case it gets nicked); the Walker Art Gallery and the adjacent museum, the Tate of the North in the Albert Dock - if it is still there! The Victorian shipping families may have departed, but they left a grand legacy.

Nearly twenty years ago, I scoffed at a councillor who suggested tourism as the City's saviour. I'm not ready to eat humble pie yet, but...

First published in VISA issue 44 (winter 2001)