Public Art is Dead. Long Live Culture.

Ed Williams

Fifteen years have elapsed since Liverpool was honoured with the title European Capital of Culture, and with the help of constant repetition, the city’s status as a ‘Cultural City’ has been cemented within the popular consciousness, at least locally, if not always universally. But what, if anything, does this accolade mean today? And how do we stop it being just a meaningless marketing label, presuming it was ever more than that to start off with?

Culture, or at least a certain type of culture, is like universal health care and compulsory education often viewed as an indisputable social good – a life enhancer that with official state sanction became a defining feature of Britain’s Post-War project to improve the lives of its population. But culture is an elusive quarry - challenging to define, let alone to quantify within a framework of metrics. Unlike healthcare, culture does not ‘treat’ or ‘heal’ in a way that lends itself to spreadsheet evaluation.  Nevertheless, a consensus of bien pensantism has coalesced around the importance of culture, invariably focusing less on its intrinsic and frustratingly wishy-washy, hard to define benefits and more on its ability to generate economic returns – something our civic leaders and purse-string holders can feel confident about putting on a press release. As a result, we’ve all become familiar with hearing how some new cultural initiative will add value to the local economy increase visitor spend, improve hotel occupancy rates, and create and sustain those all-important X number of jobs. We understand why these arguments predominate, but accusations of philistinism aside, the true purpose of culture seems to lie elsewhere.

These statistics, often quoted as culture’s most manifest benefit, highlight a fundamental point. In Britain’s post-industrial society, culture is increasingly what economic output looks like. The service sector is the prime employer, and culture is a branch of this sector. That’s why the leaders of our cultural institutions increasingly seem to resemble business men and women rather than merely champions of the arts. Or at least, they certainly have to moderate their artistic passions behind drier, more utilitarian language. The managers of a museum or art gallery may have more in common with that of a hotel or restaurant than is perhaps initially recognised, being equally concerned as they are with customer satisfaction, visitor throughput and money spent.

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“A consensus of bien pensantism has coalesced around the importance of culture, focusing less on its intrinsic and frustratingly wishy-washy, hard to define benefits and more on its ability to generate economic returns.”

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What one could colloquially call the ‘Cultural Economy’ argument may then explain the need among those, both in government and in the arts, to continually re-iterate the significance of Liverpool’s cultural status. After all, if we weren’t so economically desperate, perhaps there would be more willingness to talk about culture in its own terms and less need to worry about the financial side-benefits? In the absence of much else to shout about, continuously asserting the city’s cultural status becomes a proxy for saying we’re still here, we’re still relevant, we still have a future. It’s also jolly useful for any politicians keen to show they are making good decisions in a challenging environment.

Despite this, the inquisitive might well ask if this is all there is to ‘Culture? Is there anything beyond the reductivism of the bottom line? And if there is, how do we gauge it?

Beyond hosting prestigious events such as the recent Eurovision Song Contest Final, more recent efforts to assert Liverpool’s cultural status appear to focus on the commissioning of works of public art, such as Alicja Biala’s Merseyside Totemy (2022) and, more recently, those unveiled as part of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, including Rudy Loewe’s The Reckoning (2023) and Nicholas Galanin’s Threat Return (2023). These totemic pieces, no pun intended, now seemingly serve as cultural barometers through which our city’s cultural status appears to be discerned. Behold people of Liverpool, this is culture!

Black Power. Exploring ‘hot’ issues in inoffensive ways. Rudy Loewe, The Reckoning, 2023. Photograph by Rob Battersby, courtesy of Liverpool Biennial.

The result of this approach is an ever-increasing amount of public art on display. Whilst prima facie positive, the fact remains that the burgeoning number of works is so great, it is becoming an increasing challenge to maintain an accurate count; and to attend to their continued preservation and maintenance. But then maintenance no longer seems to be part of the brief.

Instead, in an Age of Austerity, public art is commissioned, paid for, put on display for a short time, and there the liability typically ends, with the item often all too swiftly packed up and removed to some mysterious warehouse/bonfire in the sky as if it never really existed – outside of a few pictures on the internet. This is Art transformed into fast moving consumer goods, less a vision for the ages cast in marble and more a plastic bag flapping in the wind. This hard-nosed economic reality may well explain why so many of the recent commissions have only a temporary status within the city. For example, as things stand, Alicja Biala’s Merseyside Totemy will be removed at some point in 2024.

Could this new approach to a work’s lifespan be a consequence of the fact that older pieces have been left to their own devices? Betty Woodman’s Liverpool Fountain (2016) looks to be in a forlorn state, with water flowing only occasionally. Stephen Broadbent’s beautiful and powerful Reconciliation (1) (1990) is blighted by the twin plagues of graffiti and adhesive stickers.

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“In an Age of Austerity, public art is all too swiftly packed up and removed to some mysterious warehouse/bonfire in the sky as if it never really existed. This is Art transformed into fast moving consumer goods, less a vision for the ages cast in marble and more a plastic bag flapping in the wind.”

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A cynic might surmise that this is an attempt to manifest ‘culture on the cheap’, far removed from the initial spirit with which Public Art was originally conceived in the immediate Post-War period. These works from the 1950s and early 1960s, originating at a time of greater optimism, represented egalitarian attempts to bring art to the wider public, away from the confining and often restrictive environs of museums and galleries. Typically, it was art designed to uplift the spirits. This was how the work of Moore, Hepworth, Epstein and Paolozzi, amongst others, became better known and appreciated by the non-gallery attending public. It was this zeitgeist of civic ambition and new hope that Jacob Epstein sought to depict in his iconic Liverpool Resurgent (1956) which still stands proudly defiant above the main entrance of the former Lewis’ department store. Later works such as Richard Huws’ cheerful kinetic sculpture, the Piazza Fountain(1967), more commonly known as the ‘Bucket Fountain’, were attempts to create a sense of place in an otherwise rather anonymous space. This second generation of works, beginning in the late 1960s, were also conceived as catalysts for development, particularly during the economic dark days of the 1980s and 1990s. They may be considered as examples of the role of public art in regenerating neighbourhoods and communities. Superlative pieces such as Charlotte Meyer’s Sea Circle (1984) and Tony Cragg’s Raleigh (1986) are stand out examples of British Postmodern sculpture at its best.

Cryptic. Visualising climate data to make it ‘accessible’. But can you trigger a conversation if no-one knows what you are talking about? Alicja Biala, Merseyside Totemy, 2022. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial & Liverpool BID Company. Photograph: Ed Williams.

In more recent years, works have been commissioned by various bodies, including the Liverpool Biennial and Liverpool BID Company. Such is the abundance of these new works it would appear each year heralds at least one new unveiling. But is this merely art for art’s sake? Or does this reflect a wider desire to decorate the city with public art and thereby turn the urban environment into an open air gallery of temporary works? Whatever the motivation, the result appears to be a confusing array of pieces, revealed with some fanfare and then seemingly allowed to decay through neglect or indifference.  The casual observer could be excused for concluding that Liverpool is a city where public art comes to die, discarded and left as litter like so many broken domestic appliances. Is this seeming lack of care evidence of a wider malaise within Liverpool’s cultural sector? Is it a failure to fully appreciate that a cultural legacy necessitates ‘after care’? Or does it merely reflect a changing view of art as temporary and disposable? Perhaps we no longer feel able to commit to ideas in the same way – our art like our views increasingly contingent and subject to new interpretations.  Are older works, such as Carlos Cruz-Diez’ Induction Chromatique a Double Frequence pour L’Edmund Gardner Ship (2014) – that remarkable dazzle ship - now mere historic footnotes? Having been re-painted, all that remains of Carlos’ work is a small weather beaten placard. I can’t help wondering whether our seemingly endless obsession with the ever elusive avant garde, makes consideration of the established, the old and the familiar now anathema?

This focus on the temporary and the cheap may be the avowed intention of those who commission Liverpool’s contemporary public art, but a critical eye cast over recent works would conclude that they offer little to truly spark the imagination. These pieces provide not the ‘shock of the new’, but rather a dull blandness, resulting in a series of indifferent works which seemingly seek to please only the passing tourist and the selfie hunter. Consider for a moment, Ugo’s Liverpool Mountain, a vertically stacked tower of candy coloured stone blocks placed prominently at the Albert Dock. Whilst initially amusing, and you could argue eye-catching against the uniformity of the dock’s red-brick warehouses, it hardly moves one to further contemplation. But perhaps more importantly in a clear nod to modern sensibilities, neither does it offend anyone. This is Art as Entertainment. Seen, consumed and then forgotten.

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“The dissonance between the pretensions of the explanatory labels and the works themselves is a gaping chasm. Alicja Biala’s sculptures are supposedly an attempt to visualise climate data, but you can’t spark a conversation if no-one knows what you are talking about.”

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Even commissions which claim to have a more intellectually challenging agenda often fall short. The current Liverpool Biennial includes pieces which address hot button concerns such as race relations, social inequality and climate change, but these works only explore these issues in the most convoluted or inoffensive ways, often leaving the viewer unengaged, bemused or, at best, just happy to have themselves photographed next to a decorative work. The dissonance between the pretensions of the explanatory labels and the works themselves is a gaping chasm. Alicja Biala’s 2022 piece, Merseyside Totemy is a case in point. Only by reading the artist’s explanation or some earnest review in the nationals could you guess at the message. These sculptures are supposedly an attempt to visualise climate data, which we are told can often seem too ‘academic and theoretical’. But au contraire – they are the very example of clarity compared to these cryptic albeit pretty land buoys. You can’t spark a conversation if no-one knows what you are talking about.

Eleng Luluan’s, Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, 2023 is highly decorative but does it challenge the mind? Photograph by Ed Williams.

Rudy Loewe, The Reckoning, 2023 is another example of an attempt to make a serious point in an inoffensive way. Rudy’s original work was a far more powerful meditation on the injustices of British colonialism and a celebration of the 1970 Black Power Trinidadian Revolution. Yet this Biennial piece with its pink, orange and cyan stilt walkers just looks ‘funny’. But perhaps the award for the least engaging work should go to Eleng Luluan with her Ngialibalibade to the Lost Myth, 2023. According to the official spiel, ‘Ngialibalibade’ describes ‘the growth of life, the transformation of the soul, the change in nature, the rapid development of technology, the noticeable changes in life, or the subtle ones hiding in our hearts.’ Make of that what you will. It’s claimed the work has something to do with landslides in Taiwan and their power to upend ‘culture’. Though why culture rather than life should be emphasised is curious.  Either way, its pottery jar made of fishing nets is remarkable more for its decorative qualities than its ability to provoke meditation on humanity’s relationship with nature. Still, at least it helps to mitigate the torpor elicited by the architecture of Princess Dock.

Surely culture must mean more than this? If the power of art stems from its ability to move, provoke or encourage us, then it must do more than merely act as decoration. Does this malign trend towards the banal and the superficial herald the craven surrender of those in leadership roles within the city’s cultural institutions to eliminate the alleged activism of art? Is this a reaction to the supposed ‘culture wars’ so obsessively reported on by the political right?  Or can public art now only ever be commissioned if it is considered ‘safe’, inoffensive, and non-challenging?  A small number of indifferent pieces may be forgiven, but the sheer abundance of such bland works seems anathema to the professed aims of public art.

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“Perhaps we no longer feel able to commit to ideas in the same way – our art like our views increasingly contingent and subject to new interpretations.”

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Forlorn. Betty Woodman, Liverpool Fountain, 2016. “The casual observer could be excused for concluding that Liverpool is a city where public art comes to die.” Photograph by Ed Williams.

I challenge those that cling to the illusion, with respect to public art, that ‘more is more’ in perpetuating Liverpool’s status as a ‘Cultural City’. Just as the European Union’s ever expanding list of cultural capitals – now an increasingly unexclusive club of 78 - tends to devalue the idea of the exceptional, so Liverpool must pay greater heed to what is valuable or risk swamping the quality it does possess in a sea of disposable superficiality. Or worse, lose its ability altogether to distinguish between what is good and what is not. If it is to be more than just an empty slogan, being a cultural capital should act as a rallying call to better appreciate the truly wonderful works we have and to consider commissioning pieces which truly reflect the dynamic power of art.

This is not an argument for ‘less is more’ – rather an entreaty to maintain the important works of public art that we already possess and to focus new commissions on truly ground breaking and lasting works for the people of Liverpool.  This should be the real legacy of our City of Culture status.

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Ed Williams is an Academic Art Historian who works for TATE Liverpool in the Visitor Experience team. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and he teaches the History of Art at the University of Liverpool. 

Ed is currently running a 5-week course at the University of Liverpool entitled 'How to Understand Art' starting in October 2023. For more details on enrolment click here.

Main image: Ugo Rondinone, Liverpool Mountain (2018). Photograph by Ed Williams.

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Eurovision 2023: Liverpool’s Imperfect Pitch

Jon Egan

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Amidst the near-universal jubilation at Liverpool’s successful bid to stage Eurovision, I struggled to suppress an almost inchoate feeling of dissident cynicism. Is the European Capital of Culture now pitching its future identity on an ambition to be the European Capital of Light Entertainment?

Liverpool is a perfect fit for Eurovision we are told by the bid’s architects and cheerleaders, though this natural synergy with an event that was until very recently derided as a festival of musical mediocrity is at the very least an arguable proposition. No disrespect to Sonia (creditable second) and Jemini (nul points), but they are rarely name-checked when the city intones the sacred litany of its popular music icons. As travel writer and destination expert, Chris Moss opined in his recent Daily Telegraph article; “From Echo and the Bunnymen to The Farm, from The Mighty Wah to The Lightning Seeds, pop and rock culture in Liverpool has always been anti-establishment, iconoclastic and often disdainful of national media-driven circuses."

I’m old enough to associate the Eurovision Song Contest (as it was called once upon a time) with Katie Boyle, a BBC stalwart and actress whose deft professionalism and elegant gentility made her a perfect fit as TV host for an earlier incarnation of the continent’s festival of song.

I’m not quite old enough, however, to remember, what is now my favourite ever Eurovision-winning performance, France Gall’s weirdly off-key rendition of Serge Gainsbourg’s ironic masterpiece, Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son. Yes, there was irony at Eurovision long before Conchita Wurst or the knock-about stage-Irish buffoonery of the late Sir Terry Wogan.

Eurovision’s durability is doubtless its capacity to adapt to the changing mores of social convention and popular culture, not to mention the seismic disruptions to the boundaries and very identities of its competing nations. Which of course, takes us to 2023 and a Eurovision overshadowed by the tragedy of war in Ukraine. So it’s time for me to swallow my cynicism and recognise that this Eurovision is more than a celebration of blissful superficiality. Eurovision, which was conceived as an event to help bring a war-ravaged continent back together, has rediscovered a higher purpose and it’s up to us to deliver it.

There are already some encouraging signs. Claire McColgan and her team are planning an events programme that will celebrate Ukrainian culture in its many guises and remind the watching millions why this is happening here and not there. Liverpool’s Cabinet Member for Culture, Councillor Harry Doyle, told a gathering of stakeholders that he’s open to ideas about how the city can derive the maximum benefit and the most enduring legacy from next year’s Eurovision. So, if Harry wants my two penn’orth worth, here goes.

Whilst researching an article for the Daily Post sometime in the run-up to the European Capital of Culture, I asked David Chapple, a former Saatchi & Saatchi creative and regular visitor to the city, how he would market Liverpool. His answer was stark and challenging -“Stop telling people what they already know, surprise them!”  I’m not sure that we have ever managed to live up to David’s exhortation. As Chris Moss warns, there is a danger that by claiming a perfect fit with an event that “mistakes kitsch for cool” we may simply be reinforcing a narrow and trivialised perception of Liverpool’s cultural brand. Moss, born and bred in neighbouring St Helens, believes that a city that should be the UK's foremost cultural destination is committing another branding "blunder" (having tossed away its World Heritage Status) by claiming an almost umbilical affinity with what he provocatively dismisses as a "naff, brainless extravaganza."

Moss's rhetoric may be extravagant, but there is more than a kernel of truth in the proposition that we have consistently failed to articulate and market the breadth and quality of our cultural offer. Ensuring Eurovision simply doesn't serve to reinforce a constraining stereotype, has to be a guiding imperative.

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“There is a danger that by claiming a perfect fit with an event that “mistakes kitsch for cool” we may simply be reinforcing a narrow and trivialised perception of Liverpool’s cultural brand.”

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So rather than being the perfect fit, let’s set out to design an imperfect fit. Let’s confound expectations, stretch the envelope and deliver a gathering that offers more than the “glitter and sparkle” that Doyle describes as the essence of Eurovision, but also explores what he terms (somewhat vaguely) “the added layer of Europe.”

I’m certain that Harry, Claire and their team are sincerely committed to ensuring Liverpool’s Eurovision acknowledges the wider European and specific Ukrainian context, although the confectionary metaphor suggests an application of icing rather than an especially bespoke cake mix. Surely now more than ever the “added layer” is the essence.

Returning to David Chapple and his urgings to surprise, the challenge to Liverpool would be how do we stage and wrap Eurovision in a way that confounds stereotypical perceptions of the city, that expands and subverts expectations while revealing a facet of unsuspected seriousness and cultural depth? Given the unique circumstances of this gathering, it seems like an appropriate juxtaposition to pitch the exuberant excess of Eurovision with a broader conversation and cultural exploration of the event's unsettling backdrop.

Notwithstanding Joanne Anderson’s excusable hyperbole that “the eyes of the world will be on Liverpool,” Eurovision 2023 will attract enormous numbers of visitors and serious levels of media attention. Liverpool needs to embrace the opportunity, and the responsibility, to do more than simply host Europe’s ultimate carnival of camp.

Are there media partners with whom we could convene a Eurovision of Ideas - a virtual or even physical gathering of thinkers, policy-makers and artists from Ukraine, the UK and Europe to explore how the shattering reality of yet another European war can help us to forge a deeper and more durable sense of solidarity and a shared future?

Is there space to stage an expo for Ukrainian businesses including their burgeoning technology sector, to help them forge new contacts and explore new markets?

For Ukraine, Eurovision has become a symbolic staging post in a journey from isolation and the cultural suffocation of the Soviet era. This war is a painful and bloody episode within the struggle for a new cultural and economic relationship with its estranged continent. So, how do we ensure that the celebration of Ukrainian culture proposed by Claire McColgan is sufficiently resourced to be immersive and integral and not merely a quaint window dressing for the main event? Culture Liverpool is bidding for funds to deliver a European-themed cultural programme, but an email to cultural organisations inviting bids was hastily withdrawn in the absence of any definite funding commitment from Arts Council England. These are early days, but this is not a positive omen.

In a recent conversation with me, journalist and commentator, Liam Fogarty speculated that if Manchester or Glasgow were staging this Eurovision, the scale of ambition might be greater and the prospecting for partners, funders and co-creators more lateral and imaginative. He is perhaps not alone in that thought. For the first time in nearly two decades, we have been successful in a major bidding competition, but what happens when the circus leaves town? What's our pitch to ensure a positive legacy and how do we create this event in a way that shows a previously unsuspected vista of a more interesting and multi-faceted city?

This is a huge opportunity to redress the imbalance of cultural investment towards London (and even Manchester) by demanding the resources to give a platform to the diversity of a resurgent Ukrainian culture, emerging from what contemporary poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk has described as a “war of decolonisation.” At the end of the day, we’re standing in for the place that would, but for the obscene brutality of Putin’s invasion, be hosting this event. So, let’s stretch every sinew and apply every creative impulse to celebrate the identity of a nation that a deranged tyrant is seeking to wipe off the face of the map.    

And of course, we already have a connection and relationship with a Ukrainian city dating back to the early 1950s when Odesa was in the Soviet Union. In truth, Liverpool’s twinning relationship with the Black Sea port had become a largely hollow civic anachronism - a relationship long since packed away in the lumber room of municipal memorabilia. Until now, the cultural highlight of the twinning relationship was an impromptu concert by Gerry Marsden on the Potemkin Steps when the Merseybeat legend led an aid convoy after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

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“For the first time in nearly two decades, we have been successful in a major bidding competition, but what happens when the circus leaves town?”

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For Odesa, threatened with invasion and subject to merciless missile strikes, friendship and solidarity have acquired a new and vivid resonance. Steve Rotheram's ambition to make Eurovision Odesa’s “event as much as our own” is generous and laudable but it will only be honoured by a substantial financial and imaginative investment and genuinely collaborative curation.

Without prescribing what a co-created cultural programme might look like, there is massive scope for stunning and surprising collaborations. One of the many intriguing (and sadly unrealised) ideas championed by the much-maligned Robyn Archer, whose brief tenure as Creative Director for Capital of Culture 2008 marginally exceeded Liz Truss’s occupancy of 10 Downing Street, was to stage performances by the Dutch National Opera in the semi-dilapidated grandeur of Liverpool Olympia. Notwithstanding Liverpool’s uncharacteristic failure to extend our famed hospitality to the soon-to-be homeless English National Opera, we could perhaps invite Odesa’s renowned opera company to be part of our Eurovision cultural celebration in their sister city. Whether at the Empire, Olympia (or even my long cherished dream to stage opera in the epic setting of St Andrews Gardens aka the Bullring), we could at the very least promise them a performance that would not be interrupted by air raid sirens or the rumble of distant explosions.

Sharing the Eurovision limelight with Odesa must be the beginning of a longer-term commitment to work with a city still under daily Russian bombardment. Beyond cultural and humanitarian co-operation, there may be a myriad of ways in which we can assist with trade and reconstruction. Even before the damage inflicted by Russian missile and bombing strikes, Odesa's Soviet-era port infrastructure was in dire need of investment and modernisation. Through a concordat for economic co-operation between the two cities, Liverpool should be using the exposure of Eurovision to gather together and broker the expertise and potential investment partners to help Odesa recover from the trauma and devastation of the present conflict.

All this may seem too ambitious, unrealistic or even unnecessary. At the end of the day, all that’s expected of us is that we put on a show, manage the organisation with reasonable efficiency and make an appropriate gesture to recognise the special circumstances of this Eurovision.

Maximising the opportunity and legacy is an undertaking that would require a massive collaborative effort with support from the UK Government, broadcasters, and cultural institutions here and in Ukraine. But without an initiative and impulse from Liverpool it will simply not happen. The unprecedented context surrounding the hosting of Eurovision 2023 demands exceptional effort and imagination, and we will never have a more morally compelling case for partners to match rhetoric with tangible resources.

For Liverpool, to quote Liam Fogarty, we should view Eurovision as “the starting block, not the finishing line” in the process of repositioning the city, building our cultural brand and answering the fundamental question posed in Chris Moss’s Telegraph article - what does Liverpool want to be? 

Are we content to be the perfect fit, and use the Eurovision stage to repeat what the world already knows - that we’re a place that can deliver a great night out? Or will we use it to express the depth of our generosity and hospitality, the breadth of our imagination and the magnitude of our ambition?

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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The Quest For Utopia

Pauline Hadaway

When Eric Hobsbawn, one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, was invited to address the World Political Forum in 2005, almost fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he used his speech to express admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and architect of perestroika, who died last week, aged 91. Extolling the almost bloodless transition from communism to post-communism in Eastern Europe, while lamenting the social, economic and cultural catastrophe that followed, Hobsbawn proclaimed that the world had witnessed ‘the last of the utopian projects, so characteristic of the last century’.  Perhaps surprisingly, ‘the last of the utopian projects’ was not an allusion to Soviet communism, but rather to the epic triumph of Western capitalism and the associated belief that liberal democracy now represented the final, ideal mode of government.  Addressing the Forum - with its audience of political, business and cultural leaders and its impeccably utopian mission ‘to solve the crucial problems that affect humankind today’ - Hobsbawn, a lifelong Marxist, declared that it was the visions of liberal, not socialist utopias that now epitomised the triumph of hope over historical realism.

Two years ago, The Liverpool Salon discussed the economic future of the North, in the light of recently made election promises to level up forgotten towns and regions, where growth had lagged behind the prosperous Southeast. In the middle of Britain’s first national lockdown, the future looked grim, yet barely 12 weeks earlier, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak had pledged some £640 billion capital investment in roads, railways, schools, hospitals and power networks, promising that ‘no region will be left behind’. After decades promoting the values of individual responsibility, the benefits of privatisation and the evil of state handouts, was a Tory government prepared to rip up its fiscal rule book to lay the ground for a new Jerusalem in Labour’s old northern heartlands? Similarly, Manchester’s metro mayor, Andy Burnham, warned there would be no return to ‘business as usual’, now that the pandemic had exposed the gaps in social care systems and the weaknesses of the gig economy. Appealing for consensus and cooperation, Burnham called on civic leaders to get behind his strategy to ‘build back better’, based on valuing the dignity of labour and fostering mutual dependency and community support. Having grown great cities of culture from the dung of deindustrialisation, were Britain’s metro mayors ditching their enthusiasm for trickle-down economics and dreaming of a return to grass-roots socialism? The world transformed by an unlooked-for natural event is an archetypal theme in utopian – and dystopian – fiction. Were these grandiose visions of transformation to new and better ways of living, a genuine map to the future or nothing more than flights of fancy, designed to distract us all from the deepening political crisis?

Of all the grandiose political projects that emerged from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marxism, the ideological foundation of Soviet communism, made the most audacious claims – not least of which was the belief in its own historical necessity as part of the onward drive of human progress. However, communism’s grand promises of peace and freedom rang hollow during the period of Soviet communism,  which saw the creation of some of the world's most militarized and ruthless police states. The murderous tyranny of Stalin’s Great Purge saw the execution of at least 750,000 people deemed ‘enemies of the state’ with many more sent to the Siberian Gulags. After Stalin, the remaining power and authority of the Soviet system rested on its promise to harness the forces of industrial modernity to banish scarcity and ensure economic security and well-being for all. Though hard to imagine from today’s perspective, the Cold War was as much a competition over the best way to organise the future of humanity, as it was a race to build more nuclear missiles and tanks. The question of which system – capitalism or communism – offered the best means of meeting human needs was central. Looking back, the whole Cold War period abounds in paradox. At its height, and in the midst of a terrifying escalation of the arms race which threatened global nuclear annihilation, and with brutal proxy wars raging in Africa and South East Asia, populations from both sides of the Iron Curtain still maintained their belief in the possibility of peaceful international cooperation. Importantly, both sides still believed in the certainty of future material progress. At a time of rising expectations, as the world tried to put the devastation and depravities of WW2 behind it, the ideological resentments that had frozen East-West relations were simultaneously fuelling intense competition over the rival systems’ capacity to deliver cultural, educational and medical advances and to expand the bounds of knowledge and scientific exploration for – both claimed - the benefit of all mankind.

The struggle between competing visions of the future took a somewhat bizarre turn in 1959 at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, designed to display the very best in American life to a curious Russian public – in cars, homes, fashion, art,  and - that great icon of American modernity - Pepsi Cola. Against the surreal backdrop of an American model kitchen display, a heated argument erupted between US vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon boasted that capitalism had provided American steel workers with affordable homes, dish-washers and colour TVs, provoking first-secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s angry riposte:

“Is that what America is capable of, and how long has she existed? 300 years? 150 years of independence and this is her level. We haven't quite reached 42 years, and in another 7 years, we'll be at the level of America, and after that we'll go farther.”

In the shadow of a model kitchen display, US Vice-President, Richard Nixon and USSR Premier, Nikita Khrushchev debated their competing visions of the future before reporters and onlookers at the American National Exhibition (1959). Their impromptu exchange became known as the Kitchen Debate.

The fact that the Soviets were willing to host such an event might be seen as a testament to their own cultural confidence at the time.  Thirty years on from the kitchen debate, the USSR had dissolved into chaos, consigned to the dustbin of history, along with its own futuristic visions of space colonization, flying cars, jet-packs and miracle kitchens for all. Good riddance, declared hard-headed economic realists and monetarists like Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, while promptly proclaiming the triumph of their own vision of property ownership and purchasing power as the pinnacle of human happiness and freedom.

This ‘Last Utopia’ was thus conceived as the old one heaved its last, its future guaranteed within a harmonious framework of global institutions and markets, to which there could be no alternative.

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‘The impulse to imagine new lands of plenty or to yearn for a vanished golden age is as old as human civilisation. After all, what do the ancient myths of the lost island of Atlantis or of Moses leading his people to the Promised Land constitute but a sense of a better way of doing things always just beyond reach.’

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After the shock and pain, first, of the 1970s oil crisis, then of de-industrialisation, the triumph of the free market ushered in an era of abundance, as capital flowed to low-cost destinations, profits soared and cheaper imports drove up standards of living.  Falling prices and easy credit brought foreign holidays, electronic goods, luxury cars and miracle kitchens within reach of millions in western democracies and eventually to citizens in the old communist bloc and across the developing world.  The 1990s saw the return of large-scale public spending in Britain, investment in schools and hospitals and the beautification of grim post-industrial cities, like Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle. The expansion of the cultural economy stimulated new industrial activity based on media and communications, tourism, leisure and design.  From near-costless telephone calls to online streaming and advanced communication, the giveaway economy of the turn of the century even engendered – albeit briefly - a freewheeling idealism and revolutionary optimism redolent of the 1960s. The global financial crisis of 2008 revealed that the networks of markets and global supply chains holding up this brave new world were little more than a great house of cards.

Thirty years on from the end of the Cold War,  we appear to be waving a fond farewell to the promised era of abundance, and witnessing history’s rapid return.  As world leaders rub their eyes and adjust to the changed reality, it is still unclear what kind of future will finally emerge from the ruins of the old system. We seem to be approaching a new day of reckoning, when promises of peace and prosperity secured within a harmonious commonwealth of markets may prove as illusory as earlier promises of peace and freedom, begging the question: can a perfect world ever be realised?

Speculation on the ideal state goes back at least to Plato’s account of a perfectly ordered Republic ruled by philosopher-kings, while the impulse to imagine new lands of plenty or to yearn for a vanished golden age is as old as human civilisation. After all, what do the ancient myths of the lost island of Atlantis or of Moses leading his people to the Promised Land constitute but a sense of a better way of doing things always just beyond reach. However, the term utopia, only dates to the beginning of the early modern period, with Thomas More’s 1516 fictional account of the discovery of the island of Utopia, an ideal commonwealth, situated somewhere in the new world, likely southeast of Brazil. Apart from naming a whole genre of political writing and thinking, More’s Utopia brought the speculative premise of building a more perfect order closer to reality. One of the ways of making Utopia seem credible was the adoption of a prevalent form of story-telling: the returning traveller who gives an eyewitness account of a curious distant land that seems both similar, and yet more attractive, pleasing and sensibly ordered than his own.

Taking the voyages of real-life Florentine explorer, Amerigo Vespucci as its model, More’s Utopia purported to be a literal rather than allegorical account. The supposed truth of Utopia’s perfections comes with a caveat from the author that fantasies of human perfection inevitably fall apart in the encounter with reality.  While More, ever the sceptical narrator, frequently pokes fun at the absurdities of the Utopian system, the credibility of the  tale he recounts is undermined by the name he gives to his traveller: Hythloday, Greek for ‘talker of nonsense’. Indeed, the first utopia effectively demolishes the whole utopian premise. More coined the word from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere', with a nod to the almost identical Greek word eu-topos which means a ‘good place’. In other words, the ideal place that does not exist.

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‘The idealisation of a centrally organized international order, dominated by great powers, governed by a professional administration, consulting with teams of academics, lawyers, diplomats, philosophers, doctors and entrepreneurs, while keeping the masses at arms-length from political decision-making, only goes to show that one man or woman’s dream of utopia is another’s idea of hell on earth.’

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One of the most striking of Utopia’s many excellent perfections arises from the absence of private property and the abolition of money, where all things are held in ‘common to every man’. A century later, a very different vision of perfection was created in the highly technocratic Bensalemite nation depicted within Francis Bacon’s novel, New Atlantis. For the rulers of Bensalem, perfection lay in an endless expansion of knowledge and power over nature to enlarge ‘the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ The imaginary government, economy, laws, practices of war, customs and religions of More’s humanist and Bacon’s scientific utopias recognisably prefigure numerous social and economic experiments that have followed in Britain, Europe and the United States. Published 150 years after Utopia, James Harrington’s, The Commonwealth of Oceana was both an exposition of an ideal constitution and a practical guide for the government of England’s new Cromwellian republic. Those who chose to abandon England for a better life in the American colonies often did so in pursuit of their own dreams of utopia, like the seventeenth-century Puritans with their ‘city on a hill’ in Massachusetts Bay.

Having taken concrete form in the English, American and French revolutions, utopian ideals of liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness and a more harmonious order have become deeply embedded in the political psyches of men and women in the modern world. The nineteenth-century was a particularly fertile time for social experimentation, with the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen inspiring attempts to establish ideal communities in Europe and the US. Enlightened industrialists built their own ideal company towns, like Saltaire in Bradford, Merseyside's Port Sunlight and Pullman in Chicago, designed to showcase the potential beauty and order of life under industrialism capitalism.

Utopia in space. In 1975, after a study into future space colonies, Nasa commissioned a series of illustrations to imagine what they might look like. Technology and nature sat side-by-side in this doughnut-shaped structure. Rick Guidice / NASA Ames Research Center

Characteristically sceptical of utopianism, the liberals and neoliberals were latecomers to the quest for utopia.  W.E. Gladstone, the first great leader of the Liberal party, proclaimed that he would not be diverted from the task of ‘effecting great good for the people of England’ by speculating on ‘what might possibly be attained in Utopia’. By the end of the nineteenth century those sections of Liberal thought critical of the ‘false phantoms’ of imperial glory - the little Englanders and the Manchester Liberals, like Cobden and Bright - had given way to the proponents of global expansion, which saw Britain as a force for good in the world. After the horrors of the Great War, Liberal utopians contemplated a future world state, set up and led by an enlightened committee of wise and tolerant rulers, rather like the ‘voluntary nobility’ imagined by H.G. Wells in the novel, A Modern Utopia.  The idealisation of a centrally organized international order, dominated by great powers, governed by a professional administration, consulting with teams of academics, lawyers, diplomats, philosophers, doctors and entrepreneurs, while keeping the masses at arms-length from political decision-making, only goes to show that one man or woman’s dream of utopia is another’s idea of hell on earth. Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing’. When humanity lands, he went on to say, ‘it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail’. While many of the problems and imagined solutions that excited early utopian thinkers continue to perplex us, our enthusiasm for setting sail in search of new worlds has – not surprisingly – faded.

Oscar Wilde rightly observed that the realisation of utopia lies in material progress. Today, however, we seem more inclined to expect the worse, than hope for better times.  In another paradox, the triumph of capitalist democracy appears to have deepened the level of hostility towards the historical benefits it has achieved. Mass consumption is reviled as crass consumerism, manufacturing and scientific progress seen as destroyers of the planet, while popular democracy is recast as dangerous populism. Believing that history has taught us that the road to dystopias of disorder and tyranny are paved with dreams of perfection, Faustian dystopias haunt our dreams of building a better world. For new generations setting out on their own quest for utopia - at the end of the end of history - the fundamental question is not so much the possibility, but the desirability of realising a perfect world.

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Pauline Hadaway is a writer, researcher and co-founder of The Liverpool Salon, which has been hosting public discussions around philosophical, political and cultural topics on Merseyside for over seven years.

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It’s Time to Get Interesting

Jon Egan

“Manchester, hub of the industrial north” was the opening line of a 1970s TV advertisement for the Manchester Evening News. With a voice-over by the no-nonsense, northern character actor, Frank Windsor, and what looked like shaky Super 8 aerial footage of an anonymous northern cityscape, the advert spoke to the city’s deep sense of itself as the very acme of gritty, grimy northernness.

This long-forgotten televisual gem was brought to mind by a recent tweet from Liverpolitan which observed, sagely, that when Manchester Metro Mayor, Andy Burnham talks about ‘The North’, he is essentially delineating the outer boundaries of his own city’s expanding psychogeography. Under Burnham’s monarchic reign, Manchester has become the fulcrum of an aspiring northern nation. Its status as capital of the north is beyond dispute. Michael McDonough’s visionary prospectus for Liverpool’s Assembly District as a home for pan-northern regional government (beautiful and inspiring though it is) is destined to remain another sadly lamented ‘what if’. Liverpool’s own claims to northern dominance are a boat that has long since sailed and, like a great deal of our city’s historic wealth and prestige, are now securely moored at the other end of the Manchester Ship Canal.

Sorry if this sounds fatalistic and defeatist, but it’s an unavoidable truth. Manchester as regional capital has already happened and I can’t help feeling it’s actually entirely apposite. Liverpool is not, never has been and never will be the capital of the north for a very simple reason - we’re not in ‘the North.’

Let me explain. Some years ago when pitching for the brief that became the It’s Liverpool city branding campaign, my agency team and I presented an extract from a speech by then Tory Minister for Transport, Phillip Hammond. In it, he had been extolling the benefits of HS2, which he prophesied would unleash the potential of “our great northern cities.” To emphasise the point, and presumably to educate his London-centric media audience, he decided to identify these hazy and distant provincial relics that would soon benefit from an umbilical connection to London’s life-giving energy and dynamism. Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bradford and even Newcastle (which wasn’t in any way connected to the proposed HS2 network) all made it on to his list. Our pitch focussed on Liverpool’s conspicuous absence from Hammond’s litany. We weren’t (as I opined in an earlier offering to this publication) ‘on the map’. We deduced that the speech was one more piece of definitive evidence that Liverpool wasn’t considered sufficiently great to merit a mention - nor important enough to be connected to a flagship piece of national infrastructure. But on reflection, there may have been another reason for the city’s omission. Perhaps we weren’t sufficiently northern! As if the inclusion of the offending syllables liv-er-pool would have somehow derailed this Lowryesque invocation of smoke stacks, cloth caps and matchstalk cats and dogs.

Of course, we are not talking about The North as a geographic region, or even an amalgam of richly diverse sub-regions, but as a mythic construct. However, as the French philosopher and founder of semiotics, Roland Barthes, would argue, myths are always distortions, albeit with powerful propensities to overcome and subvert reality. In this sense, northernness is not merely a point on the compass - It’s a complex abstraction, a constituent part of the English psyche and self-image that has strong connecting predicates and excluding characteristics. Geography alone is not enough to discern where The North begins and which enclaves and exclaves are to be considered intrinsic to its essential terroir. Isn’t Cheshire really a displaced Home County tragically detached from its kith and kin by some ancient geological trauma?

Thus when Government Ministers or London-based media commentators pronounce on "The North" they are all too often referencing a cloudy and amorphous abstraction defined not by lines on maps, but by indistinguishable accents, bleak moorlands and monochrome gloomy townscapes, nostalgically referred to as ‘great cities’. From this perspective, northerners are seen as honest, hardworking souls, who used to make things (when things were an important source of wealth and national prestige). Though stoical and resilient, they have a tendency, every generation or so, to get a bit bolshy, at which point it becomes necessary to reassure them of their place in our national life by relocating part of a prestigious institution to a randomly selected northern location, or by staging a second-tier sporting event such as the Commonwealth Games or perhaps even placating them with some vague commitment to ‘re-balancing’.

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“When Manchester Metro Mayor, Andy Burnham talks about ‘The North’, he is essentially delineating the outer boundaries of Manchester’s expanding psychogeography.”

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Manchester has been brilliantly adept at securing for itself more than its just share of these charitably dispensed national goodies. Largely that’s through a typically northern resourcefulness and pragmatism, but also because the city has ingeniously positioned itself as a shorthand synonym for the very idea of northernness.

Peter Saville CBE, the graphic designer who art-directed Factory Records and designed their most iconic album sleeves, also created the acclaimed Original Modern branding for Manchester in 2006. A predictably beautiful piece of graphic creation, it wove a vivid palette of cotton loom colours to represent a new Manchester, that was proud of its pioneering past but wanted to take that innovative DNA to recreate itself in the 21st century. It was wildly popular, but as an exercise in “re-branding” it didn’t succeed in challenging or reframing Manchester’s perceived identity. Instead, it merely set out to transmute it into something more contemporary and serviceable. Saville's project was to dig deeper into the Manchester’s vernacular version of mythic northernness, reflecting no doubt his immersion in Factory's overtly industrial aesthetic. It’s a restatement of core northern traits and a celebration of the city’s long-established narrative - the hub of the industrial north. Manchester’s sense of modernity was less about today and more an evocation of the 19th century, when it was considered the workshop of the world. Its originality was brilliantly expressed by the historian, Asa Briggs, who described it as the “Shock City of the age” - an urban phenomenon without peer or precedent in Europe and only matched by Chicago in North America. Cut forward to the early years of the Noughties. The opening of the ill-fated Urbis project – a new ‘Museum of the City’, conceived by Justin O’Connor and designed by Ian Simpson, was a bold assertion in shining glass and steel of Manchester’s boast to have been the world's first industrial city and the birthplace of the modern age. Despite the powerful statement of brand identity, it was a hopelessly unsuccessful attraction, closing after only two years in 2004. Its director candidly admitted that this monument to the city’s inventive and industrious spirit simply “didn’t work.”

Peter Saville’s Original Modern. Despite the fresh lick of paint, Manchester’s new branding campaign was curiously backward-looking.

In my article, Vanished. The city that disappeared from the map, I suggested that one radical option for Liverpool was to stop trying to compete with its eastern twin. Instead, I argued, we could become a new kind of urban entity - a city with two poles, which pooled our joint assets and balanced the two hemispheres of human consciousness to forge a global metropolis that could re-balance Britain without needing to turn to the patronising benevolence of London. Two hundred years after the building of the world’s first inter-city railway between Liverpool and Manchester, it seemed like a plausible and timely possibility to explore. I was wrong. Not because this idea is manifestly an anathema and heresy to every patriotic Liverpolitan (except me, it seems), but because Manchester is definitively and inexorably set on its own northern trajectory (even to the point where its most creative and happening urban district is aptly branded the Northern Quarter). Unlike Liverpool, Manchester's identity is embedded in its geography, and its literal place in the world. Its compass has only one co-ordinate and it isn’t west.

So where does that leave Liverpool? If we’re not part of The North, where in the world are we? Exiled and dislocated from our northern hinterland, we are a place apart; liminal and strangely detached from mundane geography. The recent media frenzy occasioned by the booing of the national anthem by Liverpool FC fans reignited a predictably shallow rehash of the “Scouse not English" debate, with the now familiar allusions to Margaret Thatcher’s alleged but never conclusively proven project to euthanize the city, compounded by the tragic injustice of Hillsborough. But these events were not the beginning of Liverpool's estrangement from its northern and English identity and its gradual drift to the edge of otherness. When in the second half of the 19th century our “accent exceedingly rare” began to emerge as something radically different to the dialects of neighbouring Lancashire, it was disparaged as “Liverpool Irish” - a vernacular that was deemed to be both alien and inherently seditious. As late as 1958, in Basil Dearden’s film Violent Playground - a British-take on the then topical theme of “juvenile delinquency” - the Liverpool street gang, led by a youthful David McCallum, are portrayed with accents that one reviewer of the DVD release, observed, “curiously owe more to the Liffey (Dublin's river) than the Mersey.” We were quite literally being depicted as foreigners in our own country.

Struggling to find a place within the recognised cartography of northernness, with a figure and stature too grandiose for the peripheral space allotted to us, where in the world can we find a comfortable and fruitful niche? The city that disappeared from the map has only one option - find a new map!

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“Liverpool’s cultural programme is undoubtedly worthy, but how many people outside the city can name a single event, festival or programme that happens here?”

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Let’s call it the map of interesting cities - places with an ingenuity and energy that is not defined by their geography, and whose confidence and chutzpah aren’t predicated on being the capital of anywhere or anything. Cities whose identity isn’t camouflaged or submerged into anything as nebulous as a region or a point on the compass. So let’s concentrate on being seriously interesting.

It’s a mantel that fits our self-image but we need more than the costume. It’s a project that demands a script and some serious acting. I genuinely think that Liverpool is an interesting city, it’s just that for too long we have marketed ourselves on the basis of our most boring and predictable traits.

We could take our cue from Austin, Texas, a city that markets itself with the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”. It based its civic renewal project on a determination “not to be Houston.” Austin’s promotion of independent business and cutting-edge creativity made it an early poster-child for Richard Florida’s boho-city thesis that diverse, tolerant and culturally cool metropolitan regions will exhibit higher levels of economic development. But Austin’s claim to be an interesting city pre-dates the self-conscious cultivation of weirdness as a kitsch merchandising gimmick. Austin devised and delivered what is now one of the world’s most prestigious gatherings of music, film and interactive media creatives at the annual SXSW festival. It’s an object lesson on how to make space for a genuinely international and seriously ambitious cultural proposition and use it to re-position and redefine a city.

Have we really built on the exposure of 2008 to deliver an internationally recognised programme of cultural events? For all the self-congratulatory posturing, Liverpool’s cultural programme is undoubtedly worthy, definitely diverse but how many people outside the city can name a single event, festival or programme that happens here? For all the energy and inventiveness invested in our pell mell of festive gatherings, we somehow manage to deliver a cultural calendar that is considerably less than the sum of its manifold parts. Places that use cultural events as the pivot for their positioning strategy generally do so by delivering one event or festival of genuine international scale and quality, as Edinburgh, Venice, Austin, San Remo, Cannes and Hay on Wye amongst others will testify. Similarly, “cultural cities” or UNESCO cities of music will normally look to validate that title with a programme that is commensurate with their claim or status.

I’m not going to predict or prescribe the event or theme that Liverpool needs to devise because there are bigger and better informed brains than mine who will be needed for that task. However, I do believe this city can build and sustain an international profile compatible with its brand and reputation by aiming higher and deploying its resources accordingly. For Austin, SWSX was not a travelling circus; it was an integral part of the city’s emergence from the shadows of Houston and Dallas to find its own profile and authentic magnetism. (For more information on Austin’s struggle to maintain its cultural identity try Weird City by Joshua Long).

Being interesting is a vocation. It demands creativity as well as rigorous discipline and hard work. It inevitably requires a style and quality of leadership that is absent from our dismal and discredited local politics. It’s ironic that the one aspect of our civic life that is without question unique and interesting, is so for all the wrong reasons. Liverpool's politics never fails to entertain, shock, frustrate and confound - if only it could achieve and deliver. In the 19th century, Liverpool not only spearheaded ground-breaking projects in rail, building technology and maritime engineering, we were also a wellspring for innovations in public policy and governance. Through pioneering initiatives like the introduction of the district nursing service and public washhouses, and the appointment of the world's first medical officer of public health, Liverpool's civic leaders responded to unprecedented challenges with entirely original structures and solutions. At a time when so many of the established prescriptions and paradigms are breaking down, we need to be plugged into the people and places that are responding creatively to challenges like climate change, technology & the future of work, life-long learning, democratic engagement or the next global pandemic.

Being interesting has to be a behavioural norm that finds expression across every sector and constituency. Are our politics interesting or innovative? Is our media intelligent and stimulating? Are we nurturing our most inventive businesses? Are we doing anything original or brave to address our challenges in education, housing or transport? How do we hope to stem the migration of talent, potential and ingenuity as too many of our best and brightest conclude that this city simply doesn't offer them a future? How do we emulate cities like Austin and become a magnet for innovators and entrepreneurs rather than a departure lounge?

Being interesting is fundamentally about being interested and connected to the wider world! It’s about being aware of what’s happening outside the insular and constricting straight-jacket of scouse exceptionalism or parochial northernness. It’s being open to outside influences and ideas and forging connections and relationships with kindred cities. Maybe we could become the convenor of the interesting city network - a global family of midsize cities free from the gravitational drag of conformity and contingent geography? Cities like Portland, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Auckland and Vancouver whose commitments to liveability and sustainability has sparked inventiveness in transport, urban planning, smart technology and the cultural industries.

If there is a common trait or attitude that connects these cities it is that they are porous, with a capacity and willingness to absorb ideas, influences and people from outside and beyond. Their thinking and ambition is not stunted by a perspective that is either provincial or parochial. They have a place in the world defined more by attitude and outlook than their position on the map. More often than not, they are ports and portals for cultural and human exchange. Auckland and Vancouver have flourished as a direct consequence of immigration, welcoming industrious and ambitious migrants from South Asia and East Asia. Despite our boast to be the World in One City, Liverpool is one of the least demographically diverse cities in the UK. Having at last stemmed our population decline, we are still growing at a discernibly slower rate than comparable cities like Leeds and Manchester. So let's grow our population by becoming an overtly immigrant friendly city, and proactively targeting one potential migrant population with whom we already have an historic and cultural affinity. Doesn't it make sense for the home of Europe's oldest Chinatown to be promoting itself as a welcoming haven for Hong Kong residents fearful of mainland China's increasingly despotic designs on the former colony? "Hungry outsiders wanting to be insiders" was a phrase coined by West Berlin in the 1980s as a strategy to reverse demographic and economic stagnation. It's an approach that a city built for twice its current population could usefully emulate.

Our new narrative can be built on familiar and cherished aspects of (or at least claims about) Liverpool's core identity - open, welcoming and global. But it's time to live them rather than simply intoning them as glib marketing slogans and nostalgic musings. Brands are about behaviour; their truth and utility is measured by what you do, not by what you say, so let's be consistently and ambitiously global not provincial.

In the same way that we need to rethink and curate our cultural programme to be genuinely international in terms of reach and quality, we should be enlisting global talent and expertise to help us rethink and reshape our city. Rather than flogging off prime sites like Liverpool Waters and the Festival Garden to whichever developer or volume house builder is offering the biggest buck, let's hold an international design competition to deliver the most innovative and sustainable new waterfront communities. Twenty years ago, Liverpool Vision was able to excite architects of the calibre of Richard Rogers, Rem Koolhaas, Will Alsop and Norman Foster in opportunities at Mann Island and King's Waterfront. It's a tragic shame that none of their inspired visions came to fruition, but let's resolve to try harder and be clear and consistent about who we are and how we intend to renew and reposition our city.

It's tempting to imagine that being the Capital of the North will transform our destiny in a way that being European Capital of Culture failed to do. But it's not about titles. It’s about a fundamental change in disposition, attitude and culture - and finding a way to overcome the inertia and mediocrity that emanates from our moribund and discredited civic governance.

Above all, it’s about remembering that once upon a time we were the first world city - our compass is omni-directional.

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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Liverpool Waters: Peel’s recipe for anytown, anywhere

Jon Egan

The debates around the Waterloo Dock project in Liverpool Waters and the expansion of Liverpool Airport caused heated debate amongst Liverpolitan’s contributors leaving plenty of room for disagreement. But one thing we all agreed on was their totemic importance to the city, revealing a schism between competing visions of our future. It’s a discussion the people of Liverpool need to have. What kind of place do we want to be? In this article, Jon Egan self-identifies with those sometimes christened as ‘nimbys’ and puts forward his idea for a city built around the cultivation of difference, individuality and beauty.

In the months ahead, we’ll explore these issues from other perspectives as part of a new ‘Debating Our Future’ series. If you would like to contribute to the discussion with your own vision, contact team@liverpolitan.co.uk

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It's rare we embark on journeys in pursuit of the familiar, the ordinary or the humdrum. Travel, they say, is about broadening the mind, experiencing new sights, sounds, flavour and ambiences. The places we cherish and remember are those most imbued with a capacity to charm and surprise. So for places and cities aspiring to become destinations, cultivating and conserving what makes them different and original seems like a rewarding strategy. For Liverpool, a city that loudly proclaims its originality and inimitability, this should be a simple and unchallenging task.

When travel is neither practical or affordable, we always have the consolation of reading about the places we yearn to visit, experiencing their enchantment vicariously, though often with the added patina of poetic imagination.

Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, is predicated on a series of imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The famed traveller regales the Mongol Emperor with tales of the many fabulous cities he has visited, but true to the spirit of Calvino’s magical realism, these are not actual cities, nor even possible cities. They are extraordinary and fantastical creations - parables and paradoxes that explore what the book describes as the “exceptions, exclusions, incongruities and contradictions” that characterise and differentiate cities. Towards the end of the book, Marco Polo describes a city that heralds a disturbing vision, an incipient possibility foreshadowing the endpoint of globalisation.

“If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different to the others with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Why come to Trude? I asked myself, and I already wanted to leave. “You can resume your flight whenever you like”, they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport is different.”

The Waterloo Dock project in Liverpool Waters has totemic significance. For modernists it stands for ambition, progress and status. For the conservation lobby it was loaded with deep symbolism representing the destruction and the desecration of heritage.

So what, you may ask, does this have to do with Liverpool and its future? The answer lurks somewhere in the subtext of a recent planning controversy that divided commentators and communities, polemicists and politicians.

The project was the proposed residential development on the partially infilled Waterloo Dock in Peel’s Liverpool Waters. For modernists and urbanist thought leaders the project had totemic significance, standing as a shorthand statement of ambition, progress and status. For the conservation/heritage lobby the project was similarly loaded with deep symbolism representing the destruction and the desecration of heritage. The fractious debates and the absence of a shared narrative or vocabulary suggest a city without a clear or shared sense of self, insecure about its past and uncertain about its future.

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The Romal Capital proposals for Waterloo Dock in Liverpool Waters were unanimously rejected by the Liverpool City Council Planning Committee on 18th Jan 2022. The developers have appealed and the plans will now go before the government’s Planning Inspectorate

So which side am I on? Typically perhaps for a Libra, both and neither. I have lamented the city’s lack of ambition, absence of vision and its inability to answer, or even ask itself, the fundamental question - what is Liverpool for? But I have also questioned the assertion implied, or explicitly asserted by some, that development is nearly always an intrinsic good. Indeed, in the context of the Waterloo Dock debate, I found myself aligned with alleged nimbys, and in spirited disagreement with many allies including the Editor and Founders of this publication.

Maybe the partial infilling of the dock and construction of an inoffensively bland apartment building was not the greatest ever crime against Liverpool’s heritage, but neither was this drably functional box of micro-apartments the most aesthetically or socially desirable addition to our (formerly) World Heritage waterfront. The debate and passions were evidently focused on bigger agendas and deeper sensibilities.

Fly-through video panorama of Waterloo Dock, Liverpool filmed in January 2022

Looming almost literally over the Waterloo Dock debate is a bigger picture, a grander vision and a development proposition that has insinuated itself into being a substitute for an actual future vision for our city. Liverpool Waters is now so ingrained into the city’s discourse and psychogeography that you could be forgiven for thinking that it actually exists. Peel’s near messianic promise to deliver Manhattan or Shanghai on the Mersey was proclaimed with a prophetic urgency in 2007, imbuing its curiously cinematic CGI’s with a hyperreal potency. When choosing between the actuality of World Heritage Site designation and the ephemeral fool’s gold promise of Liverpool Waters, we opted for the phantasy.

Liverpool Waters has both framed and constrained the debate about what sort of city we want to be, and what kind and quality of development we should be encouraging and embracing. Tall buildings have an obvious glamour. UK cities in particular seemed to be in frenzied competition to erect the tallest buildings, as if this, above all else, was a shortcut to status and significance.

Peel’s phalanx of waterfront skyscrapers was Liverpool’s trump card ready to be played (at some ceaselessly rolling future 30-year date), catapulting us ahead of our provincial rivals and reasserting our true global status. But is this what we want for Liverpool - a derivative identity, a replicant city? Trude on the Mersey?

Without for one second surrendering to nimbyism, we can recognise that imitation and simulation should not be our template. Echoing Calvino’s prescient warnings about globalisation, Desmond Fennell, the essayist and philosophical writer, foresaw similar tendencies at work in the early days of Ireland’s embrace of cosmopolitan modernity. In a beautifully evocative passage, in his book, State of The Nation, Fennell laments the loss of Dublin’s once rich and distinctive urban culture and soul. He mourns the curious and idiosyncratic details and delights that once defined and differentiated places.

Liverpool Waters is now so ingrained in the city’s discourse and psychogeography that you could be forgiven for thinking that it actually exists.

“If he is a Dubliner, walking amongst the offensive tower blocks, one who can cast his mind back 20 years, he will remember the vast Theatre Royal with its troupe of dancing girls, The Capitol and the old Metropole with their tearooms, Jammet restaurant and the back-bar, the incomparable Russell, the Dolphin, Bewley's and the Bailey as they used to be, the elegant grocers shops staffed by professionals of the trade, the specialist tobacconists with their priest-like attendants... It would be an exaggeration to say that consumerism destroyed or reduced the quality of everything: it improved the quality of tape-recorders, computers and inter-continental missiles and many other things. But it destroyed many of the amenities and much of the pleasure of cities, and, in a sense, the city as such."

The steady erosion of difference, character and defining originality is in danger of creating a sense of alienation and disinheritance as places converge and identities become eerily homogenous. We lose our bearings as familiar places lose their landmarks and legibility.

All too often progressives and modernisers have a tendency to disparage ‘conservatives’ whether they are rabid xenophobes or harmless nimbys, as people living in the past, fearful of change, trapped by prejudice and insecurity. But sometimes those who question change do have a point, even if it escapes rational or tangible articulation. Loss is something that is easier to feel than it is to explain.

So am I proposing a future constrained by conservation and suffocated by the cult of heritage? The simple answer is no, and if I may be excused for recycling New Labour nomenclature, I believe there is a third way. It’s an approach that can be radical, imaginative and ambitious without being imitative or simulatory. In a recent Guardian Op Ed, Simon Jenkins added his voice to the argument for diverse and differentiated strategies for regeneration.

“The Leaders of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol can think of no other way of competing with London than by erecting garish towers of luxury flats in their central areas. They ignore the evidence that modern creative clusters - in design, marketing, the arts and entertainment - are drawn to historic neighbourhoods and old converted buildings… Northern cities regard their Victorian heritage as a liability not an asset.”

For Liverpool this should not mean a moratorium on tall buildings or intelligent contemporary design, but it should be a challenge to rethink and re-prioritise. We know from our experience that innovation and regeneration are about more than large-scale physical development and shiny glass towers. It’s about what happens in the cracks and gaps, the higgledy-piggledy neighbourhoods and Wabi sabi spaces where innovators and pioneers just get on with it. So let’s learn the lesson from the Baltic and formulate a planning framework for the Fabric District before its character and urban ambience are swamped by more identikit apartment blocks.

The decline of our port economy has bequeathed us an enviable array of empty buildings and fallow dockland areas ripe for reseeding as creative clusters. But areas like Ten Streets need more than protective planning frameworks, they need assertive interventions and clever curation if they are to fulfill their potential. Where are the big catalytic ideas that would stimulate investment and clustering in an area that may otherwise remain a squandered asset? If we see Ten Streets as the incubator for a world-class digital cluster, should it also be the home for Liverpool’s equivalent of Paris’ Ecole 42 - the digital “university without teachers” whose model and approach is now being embraced by cities ambitious to expand their technology and creative sectors.

And what about Ten Street’s brash and status-obsessed neighbour? It’s time to radically reappraise Liverpool Waters. As a benchmark for ambition it’s looking increasingly hackneyed, irrelevant and unrealistic. Even its most impassioned advocates are now beginning to question whether Peel is seriously committed to actualising this Fata Morgana version of Liverpool's future.

The debate about the northern docks should not be a battleground between nimbys and tall building fetishists. It should be about what the city needs and how the immense potential of vacant dockland can be harnessed to make Liverpool a different and more attractive city for its people, its visitors and investors. In San Francisco the development brief for its historic piers (former docks) proposes a mid-rise human scale built form aimed at preserving the setting of the city’s downtown cluster - an important part of its visual signature - but also to safeguard the city's view of the bay and sense of connection to its port history. Far from fostering mediocrity, the city has encouraged architectural excellence and experimentation with brilliantly innovative contributions from Thomas Heatherwick amongst others. Ironically, this was the approach favoured by UNESCO as the basis for the future evolution of our World Heritage Site. It’s also an approach that would have facilitated a more seamless integration with Ten Streets and wider North Liverpool.

Sometimes those who question change do have a point, even if it escapes rational or tangible articulation. Loss is something that is easier to feel than it is to explain.

Of course, we need to recognise that regeneration of the city centre alone will never suffice; Liverpool’s individual identity resides as much in its suburbs and neighbourhood high streets, its stunning parks and rich Georgian and Victorian legacy as it does in the more showpiece locations. Prefiguring Calvino's parable, Marxist critic Guy Debord and his Situationist collaborators warned that the redevelopment of Paris in the late 1950s signified a ruthless process of rationalisation, commercialisation and homogenisation where the authentic social life of cities was being replaced by spectacle - "all that was directly lived has become mere representation." Like their Surrealist forbears, the Situationists saw the city as a playground or dramatic stage promising limitless encounters with the extraordinary and the unexpected (le merveilleux quotidien).

It seems strangely apposite for a city seduced by the film-set flimsiness of Peel's promise, that we cherish our architectural heritage less for its intrinsic quality - its lived experience - than its capacity to mimic more significant and glamorous places. Sure, we can take pride in being the UK’s most filmed city, but is that it? Is our identity founded on an aptitude for imitation and representation?

Peel's penchant for visionary masterplans extends beyond the stalled blueprint for Liverpool Waters. Equally "ambitious and aspirational" are its plans to transform our humble provincial airport into a global hub with direct links to long haul destinations on every continent. Irrespective of the merits, feasibility or environmental impact of the plan, it is another ingenious attempt to stroke the ego of a city short on self-belief and uncertain about its place in the world.

Proper cities have proper airports, and the fact that Manchester has one, is less a matter of convenience than cause for a deep seated inferiority complex. But as latter day Marco Polo, Bill Bryson’s descriptions of Manchester as “an airport with a city attached” and “a huddle of glassy modern buildings and executive flats in the middle of a vast urban nowhere,” reveal, mere status symbols are not enough to make a city significant or memorable. In contrast, Bryson observes that “in Liverpool, you know you are some place.”

We need a regeneration prospectus based on the cultivation of difference and individuality, that cherishes what’s unique, irreplaceable and above all beautiful, but also fosters experimentation and originality. We want Liverpool to be the conspicuous and refreshing antidote to the nightmare of endless and interchangeable Trudes.

Being “some place” is not a bad guiding principle for a city seeking to nurture difference, and be a place that people want to come to, and are in no hurry to leave.

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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No Platforming: Taking statues off their pedestals

Ed Williams

An unforeseen consequence of the enforced closure of our cultural institutions during the recent ‘lockdowns’ is that the curious and bored alike encountered, perhaps for the first time, the numerous statutes and public monuments located in our major towns and cities.  Much like an open air exhibition, these free ‘exhibits’ were one of the few cultural experiences available during the uncertain and tedious days of enforced ennui.

Liverpool, like many cities of a similar ‘vintage’, has a plethora of statues. They are a testament to the city’s ‘fathers’ and an attempt to engender a sense of civic pride, commemorating as they do the legacy of the ‘big men’, the ‘great and the good’. These honoraries were predominately white, bourgeoisie males who (allegedly) conformed to the idealised values of piety, philanthropy, the championing of free trade or military prowess in some overseas campaign.

Though for many such art works elicit nothing more than indifference as they hurry past in the rain, for others contemporary reaction has become deeply politicised, ranging from visceral contempt to staunch defence.  Most graphically, the toppling in Bristol of the statue of slave trading merchant Edward Colston and the perceived threat posed to others draws attention to the fiercely contested debate between those who seek their removal and those who feel that such change represents an existential challenge to ‘tradition’ and ‘history’, a reductive dispute that places figurative sculpture very much on the battle front in the ongoing ‘culture wars’. In light of such a polarised debate perhaps there is an alternative approach to removal or maintaining the status quo, one which seeks to re-imagine the role of public figurative sculpture altogether. Fundamental to this approach is to question why do sculptures exist? What, if any, function do they serve and can these aims be achieved via alternative means?

Different approaches to the statue problem. Some take direct inspiration from events in Bristol…

‘History is complicated so we have made some judgment calls’, says the Topple the Racists website, which has compiled a map of statues and monuments which celebrate aspects of Britain’s colonial past. Despite the website’s name it claims its aim is to ‘promote debate’.

The vogue for erecting sculptures of the ‘worthy’ emerged in Britain during the late eighteenth century, a period in which the nascent British Empire sought to emulate, through wholesale adoption, the tastes and virtues of the great classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.

This fascination with statues reached its peak in the Victorian era when it approached something akin to mania. Liverpool, like the majority of towns and cities in the North of England had experienced relatively recent urbanisation. Unlike those great ecclesiastical centres of York, Chester, Hexham or Durham, most of the ‘boom’ towns of the Industrial Revolution lacked the convivial Roman ruins, medieval fortifications, or ancient sites of worship that conveyed a sense of historic importance, so a new civic story was required for these modern metropolises. Sculpture allowed a sense of ‘history’ to be created instantly.  Committing a likeness to bronze, or more commonly embalming in marble those local or national heroes provided more than just a mnemonic memory device for the masses (something which the recently developed art of photography was mastering with ever greater verisimilitude). The statue was first and foremost a didactic tool for conveying officially sanctioned moral education. ‘Here before you stands’, his (rarely her) virtues and triumphs, dates and places listed instructively. This way, civic history, like classical history can be taught by rote through stone to future generations of proud civic citizens.

The toppling in Bristol of the statue of Edward Colston and the perceived threat posed to others places figurative sculpture very much on the battle front in the ongoing ‘culture wars’.

These moral lessons were further, powerfully enhanced by the sighting of works on plinths. The public were compelled to literally ‘look up’ to these individuals, lending them an almost god-like aura, respectful awe implicit in the architecture. Conversely they (the statues) cast a downward glance upon us, lesser mortals, few, if any of whom, would be deemed worthy of such sculptural dedication.  This asymmetric relationship is perhaps the most contentious issue, in this author’s opinion. Why should we be compelled to look up? Craning one’s neck skyward is not the ideal way to view any artwork, especially when dealing with the additional height of those old regal and military favourites, the mounted equestrian statues. Frankly from this vantage point you might conclude that one stylized representation of a Victorian is much the same as the other (and oddly never too dissimilar to the late Prince Albert).  Whilst the curious amongst us may trouble ourselves to read the plinth plaque (though many are so weather worn as to be illegible) their elevated position compromises comprehension. We simply cannot appreciate, nor begin to truly understand and scrutinize, the work from this position.

Stranger still perhaps is the location of such works, often arranged together in neat, parallel rows or clustered together as in Liverpool’s St John’s Gardens.  Was this an attempt to create an open air pantheon of sorts? Yet as time passes, and we become ever more distant to the reasons why these people were heralded in the first place, the result often feels more like a dusty necropolis, a graveyard of dead luminaries, littering the city, lest the tourists be interested.

If such works now appear to be instructive failures could their continued presence perhaps reveal something more contentious?  Are they not now reminders of a ‘once great past’, a symptom of the wider British malaise, the fetishization of previous times, those fabled ‘good old days’? This fatuous narrative remains a potent deceit, which serves to stymie progress, especially in a city like Liverpool where heritage is pinned as our number one asset. If things were indeed better ‘back then’, we truly are doomed.  In light of the supposed ‘culture wars’ a wider debate is needed to determine the proper place of the past in our national dialogue, and one starting point may be statues and their continued legacy.

Sky Arts, Northern Town and Culture Liverpool chose to redress statues in ways designed to be celebratory or confrontational

Former Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli re-dressed in rainbow colours by artist Daniel Lismore to reflect his conflicted relationship with homosexuality. Photograph by David Edwards, courtesy of Sky Arts.

This author’s, perhaps provocative suggestion is not to remove these works, nor to ‘re-purpose’ them in the latest postmodern fashion by ‘dressing them up’ in colourful clothes, as was seen during the recent Sky Arts ‘Statues Redressed’ programme, but rather to remove them from their plinths and site them at ground level. This way we can encounter these figures more closely as physical equals and as fallible humans, not superior secular gods.

Such an approach is not unprecedented. More recent commissions such as the statues of Sir John and Cecil Moores in Church Street, The ‘Fab Four’ at The Pier Head and those of Sir Ken Dodd and Bessie Braddock at Lime Street Station are all sited at pavement level. Being devoid of plinths it allows us to interrogate their features and to consider them further as real people, rather than simply ‘grandees’. In short, we encounter and experience the statues as figurative artworks, not pieces of sociological propaganda. Divested of their lofty position, we can begin the process of critique from a more nuanced position. After all, the measure of history’s heroes and villains is rarely clear cut. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the ‘Greatest Briton’ according to a BBC poll, was also an incompetent military adventurer (Gallipoli) and violent strike breaker (Gun Boats on the Mersey), who allowed millions to starve in Bengal during the Second World War. The truth is, simple judgements are not always easily arrived at. Life is complex. Besides, if you look at our most popular media tastes today, we tend now to prefer the flawed anti-hero, or loveable rogue over the unsullied but rather boring saints of yesteryear. Heath Ledger’s Joker was a far more compelling character than Christian Bale’s growling Batman. Such dubious figures may be perceived as models for redemption for those of an optimistic streak, or perhaps they remind us that we are all deeply fallible, despite our best efforts. In seeking to bring statues ‘down to our level’, we are effectively humanising them in order to better understand them. That doesn’t mean that we necessarily forgive them their sins, just that we are in a better position to take a view.

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Clockwise starting top left: Stone relief of 2 slave children (St Martins Bank), a petition for its removal attracted approx 2000 signatures; Penny Lane street signs were defaced despite no proven link to slavery; Chained prisoners of war beneath a victorious Admiral Nelson (Exchange Flags), the figures are often mistaken for African slaves; Explorer Christopher Columbus dressed in an African-inspired Elizabethan ruff (Sefton Park Palm House) as part of the Sky Arts project, Statues Redressed. Images courtesy of Jane Anderson

Notwithstanding Lenin’s allegedly prophetic assertion that statues are for pigeons to shit on, commissioning figurative sculptures remains as popular as ever. Is this evidence of their continued cultural significance, or yet another example of a paucity of imagination when faced with the tyranny of ‘tradition’? Is their use so hard wired into our cultural psyche that we have no other alternative but to default to the obligatory statue as the go-to reminders of our latter day worthies? Who knows but at least today the metal and stone pantheon has been somewhat democratized with footballers, comedians, actors and musicians just as likely to get the nod (sometimes with dubious results). This is most probably a good thing as welcome evidence of a more meritocratic society which appreciates and applauds those whose lives and work resonate more with ‘ordinary’ people.  A cynical alternative may be that we just set the bar on achievement too low or are just a bit too quick to judge greatness?

In recent years, it’s not uncommon to see the subject of a statue, still living and breathing, pulling back the curtain on their own likeness. In this way, they get to enjoy all the benefits of exalted, sanctified status, while still being very much of this world. Sometimes however, the public reaction is not what was hoped for, as Fulham Football Club’s hasty removal of their Michael Jackson statue would attest. Dictators such as Saddam Hussein have also lived to see their own sculptures pulled to the ground, while once omnipresent busts of Lenin are now in Russia conspicuous by their absence. This rush to cast a likeness does suggest a certain growing transience in the form – statues turned into short-lived consumables, instead of boasting the forever quality that their form implies.

Devoid of plinths, divested of their lofty position, we encounter and experience the statues as figurative artworks, not pieces of sociological propaganda.

Today’s ‘legends’ are often described as ‘idols’ and idols are naturally associated with worship, venerated to the grave and beyond by their acolytes. The phrase ‘immortalised in stone’ hints at the unspoken pact – you may die but your memory will live on forever. But what happens when all that knew them or knew of them, or who valued their achievements are gone?

And on the pedestal, these words appear; 

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

So wrote, the great romantic poet Percy Shelley in his poem, Ozymandius, about a statue half sunk and very much forgotten in the remote desert sands.

Whilst this may strike some readers as peculiar, cults of adoration pass with time, memories fade and the ‘legends’ supporters pass on themselves. All is forgotten. This leaves us to ponder, what do we do with such ‘relics’ when they no longer matter to anyone still alive? Should we consider them as historical artefacts, totemic symbols of a past creed? Should we dispose of them discreetly, or are they, as I would suggest, worthy of consideration as art objects, as opposed to yet another example of ossified history?

Like sculpture from antiquity, considering them as art, rather than artefact, may engender a more human, civilized response to the ideas of our forebears. Let us not be too judgemental in our critique of how our antecedents perceived their world. No generation has a monopoly on ‘truth’ or ‘virtue’. Let us be free to consider each work as an individual piece, divested of its grandeur and pomp, having been brought back down to earth. 

Ultimately the best thing about the past, like this article, is that it is over.

Ed Williams is an Academic Art Historian who works for TATE Liverpool. He is passionate about all aspects of visual culture and enjoys sharing his knowledge with interested groups.

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The Ten Commandments of Scouse TV and Film

(How Liverpool stereotypes shape our media)

Paul Bryan & Michael McDonough

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“Ignore the non-creative, faceless, nameless, self-appointed prick Tony. Imagine someone in New York (with all its crime stories) taking that same lazy, blinkered view. There’s a dark side to our city - anyone who doesn’t accept that is in denial. Well done & good luck mate.”

 Dave Kirkby, a Writer/Producer/Director on Twitter

The Tony in question was Tony Schumacher, the screenwriter of new Liverpool-based BBC cop drama, The Responder, which stars Martin Freeman as a morally compromised Urgent Response Officer working the night-time crime shift. According to the Guardian, we can look forward to seeing the policeman pinch cigarettes and food off the dead while battling local drug barons. The show airs on the 24th January 2022.

Tony was not happy and to be fair, Liverpolitan had something to do with that. We’d spoilt his day, we were told, with a tweet of our own. It was maybe a little bit naughty.

“Another crime drama for Liverpool. Original,” we’d posted. Queue shitstorm. Tony bit back and all hell broke loose. Actors, producers, godknowswhosers leapt in intent on tearing us a new one, and presumably to make Tony feel better. But it was too late supposedly. We’d taken the shine off his achievements. Bubbles had been burst. You can check out all the fun here.

Based on the strength of the reaction, there was the distinct feeling that we’d touched a raw nerve. Are film and TV producers, writers and directors aware of just how often they go to the same well, selecting from the small set of go-to tropes and narratives that depict the city as the land of desperation rather than opportunity? We’re bored of it. Bored of seeing Liverpool as a metaphor for the down at heel, for crime and unsafe streets. For plucky, gobby underdogs struggling to keep their heads above water. There’s got to be different stories to tell.

But weren’t we being unreasonable or unkind? After all, we hadn’t even seen the show yet – just the trailer, the star interviews, and the press coverage, which seemed to major on how hard Freeman had worked to perfect his scouse accent. Marvellous. Wouldn’t want to get that wrong.

We’re bored of it. Bored of seeing Liverpool as a metaphor for the down at heel, for crime and unsafe streets.

BBC Trailer for ‘The Responder’

The truth is, The Responder could be the best British TV show ever written (and we hope it is) and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. We’ve walked this path many times before. That’s not to say Liverpool doesn’t have real social problems. Of course it does, just like any other major city. And we’re not saying people shouldn’t write about them – everyone’s got to make a living, but what you really notice is the absence of alternatives and the laser-like focus on suffering. And what happens when the same kinds of story and the same kinds of characters get rolled out time and time again? How do the scouse stereotypes impact the way the world sees us? Or even more worryingly, how we see ourselves.

But’s let’s park that discussion for a minute because we need to make a point. Liverpool is, as many readers will know, a popular filming location. Everything from The Batman to Peaky Blinders and The Crown have been filmed here in recent years and many more productions besides. The Liverpool Film Office claim the city is the most filmed UK location outside of London. It’s an undoubted achievement. But the truth is, Liverpool tends to act as a stand-in for other places – notably New York and London, rather than as a setting itself. This is no doubt testimony to its incredible architecture and urban landscape. But what this does mean, is that the cultural imprint of Liverpool is often invisible on the screens. Unless you were in the know, you’d have no clue you were seeing the north’s best city. So when assessing how Liverpool is represented in film and television drama you can disregard all of those productions. You need to look at shows that are set here and you need to look at Liverpool characters that appear in other programmes located elsewhere. It’s the only plausible way you can do it.

And the mind naturally turns to Stephen Graham, that quite brilliant actor who is nevertheless, a one-man industry in televisual scouseness – the close-cropped hard man with the inner vulnerability. He is screen-gold, no doubt about it and we’re huge fans. He is unreservedly a fantastic asset to the city, whose name will be forever synonymous with Combo, the fascist scouse skinhead from This is England, perhaps only rivalled in intensity by Robert Carlyle’s scouse football-obsessed racist psychopath in Cracker.

I guess we need to put our money where our mouth is. Tony Schumacher seemed to think there hadn’t been any crime drama set in Liverpool since 2012. But our yardstick is wider. Here’s a list of crime or crime-related dramas that have been set in Liverpool or featured major stereotypical scouse characters – Waterfront Beat (1990), Cracker (1994), Liverpool 1 (1998), Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Going Off Big Time (2000), 51st State (2001), This is England (2006), Good Cop (2012), Little Boy Blue (2017), Tin Star (2020), Time (2021), The Responder (2022).

Of course, we’re only really touching the surface here.

Benidorm (2007-18) featured a whole plethora of dodgy scousers on the rob, Coronation Street has never been shy to play the thieving scouse card either. Who can forget Jackie Dobbs, Diedre Rashid’s classic Liverpudlian prison cellmate. Then we’ve got the crafty lazy type – Lister from Red Dwarf (1988-2020), a self-described bum, and Jim Royle of The Royle Family (1998-2012), the cynical, albeit amusing slob. England’s most incompetent manager ever was also a scouser in Mike Bassett, England Manager (2012). We’ll steer clear of Harry Enfield … All of them had a flexible moral code when it came to the law (with the possible exception of Mr Bassett). We can’t help but feel we’re missing other examples – Boys From the Blackstuff (1982), Blood on the Dole (1994), Bread (1986-91). Hell even the C4 series, The £1 Houses: Britain’s Cheapest Street (2018) had to feature regular shots of feral-looking kids.

What you really notice is the absence of alternatives and the laser-like focus on suffering. How do the scouse stereotypes impact the way the world sees us? Or even more worryingly, how we see ourselves.

Now we want to make absolutely clear, this is not about passing judgement on whether TV shows are any good. There are clearly some classic stories and memorable characters here. Neither is it about advocating for only ‘positive’ portrayals like some latter-day Mary Whitehouse protecting the nation’s morals. Creators should be free to fly wherever their muse takes them including to the darkest of places. Writers should feel no obligation to tell any kind of story unless it’s an imperative they feel within themselves. Nothing is off limits as far as Liverpolitan is concerned and we are wary of those who want to place limits on expression in pursuit of other political goals. We will not put forward the case for restrictions on the use of regional stereotypes by co-opting the kind of representation arguments employed in matters of protected characteristics. Creatives have enough on their plate as it is.

But the question stands, why when it comes to Liverpool, do certain types of narrative and certain types of character re-occur over and over again? And this goes way beyond crime. That’s only a subset of the cliches. In addition to the drug dealers and gangsters, lazy slobs, dirty cops, jailbirds and grifters we have the more scouse-than-scouse; the images of decay and struggle; of hard-men and gold-hearted working class women (only working class is allowed if you want to be a hero) striving to overcome the limitations of an oppressive place that wants to beat them down and crush them.  Sometimes, if we’re lucky we get the positive spin version, where ‘authentic’ people find happiness or social solidarity in the most unexpected places, despite ‘the system’ and the limitations of their surroundings. Liverpool characters are typically portrayed as ‘street-wise’ and ‘gobby’, which is something I guess we’re supposed to take pride in, but less so do we see them as educated or refined (the entire premise of Educating Rita was based on the unlikeness of a scouser going to university). Often, they are just one heart-beat away from kicking-off, sometimes saved from eruption by that omnipresent scouse ‘sense of humour’. Throw in the name checks to the Reds, Blues and Beatles and the lingering shots of discarded shopping trolleys and the rain-soaked terrace houses where everyone is supposed to live and it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’ve seen it all before. That those creating or commissioning shows are themselves suffering from some kind of block, a collective failure of imagination. It most probably doesn’t help that most (all?) commissioners are located elsewhere, but the truth is many of our own sons and daughters seem all too happy to play this game. They may be wonderfully talented professionals who can play or write characters with nuance and all power to their elbow. But maybe we should try a little harder to look outside the model and imagine different kinds of stories. When is Liverpool going to get its own When Harry Met Sally? (not the coke-snorting edition). I’d even take a horror - the Williamson Tunnels lend themselves to finding a monster in the deep. You can have that one for free.

Of course, the question naturally arises, whether any of this is important. Are we exaggerating the significance of dramatic media portrayals in shaping external perceptions of the city? And even if they did have an influence, does it matter? Does the way a region and its people are viewed have any impact on real-life outcomes? How credible is it to say, as we suggested in the online debate, that fictionalised accounts of crime, depravation and struggle when incessant impact business investment decisions? Surely that’s a nonsense?

This stuff is always hard to prove and it’s easy to mock. As one exasperated Tweeter said in the Schumacher clash, “If crime dramas damaged a city's reputation then New York would never see a tourist.” Perhaps stretching the point, someone else made a similar argument about Costa Rica and the threat of Jurassic Park dinosaurs. But New York is not the debate-winning example they seem to think it is. For every NYPD Blue, there’s a Coming to America, Birdman, Jersey Girl and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. New York is an unofficial capital and home to powerful media empires. Its stories are legion and diverse, reflecting the vast variety of life in one of the world’s most important cities.

Creators should be free to fly wherever their muse takes them including to the darkest of places. Nothing is off limits. Liverpolitan will not put forward the case for restrictions on the use of regional stereotypes.

Liverpool’s media landscape consists of The Liverpool Echo and some broadcast journalists on loan from Manchester. Its biggest TV Production Company, Lime Pictures inspired the scripted reality nonsense that was Desperate Scousewives. It’s once ground-breaking soap opera, Brookside is long dead, and Richard and Judy fled back to the capital because TV guests didn’t fancy the trip up to the Albert Dock. The city is simply not in control of its own narrative. It eats what it’s fed and what it’s fed is the drip, drip, drip of bleakness and all too often criminality. It might make for good TV (if you like that kind of thing) but it’s depressing as hell, and it’s about as ‘real’ as a Potemkin village.

We can’t prove that a business looking to invest lets the latest Stephen Graham crime special outweigh what its spreadsheet calculations tell it, but we’ve been around long enough to know there’s a strong dose of subjectivity in the decisions people make. If all you’re ever told is Liverpool is the land of the desperate, how likely is it to make it onto your office relocation shortlist?

The perverse thing, if it is a thing, is to wonder to what extent these narratives become internalised by the city’s own people? Become part of our own self-image, heralded as truth as we play the fool. Do we start to celebrate our own stereotypes, and invent new stories that fit the ever decreasing circles of our imagination?  It’s worth thinking about even if you end up dismissing it. At the very least, you should ask yourself, why Liverpool is never the setting for a romcom, or a political drama (God knows we give them the material – appreciative nod to Bleasdale’s excellent GBH (1991)) or any number of things that we don’t currently see. What exactly is going on in the heads of our commissioners?

So we’ve been doing some thinking about these fictional tropes and narratives that swirl around the city of Liverpool. We’re going to call them The Ten Commandments of Scouse TV and Film. There’s actually more, but 13 didn’t sound as snappy. So read on, we’re about to list them and let us know if you can think of any more. Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, they are intended as satire, not tablets of stone. We named them, but they aren’t ours - they’re in the minds of those with the power to green-light, polluting our cultural soup.

But before we get to that, one final point. In our minds, when we were writing this, our intention was not criticism but rather a rallying call to creatives. It is time to set our imaginations free. To see the city of Liverpool not as others do, but as we do. In full technicolour. Let the new stories begin.

The Ten Commandments of Scouse TV & Film

Thou Shalt …

1. Make only working class heroes

‘Real’ heroism is measured in the absence of a bulging wallet or purse.

E.g. Letter to Breshnev, Boys from the Black Stuff, The Liverbirds; Bread

2. Depict Liverpool as a cesspit of crime

Coke wars, feral kids, dodgy police, prison officers and cons, murders, gangsters, hard-bitten opportunism, and an uncooperative and sullen populace. You get the picture.

E.g. 51st State, Blonde Fist, Tin Star, Little Boy Blue, The Responder, Good Cop, Liverpool 1, Going Off Big Time, Clink, Merseybeat, Z-Cars, Wired

3. Ensure the scouse accent is turned up to eleven

According to TV, every character from Liverpool speaks with the thickest of scouse accents because it’s ‘authentic’. If they didn’t, they’d be bracketed as a ‘snob’. Don’t expect to be hearing anyone that sounds like they might hail from Woolton or Crosby.

E.g. Almost every single show that ever featured a Liverpool character

4. Portray Scouse protagonists as gobby, streetwise but uneducated

The only higher education most scouse characters get is from the university of life. They grew up the hard way, on the streets, but they’re crafty or smart in their own way – not easily fooled.  Schooled in conflict, they can always handle themselves verbally with fighting-talk, and if required with fists too. Always dreaming of better.

E.g. Educating Rita, Desperate Scousewives, Shirley Valentine, Benidorm

5. Point the camera at dirty streets, dereliction and decay

Phwoar, look at that, what a tip! But the poverty is ‘real’. Oh, and everyone lives in a terrace house up there.

E.g. The £1 Houses, 51st State

6. Plug the ‘scouse sense of humour’ as a genetic omnipresence

Everyone’s a wit. I mean, you’d have to be to live here.

E.g. Bread, Brookside, The Royle Family

7. Script storyworlds to revolve around misery, struggle, bigotry or a fight against injustice

Because that’s the sum total of life in Liverpool. Now, can I have a cappuccino with that?

E.g. Boys From The Black Stuff, Anne, Brookside, Blood on the Dole, Blonde Fist, Lilies, Secrets & Words, Hearts and Minds, Wired

8. Roll out the not-too-bright, fighty scouse psychopath, lazy slob or lowlife criminal

When you need a real nutter with a good line, who better than a scouser?

E.g. This is England, The Royle Family, Red Dwarf, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Cracker

9. Portray scouse men as hard as nails with a soft centre, women as brassy or hard-worn salt of the earth

Everyone’s got a shield and everyone’s got a story. They do what they have to do to survive. But deep-down, they’re good people. Even when they are knocking you unconscious.

E.g. Brookside, Time, Line of Duty, The Street

10. Mention either football or the Beatles or both

Well you’ve got to haven’t you?

E.g. Doctor Who, Help, Cracker, Yesterday, Scully

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach

Michael McDonough is the Art Director and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a lead creative specialising in 3D and animation, film and conceptual spatial design.

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A life through books: Five decades of radical politics in Liverpool

Jane Anderson

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From an up-bringing which instilled the values of peace and non-violence to fighting against fascist arson attacks on her bookshop, Mandy Vere has witnessed both formative and turbulent times in the city's long history. Now approaching retirement, she reminisces about her life as the longest surviving member of the News From Nowhere collective, Liverpool's, indeed one of Britain's, longest standing, most beloved, independent radical bookshops.

Born in Stockport in the 1950s to Quaker parents, who were devoted to a life of community engagement and socialist politics, it could be said that those central values have come to shape Mandy Vere's whole approach to life. This value system is focused on five key principles or 'testimonies' for living: Equality, Peace (non-violence), Integrity, Community and Stewardship (sustainability). The Quaker axiom, “that of God in everyone", for Mandy came to be in more humanistic fashion, "that of good in everyone”, essentially a wholly positive view of humanity and its potential.

Her earliest days of community activism had been forged on the streets of Longsight, Manchester around the age of 16.  It was there that she became radicalised by a crew of revolutionaries, activists and bohemians who were engaged with community organising, internationalism and the principles of non-violent direct action; as well as with the very real and pressing issues of poverty and homelessness. There was also the blossoming and exciting new world of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll to explore. 

Needless to say, a lot of learning, experimentation, and fun was had, but it was in Liverpool that Mandy went on to find her calling. The city was at that time a very exciting and cool place to be. Post the Swinging Sixties and Mersey Beat, the ever-present sea breeze seemed to carry so much promise and possibility.

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The News From Nowhere bookshop had been set up by Bob Dent, an acquaintance of Mandy's from the various alternative scenes in Liverpool, in 1974, in a tiny shop on Manchester Street (now re-named, Old Haymarket). Having come to Liverpool to study for a degree at the university and subsequently dropping out, Mandy joined Bob in managing the shop in 1976. Another member of staff arrived in 1979, and then a couple of years later Bob left to pursue other projects. It was then that the decision was taken to create a female-only collective. 

The phrase 'The personal is political' was coined in 1968 by Carol Hanisch, an American civil rights worker and radical feminist, to challenge the view that the public and private spheres were separate realms; especially as they related to women, who had long been assigned merely a domesticated and supportive role in society. The concerns of men were painted in broad brush strokes on large canvasses, whereas the woman's realm was seen as being small and interior, and not really the stuff of politics. 

Mandy recalls the many times when book sellers and publishing agents would come into News From Nowhere and ask to "speak with the boss", assuming the manager would be male. At the time, it was still highly unusual to see women in positions of authority or in managerial roles outside of the strictly determined 'feminine spheres' of work. Even some of the shop's male customers would automatically seek out other male customers when looking for advice, rather than asking one of the staff.

Feminist texts were not readily available at the time, and a request from a customer for Marge Piercy’s, Small Changes (a fictionalised account of the struggles of two women to liberate themselves from restrictive relationships) prompted, after much searching, the book to be ordered from a U.S. publisher. That opened the floodgates to a world of new, ground-breaking feminist texts. 'Sisterhood Is Powerful', a compilation of writings by women, is one amongst many that Mandy recalls as being pivotal for her. 'The personal is political' was not just an empty trope; it was a sentiment that meant that every action one took in life, every choice, and every decision mattered. That by raising one's consciousness, confronting power and speaking truth you could change the world one step at a time. The idea of a women's collective was based on the desire to support women; offer them professional training and experience in the largely male book trade, as well as challenging the notion that all organisations must be hierarchical in structure.  The Quaker and socialist values of equality and egalitarianism had to mean something. 

Some topics have become almost too hot to discuss in an honest and open manner.

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Unlike most of the other radical bookshops in Liverpool at that time, News From Nowhere, named after the utopian socialist novel by William Morris, was not party affiliated and by being truly independent was able to to stock whichever texts were liked, across a very broad range of leftist, anarchistic and generally radical thinking. Progressive Books; October Books; Red Books and Mersey Books, amongst others, were affiliated with the Communist party, the Maoist party, the International Marxist Group and the Workers Revolutionary Party, respectively, and their stock and the subsequent general mood of the shops reflected these more narrow, sectarian affiliations. In time, this inevitable fracturing and sectarianism that had always plagued the Left, led to some disillusionment with aspects of leftist politics, and Mandy became interested in more anarchistic, libertarian models of thinking.

The Left, especially in Liverpool, she feels, had a very narrow and single-minded focus on class. Sexism and racism were often overlooked as were ecological and environmental concerns. The bookshop, she says, was "viewed by some as an irrelevance" during the Militant Tendency years, as the staff were not "white, male, working class trade unionists". There seemed to be a pre-occupation with what divided people, with these divisions being relentlessly exploited and exacerbated, to the extent that any proposal would be voted down simply because another party had proposed it. Mandy feels this kind of approach still very much scars the political scene in Liverpool today and that 'one-party politics’, which has defined the city for many years now, is by nature undemocratic and makes government susceptible to corruption.           

In spite of initial dismissals by some that News From Nowhere was being run as a women-only collective, events in the 1980s caused many in the community to rally around and come together in support of the shop.

Throughout the 1980s, radical bookshops everywhere were being subject to violent fascist attacks by individuals and groups aligned with the National Front. Groups of thugs would come in to News From Nowhere, at its then home on Whitechapel, rampage around, upturning tables and bookcases, and even assaulting people.

Publishing houses now refer to lesbian authors as ‘queer authors’, regardless of whether they identify as ‘queer’ or not.

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This became quite a regular occurrence, which then escalated to arson attacks - twelve in total. When the police were called, Mandy recalls an almost accusatory tone, that maybe they themselves had done something to provoke these attacks, just by being an overtly left-wing outlet. Through community effort, enough money was raised for metal security shutters and to replenish damaged and destroyed stock. People began to appreciate just how much the collective had been on the front line, and the shop started to become the icon and beacon of enlightenment that it remains to this day.

This was not to be Mandy's first uncomfortable experience with policing and the justice system. She was jailed in 1979 for supposed importation of cannabis (a customer had posted a package for themselves to the shop and it was intercepted). She felt that both she and the wider radical movement, by extension, were being made an example of. Mandy was sentenced to six months, initially in HM Prison Risley ("Grisly Risley", as she calls it)", but was then moved on to Moor Court open prison in Staffordshire where she was to serve the majority of her sentence. 

Mandy recalls scrubbing floors and working on a production line inserting screws into plugs, as BBC Radio One blasted out the pop hits of the day. Just up the hill from Moor Court was a working dairy farm, and many of the women were put to work there - sweeping yards and cutting back nettles, before eventually graduating to milking the cows, for which Mandy gained a milking proficiency certificate, as well as a new found appreciation for cows and goats - each with their own character and personality. 

Knitting, yoga sessions, and learning to type passed the time and Mandy taught a fellow inmate to read via the pages of The Guardian which her parents would regularly send to her. So whilst her time in prison was put to practical use, and she managed to have a modicum of freedom out in the open air, Mandy was aware that many of the other women suffered greatly having been separated from their babies and children. In later years, and in honour of her experiences and of the other women, Mandy was to go on to invite the Clean Break Theatre Company, which was formed by female ex-prisoners, to perform at the Liberty Hall in Liverpool, a venue which hosted 'alternative' theatre and concert events, with which Mandy was actively involved.

Practically focused, self-help community groups and collectives have always been where Mandy is most at home. This is one area in which she feels that the city of Liverpool and its population has always been strong, especially the Liverpool 8 community, her home of over 26 years. For so long ghettoised and subject to oppressive policing; the people's voices dismissed and ignored in the years of Militant; L8 has gone on to nurture many community initiatives. The Princes Park Health Centre, established in 1977, was a truly radical practise through which its founder, Dr Cyril Taylor, applied a more holistic approach to health. Ill health, he believed, was caused by factors not only in one's immediate situation and environment, but also by the social and political conditions of one's life. Groups of women and children would be taken to local swimming baths and on walking trips to Moel Famau in North Wales. For some in the community it would be the first time they had ever set foot outside of the city. There were cycling initiatives, and housing co-operatives were established, including Mandy's own housing co-operative which was centred on Kelvin Grove and which gave shelter and support to many women over the years, and where several babies were born.

Mandy had also been very actively involved in the practice of co-counselling; a grassroots method of personal change based on reciprocal peer counselling. Time is shared equally and the essential requirement of the person taking their turn in the role of counsellor is to do their best to listen and give their full attention to the other person. It was at the Princes Park Health Centre that Mandy helped to develop this practice via a programme of therapeutic play sessions for local families.

Mandy reflects on how in more recent years, there has continued to be lots of new grassroots community initiatives, such as: Squash, the food co-operative on Windsor Street; the Liverpool Community Tool Library which has been established in Lodge Lane; and the Granby 4 Streets housing project, which involved the community-led regeneration of some of the many houses made derelict by the failed Housing Market Renewal Strategy, overseen by former Labour Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. In north Liverpool, Home Baked in Anfield has been providing a community kitchen, bakery and cafe for the last nine years, and hopes soon to launch a number of newly renovated, co-operatively-run houses for local people. Kitty's Launderette, which is located on Grasmere Street in Everton, is a community-driven initiative combining laundry facilities and and social space. It is inspired by Kitty Wilkinson, a 19th century Irish immigrant to Liverpool, who became the pioneer of the early wash house movement, which was instrumental in bringing about control of a major cholera epidemic which swept the city in 1832.

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Being News From Nowhere's main book buyer was, for Mandy, often a delicate balancing act between providing unfettered access to a wide range of literature from all fields of leftist and radical thinking, and being conscious of some of the sensitivities of those caught up in, or at the hard edge of, the contentious and often fraught disagreements and issues of the day. The shop stocked Irish Republican literature and campaign material, for example, at the same time that there was a national media blackout and censure of interviews with prominent Irish Republicans. People from British military backgrounds, and from the local Protestant community, would come into the shop to express their upset at prominent window displays of Republican literature. Some members of the Jewish community would express disquiet at how the bookshop seemed to them to be overtly promoting an anti-Zionist stance, and confecting one-sided presentations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mandy, mindful of not wilfully causing upset or offence, and knowing full well the age-old anti-Semitic oppression of the Jewish people, would annually celebrate Jewish book week and would create prominent window displays to promote it.

People were never shy of coming in to the shop, though, to argue vehemently about or to disagree with what they perceived as biased representations, says Mandy. When the publication of Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' precipitated a fatwah against the author (declared by the Iranian Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini) Mandy thought it was important to stock the book.  Contentious issues would always be present and free discussion and debate was the way to approach it. The shop had long been involved with writing and literary festivals of one sort or other and prided itself on being a place which could host and facilitate such discussions. Social media has been utilised to facilitate the presentation of information relating to new publications, upcoming events and so on - but there has consciously never been any engagement in debate or discussion through this medium. Mandy has always strongly felt that it is only through face-to-face communication that relationship, conversation and discussion are humanised, and we treat people differently when they have a visible face and a vital presence.

News From Nowhere has managed to survive when most of the other radical bookstores in the city long ago fell by the wayside. Mandy puts this down to the more broad-minded and inclusive approach to the books they have stocked.  There was the sense that the shop provided a space where customers automatically felt the staff were on their team, whichever team that might be. People would come in the day after an election or a major event and be comfortable enough to engage the staff and other customers in often passionate discussion. There was a facility for customers to make themselves a cup of tea or coffee; the shop felt like home, a place where you could be yourself and nobody would try to force anything onto you.

Yet, the rise of social media as the primary platform for debate and dialogue has led, Mandy believes, to the 'flattening out' of discussion in such a way that the subtleties of human communication are lost, and with it the respect for other people, who tend to appear as faceless entities with one-dimensional views. Social media seems to foster a kind of tribalistic culture in which people tend to seek out only those whose views align with their own. Rather than coming into the shop to take part in a discussion in the way they might have done in the past, people are now more likely to take to social media to condemn, often facilitating a social media 'pile on' in the process. As a result, some topics have become almost too hot to discuss in an honest and open manner,  and there are now pressures to shut down debate when it involves edgy or contentious issues. Social media bubbles increasingly mean that people will no longer even look directly at source material; will no longer read anything which they believe to be 'not of their tribe', instead resorting to censure and, inevitably, misrepresentation. Mandy is not sure what sort of reception there would be today if, for example, they were to stock and promote the 'Satanic Verses' as they had done in the past. She suspects it may well now be considered a lot more controversial.

Another very contemporary trend which runs directly against everything Mandy has always fought for, is the attempted erasure of language as it relates to sex, especially the female sex, and to sexuality. As with the tradition of working class self-education and intellectualism, the women's movement was predicated on the ability to name and discuss one's situation, and that only by confronting that situation could you  claim your power. 

Stemming from the American, campus-formulated 'Queer Theory', formulated largely by academic, Judith Butler, which came into prominence in the late 1980s, there has grown a movement to "queer society". This is presented as a liberating and self-actualising way for 'gender, and sexually, non-conforming' people to present their 'true selves' and be accepted. Yet one of its effects is to erase the reality of, and the language used by other groups of people, and to make unsayable certain words. She notes, for example, that in more recent times when a new book by a lesbian author comes out, the publishing houses are now referring to her as a 'queer author', regardless of whether she identifies as 'queer' or not. The language that women, more generally, have used to describe themselves and name their experiences is being eroded. In addition, the word 'queer' is still felt by many gay men to be a term of abuse with which they certainly do not identify.

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Given the struggle for women's rights and greater equality for the female sex by previous generations, many young women now take for granted the gains made. For them it is now normal and natural to see women in positions of authority or power, or in occupations and lifestyles once largely closed to women. Mandy is concerned, though, at the way that young women are now steeped in a culture, especially a social media one, which is saturated with extreme pornography and violence, and in the way that it has become normal, even in Left and progressive circles to speak of 'sex work', in a way which she believes disguises the inherent exploitation of prostitution.

Mandy may be fast approaching retirement from the bookshop, but she in no way sees herself retiring from a life of deep engagement with the issues of the day, nor with any stepping back from community organisation and action. Campaigns and projects not only focused on women's rights, but also on issues to do with predatory landlords, and an immediate campaign against the up-coming arms fair at the Liverpool Convention Centre, will be occupying her time. Needless to say, it will be good for her to take a little time out just to relax and reflect on a life lived with honour and integrity, and true to the principles in which she was raised. She will be much missed in News From Nowhere, but somehow I'm sure that is not the last we'll be seeing from her.

Jane Anderson is a local photographer and former teacher who grew up in the City Region.

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Turning the lights back on

Glyn Mon Hughes

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When Covid first struck, nobody could have predicted the catastrophe it would inflict on the cultural sector worldwide.

What was thought to have been little more than a rather large blip similar to the annual appearance of a new strain of influenza turned into something way more serious, closing down massive sectors of the economy and driving many to the brink of oblivion. For the cultural sector, the outlook was dire. Museums, galleries, libraries, theatres, concert halls, music venues and leisure centres all closed. The Creative Industries Federation cited research that more than 400,000 UK jobs could be lost in 2020, with the nation’s creative industries losing £1.5bn a week in revenue.

However, as signs of conquering Covid become bit by bit more evident, the culture industry is slowly reopening in Liverpool and its environs. But how different will it be?

Liverpool, after all, is an internationally recognised ‘brand’ and many of its cultural offerings are globally recognised. Names such as Tate Liverpool, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, The Beatles, the Walker Art Gallery and dozens more are up there with cultural icons from cities on five continents. Things will, no doubt, change particularly when most restrictions are eased from 19 July. One of the many questions which remains unanswered, though, is whether people will come back to venues in the numbers who attended before March last year.

In March this year, a five-year plan was revealed to help rebuild the sector. The grandly named Liverpool City Region Cultural Compact Strategic Action Plan says it ‘recognises the key role that arts and culture play in the city’s economy and in supporting health and wellbeing as the City Region emerges from the pandemic’. It talked about the ability of recognising the evidence of the impact of the crisis, seen in the closure of venues and 3,500 redundancies in the first six months of the crisis. It added that ‘closure of music, entertainment and performing arts venues had a catastrophic effect on other parts of the supply chain, including production services, catering and travel companies, whose social and economic impact is immense’.

So, where next?

Prior to the pandemic, according to Culture Liverpool 57,000 people worked in the City Region’s cultural sector (or in associated jobs) – double the number estimated by the Office for National Statistics. Many of these jobs are unseen by both residents and visitors. They are the people who curate exhibitions in art galleries, who write the descriptive information on museum exhibits, who light the theatre, who collate and put out the music for orchestral musicians, who run the publicity machines to get people to the venues in the first place. That’s before all those who serve in theatre bars, museum coffee shops, art gallery shops and all the other support staff.

But many of those jobs have gone. Getting them back may be more of an uphill struggle than many realise.

The five-year plan has put three key strategies into place to ease the way along the path to recovery. Creative Communities will champion community-led transformation and develop assets within communities across the City Region. Creative People will support and facilitate artist-, practitioner- and community-led cultural and creative interventions with the City Region cultural programmes, while Creative Place will prioritise the influence and role of arts and culture and regeneration of the City Region.

The seriousness of the situation was revealed when National Museums Liverpool set up an appeal in order to avoid losing jobs. Donations from the public dropped 95%, since all seven venues attracted 200,000 visitors in 2020. The normal footfall tops 3m.

“We usually get £400,000 a year through donation boxes so you can see how devastating that is,” said Head of Development Rowena Dean. Towards the end of the year, around 100 jobs came under threat as the Museums’ total income fell by about £5.9m. There was funding from Government but that does not cover everything, with Dean revealing that, for every £1 which comes in grants, 45p needs to be raised locally – from shops, cafes and donations. “Even while we have not had visitors in the building, the work still goes on. We’ve still been feeding the fish, caring for the collections, planning exhibitions, looking after those buildings. So a huge amount has been going on.”

Theatres and music venues have been closed and, now that many may reopen again, audiences must be socially distanced. That means a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra can be attended by 300 people in the hall – which is about a sixth of the venue’s capacity. Liverpool Cathedral can accommodate only 200 in the vast central space – whether for a service or for a performance of some kind.

The Philharmonic, however, attracted national media attention for its innovative online offer. Concert-goers who could not attend the live event could pay £10 and watch a recording of the event as many times as they wished within 30 days. That helped the venue recoup some of the millions it lost in non-existent box office revenue - £2.5m, as reported in the Daily Telegraph in June 2020. That figure has surely rocketed since then. Social distancing not only restricts audience numbers but also the amount of musicians allowed on stage – a maximum of 35 at present.

Any choir – unless professional – cannot perform at present, so large organisations such as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir or the Liverpool Welsh Choral are silenced. That has led members from the thousands of other choral outfits nationwide to take to a frantic social media debate asking why singing is seen as highly dangerous, yet shouting or cheering at a sports event is perfectly acceptable. In all, something like 2m singers have been silenced nationwide since March 2020 as rehearsals and performances for all but a very limited group are banned.

The seriousness of the situation was revealed when National Museums Liverpool set up an appeal in order to avoid losing jobs. Donations from the public dropped 95%…

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According to a worried yet optimistic chief executive of the Phil, speaking to the Daily Telegraph a year ago, there are fears for the future. “The hope is that we come through this not only successfully, but strengthened,” said Michael Eakin, “because one of the things that gives me hope is that I can see that people can see the value of this when it’s not around.”

Liverpool’s music scene is, of course, far more than the Philharmonic. The M&S Bank Arena has seen its programmes decimated as have places such as the O2 Academy and the various Liverpool venues it manages, such as the Guild of Students or the Arts Club. The myriad other venues which make up what could be described as Liverpool’s gig economy have had to rein their respective programmes which means that it is not only large theatres with labour-intensive touring productions which have been affected but also everything else, right down to the folk duo playing in a street-corner pub who have seen their livelihoods virtually terminated.

The same goes for theatres and cinemas. The Playhouse can admit 150 patrons – normally 680 – while the Everyman sells 72 seats for each performance, instead of 405. Groups of cinemagoers must keep apart which, in turn, affects revenue. How all this will change after 19 July remains to be seen and plans so far appear sketchy.

Even outdoor events, such as the giant artworks planted around the city, part of Liverpool Biennial – the UK’s largest festival of contemporary art – came a cropper. Thousands of people turned up to see the installations which immediately attracted criticism because of a lack of social distancing. These were, of course, people venturing out for some sort of entertainment often for the first time in months, so they could hardly be blamed.

All is far from lost, though, and there are positive signs for the future. The Shakespeare North Playhouse opens in Prescot in summer 2022. The new 400-seat Tung Auditorium, in the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre on Grove Street, opens later this year and will become the home of the Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit, Ensemble 10/10. The Liverpool Theatre Festival will go ahead in September. A new chamber music festival has been set up in Wirral, and takes place this month. Add those – and many other events – into an incredibly vibrant cultural offering, and it is possible to take some comfort from the herculanean efforts made to keep the arts afloat.

Independent research commissioned by the Visitor Economy Team at Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership in 2018 showed that 67.3m people visited the region – 61m just for the day, and 5.5m as staying visitors. The economic value of the visitor economy had grown 5% per year for five years and stood at just under £5bn pumped into the local economy. Somewhat ominously, Peter Sandman, Head of Visitor Economy for the LEP spoke of underlying concerns which could hamper growth in the next five years. “In 2018, Liverpool slipped from fifth to sixth place in terms of popularity with overseas visitors,” he said. “Similarly, the reliance on domestic markets to sustain this level of performance while the implications on border controls as the UK leaves the EU for key inbound markets may also affect performance.”

That view must, surely, be radically different now. Quite how the City Region rebuilds its cultural offer remains to be seen. Tentative steps are being made on the footpath back to normality for the formidable culture offering in Liverpool City Region. But how are we going to countenance the new normal?

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