Vanished. The city that disappeared from the map

Jon Egan

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When I was a young child my parents bought me a truly wondrous gift ‐ an illuminated globe of the world. It was a magical object with the power to inspire and enrapture, but it also taught me two important, but hitherto unknown, facts about the world.

The first was that my country, Britain, was very small. So small in fact that it was only possible to fit the names of two cities onto this tiny morsel of irradiated pinkness. The second lesson, that followed ineluctably from the first, was that my city clearly was important. As far as the world was concerned Britain could be adequately represented by only two places – London, its capital, and Liverpool, its global gateway. We were on the map, or at least we were then.

A few years ago, when passing through the John Lewis department store, I stopped to browse at a selection of highly impressive (but sadly not illuminated) globes. Britain remained within its familiar miniscule dimensions, but the cartographers had skilfully managed to inscribe on its terrain the names of not two, but five significant British cities – London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. It merely confirmed what I had long suspected ‐ we were no longer important.

There is of course a serious point to this parable, and it is that we are not simply absent from physical maps, but also from the conceptual and metaphorical maps that shape policy and influence important decision‐making. Despite the incessant hype to the contrary, data from the Centre For Cities suggests we are making little progress in closing the performance gap with competing and emerging economic centres.

A well‐placed insider described Liverpool as “the city that has forgotten how to conjugate in the future tense.”

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We have become peripheral ‐ largely outside the thought processes and priorities of political decision‐makers, investors, media commentators and influencers. Addressing and reversing this process – or putting Liverpool ‘back on the map’ ‐ has been, or certainly should have been, a guiding principle for our political and civic leaders over the last four decades. With a City Council mired in crisis and multiple criminal investigations, and the most recent State of The City Region (2015) report presenting a picture of chronic levels of ill‐health, worklessness and deprivation, it’s clear we still have a very long way to go.

For anyone wondering if the economic picture has improved since that last report was published, check out the tale of woe in the new Shaping Futures report, The Demographics and Educational Disadvantage in the Liverpool City Region (2021).

My own involvement with efforts to reposition and rehabilitate Liverpool’s external image has been deeply frustrating and depressingly circular. When in 2002 Liverpool was bidding to become European Capital of Culture, bid supremo, Bob Scott, suffered a heart attack in the closing stages of the process. City Council CEO, Sir David Henshaw took control of the bid, and invited myself as director of the agency that had devised the bid’s World in One City branding, and the Lib Dem’s political strategist, Bill le Breton, to review the campaign and communication messaging. This was an interesting and instructive exercise. Talking to people very close to the then Culture Minister, Tessa Jowell, and contacts equally close to the leading members of the judging panel, the feedback on Liverpool’s campaign pitch was not entirely encouraging. One of the most memorable comments from a very well‐placed insider described Liverpool as “the city that has forgotten how to conjugate in the future tense.” In a competitive process that was supposedly about regeneration and the role of culture in stimulating economic transformation, Liverpool had, until that point, focused almost entirely on showcasing its “great cultural heritage” and waxing nostalgically about its past glories as the Second City of Empire.

A radical rethink was needed, and fast if the city was to be ready in time for the judges’ second visit. We’d need a whole new bid narrative, rigorously disciplined messaging and a tightly scripted programme to change hearts and minds. The new story would be about the future ‐ a city applying its creative energies to embrace cutting‐edge culture, commerce and technology – and it worked. The only problem was that having won, we quickly abandoned the brave, new language and future‐focused vision. 2008 became, as Phil Redmond, Capital of Culture’s, last‐minute appointee as Creative Director, once testified, the proverbial “Big Scouse wedding” with Uncle Ringo on the karaoke.

Consigned to the second tier of UK cities, Liverpool had somehow become pigeon‐holed as economically and maybe even culturally irrelevant.

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Fast forward to 2010 and the festival’s former marketing supremo, Kris Donaldson, arrives back in Liverpool to take up a new position as the city’s Destination Manager, only to discover that the promise of Capital of Culture as a platform to radically re‐position Liverpool had largely been squandered. Research commissioned by economic regeneration company, Liverpool Vision had suggested the city was perceived as quirky and entertaining, but news of its “regeneration miracle” was still a dimly perceived rumour amongst the nation’s influencers and decision‐makers. Without any significant expectation of success, I joined forces with journalist, political campaigner and former BBC Radio Merseyside broadcaster, Liam Fogarty and two local creatives (Jon Barraclough and Chris Blackhurst) to pitch for the city re‐branding brief that emerged from Kris’s sobering discovery. Our proposal was less of a pitch and more an indulgent exercise in provocation. Having initially been sifted out of the process by a dutiful underling at Liverpool Vision, Kris reinstated us onto the shortlist for interview. Our presentation began with a miscellany of quotes from ministerial speeches, broadsheet Op‐Eds and the authoritative musings of a polyglot of professional commentators. They were all opining on the need for economic re‐balancing and the incipient promise of that great new hope, the Northern Powerhouse. But amongst their mountain of words, one city was consistently and depressingly absent, and it was of course, Liverpool.

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Permanently consigned to the second tier of UK cities, Liverpool had somehow become pigeon‐holed as economically and maybe even culturally irrelevant. The bold promise of 2008 had been replaced by fatalistic resignation, punctuated by occasional blasts of delusional bombast and mawkish nostalgia. As a result, Liverpool ceased to be discussed when the adults were in the room.

Winning the brief, with an ominous feeling of déjà vu and an almost Sisyphean sense of futility, we set out to equip the city once again with a future tense vocabulary and a story that would surprise and challenge the preconceptions of those we most needed to convince and convert. But like an aging soap star struggling with new scripts and plot lines, the city inevitably lapsed into its well‐worn phrases and crowd‐pleasing clichés. The It’s Liverpool campaign became less of a device to “package surprises” and orientate future ambition, but more an excuse to recycle familiar messages and tell the world what they already knew.

Fast forward another seven years to 2017 and I am sitting in the campaign HQ of the man bidding to become the first Liverpool City Region Mayor, the Labour MP for Walton, Steve Rotheram. We are discussing how to frame a transformational narrative for his soon to be launched election campaign. I find myself agreeing with him that devolution is the last chance saloon for a city (or City Region) being left behind by its competitors and too often ignored by those whose judgments and decisions shape its future. I think we may even have used the phrase “putting Liverpool back on the map” as shorthand for a project to reassert the city’s status as a Premier League player (forgive the clumsy football cliché) ensuring it once again became an integral component in the national economic narrative. I was increasingly hopeful that Steve’s refreshingly insightful analysis of the city’s deficiencies could be the prequal to a visionary devolution project. Four years on, and the consensus is that our Metro Mayor has yet to reset Liverpool’s trajectory or restore our status as an important economic or creative asset for the UK. If devolution was the last chance saloon, then the barman, with one eye on the clock, appears to be reaching ominously for the towels.

Four years on, and the consensus is that our Metro Mayor has yet to reset Liverpool’s trajectory or restore our status as an important economic or creative asset for the UK.

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The initial stimulus for this article was the then imminent launch of Rotheram’s re‐election campaign in March 2020, before, of course, normality was put on hold by Covid and what we imagined were urgent political challenges dissolved into irrelevancy in the face of a global human tragedy. That earlier, never published version of this article, drafted in the format of an open letter to the Metro Mayor‐elect, was triggered by a series of events that acted as timely reminders of our reduced circumstances. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne had used his resignation as Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership to restate his vision of a rebalanced Britain where the “great cities of the north” (predictably we weren’t name‐checked) counterbalanced the wealth and prestige of London. But the tipping point for me, however, came on a day when Rotheram launched the latest phase of the Mersey Tidal Energy study, part of his big plan to recast the Liverpool City Region as an exemplar for sustainability and innovation. He might as well as not have bothered for all the attention it got. Instead, on that same day, a Simon Jenkins’ Guardian Op‐Ed calling for economic rebalancing, once again seemed to have been drafted with a map of Northern England where Liverpool was inexplicably absent. Twelve years after Capital of Culture and four years after devolution, the sad fact is that we are still not on the map.

The constructive, and at the time topical, section of the article was a positively motivated attempt to offer some suggestions for Rotheram’s critically important second term. Not that I thought I was especially qualified to provide such advice, but more to help stimulate a bigger, smarter and more diverse political conversation – in fact, the kind of energised democracy that devolution was designed to foster.

In a strange way Covid has given us more time, and an even more urgent imperative to take stock of where our City Region is heading. We need to be more radical, more imaginative and more willing to challenge the myths and shibboleths that have constrained thinking, blighted ambition and stunted potential.

So, in that spirit, here are five ideas about how we might help to remake and re‐position our city.

1. Appoint smart people – preferably from places more successful than Liverpool

Scouse exceptionalism and insularity are tragically compounded by a debilitating public sector culture. As the employer of last resort, our public institutions have evolved a defensive protectionist mindset that all too often fosters inertia and promotes mediocrity. I’m not necessarily advocating a Dominic Cummings‐style cull of staff and an invitation to assorted geeks, weirdos and misfits to replace them, but for devolution to make a difference it needs to be delivered by different people with higher levels of ambition, achievement and creativity. The kind of people capable of imagining possibilities beyond the recently launched hotchpotch of reheated pet projects and lame platitudes which masquerade as the city’s “transformational vision” for a post‐Covid future. What we need more than anything are people with a track record of delivery in a city or City Region that is palpably more successful than Liverpool. To extend the football analogy, we need a Klopp rather than a Hodgson; an Ancelotti or Benitez, not a Big Sam.

Rather than a being a dynamic galvanising body with a transformational agenda, our post‐devolution governance has somehow coalesced into an unhappy amalgam of Merseytravel and the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) – a stifling bureaucracy with a highly developed aversion to any form of risk or innovation. For the next term to be successful, our Metro Mayor needs to transform the calibre, capacity and orientation of the Combined Authority. It remains to be seen whether the new Head of Paid Service can create a different dynamic and organisational culture or can inculcate the expansive perspective that has thus far been absent from our devolution project.

2. Have a story that makes sense, and then stick to it

Liverpool’s tragedy is that it is famous but no longer important. It means people already have an idea about who we are, what we’re good at and what we’re not so good at – like having an economy. The Combined Authority issued a brief to create a new City Region narrative, but the process seemed to be firmly in the hands of people who were too deeply immersed in the old dispensation, and too easily seduced by trite PR‐speak and marketing gobbledygook. So, here’s a radical suggestion – and one in the spirit of recommendation 1 – let’s appoint a world‐class creative with an international reputation to help us frame and articulate what this City Region is about. There are extraordinary flowerings of innovation and excellence here, but they currently look more like an advent calendar than a big picture. Rather than designing another procurement process and issuing yet another brief, why don’t we appoint somebody of the calibre of Bruce Mau, the Canadian branding and design genius? Let’s get a fresh set of eyes to re‐imagine the planet’s first “World City” and the place that globalised popular culture. Unless we can answer the existential question – what is Liverpool for? – we cannot hope to persuade people that we are still relevant today.

3. Get out there and spread the message

OK, I understand the electoral context and the reason why it was attractive for Steve Rotheram to launch the Tidal Energy study ‐ and a raft of more recent policy announcements ‐ in his own back yard, but guess what? No‐one east of Newton‐le‐Willows is taking any notice. The world is not watching or listening to Liverpool, so we need to get out there and tell them. That means doing the big announcements in London or wherever they’ll get noticed. It means having a Metro Mayor who is prepared and confident to do the awkward, challenging and high‐risk national media gigs. It means being willing to get on planes and fly to the four corners of the earth to spread the Liverpool (City Region) message. The great thing about not being weighed down with a plethora of statutory and service delivery responsibilities, is that a Metro Mayor can be our foreign minister, our ambassador – the kind of advocate and propagandist that this place has lacked and still so badly needs.

4. Find the causes and campaigns that make the story sticky and believable

As Boris Johnson so ruthlessly demonstrated in the Brexit and General Election campaigns, the world, the media ‐ and especially social media ‐ abhor complexity. Messages need to be sharp, self‐explanatory and sticky. They need to reveal and illuminate the bigger picture, and have the power to vanquish the myths, clichés and stereotypes that continue to blight perceptions of the City Region. We need to be able to definitively answer some key questions. What are the three most important ideas that can be the foundation of a new economic identity that gives our City Region a competitive edge and compelling new story? How do they connect? Who will they effect and why is it absolutely vital and non‐negotiable that we deliver on them? Whatever these ideas prove to be, underpinning them is a very simple ambition; to make Liverpool not just relevant, but also important – somewhere that is vital to the vision of a rebalanced, prosperous and successful UK.

5. Look for short cuts – if necessary, borrow someone else’s reputation and influence

It’s possibly the quickest win and the hardest pill to swallow, but we do have one big asset on our doorstep that could and should be mobilised to our advantage. George Osborne once observed that Manchester and Leeds city centres are closer to each other than the two ends of London’s Central tube line. Perhaps, from the distant vantage point of the Evening Standard editor’s office, he is unable to see the inconveniently positioned mountains or the fact that Liverpool and Manchester are even closer together! We even share two centuries of economic interdependence, and between us possess all of the attributes that sociologist, Saskia Sassen identifies as the defining characteristics of a global city. Abandoning football terrace rivalry to position Liverpool City Region closer to its burgeoning neighbour is both logical and necessary. An integrated transport authority, a shared policy unit and a merged LEP are all ways in which Liverpool City Region could begin to reposition itself within an expanded urban economy with the scale and asset base to counter‐balance London. Let’s not be constrained by redundant mindsets or arbitrary administrative boundaries. Liverpool – and Birkenhead – more than anywhere else can claim to have invented the template for modern civic governance in Britain, so why not pioneer new and liberating models designed to deliver the levelling‐up economic agenda, that will otherwise remain pious rhetoric?

Of course, these suggestions were offered in the confident expectation that the Metro Mayoral election was a mere procedural formality. Not even the implosion of Mayor Joe Anderson’s city mayoralty, the Caller Report and the national party investigation into Liverpool Labour were able to dent Rotheram’s majority. Labour’s almost Belarussian control of the City Region, and the fatalistic impotence of a fractured opposition, leaves us with a hollowed‐out politics where, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of Independent candidate Stephen Yip, the impetus for an inclusive civic discourse is blunted by establishment complacency and partisan insularity. A competitive electoral democracy, intelligent media scrutiny and strong independent civic voices (rather than meek subservience to the local state) are the prerequisites for energised politics and the possibility of a visionary civic project. So maybe the big question isn’t simply about what Steve Rotheram and Joanne Anderson need to do next, but how do we make space for genuinely transformational alternatives that might help Liverpool regain its former economic prestige and put us back on the map.

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: UK capital of computer games

Mark Butler

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In a significant piece of regional business news, global consumer technology giant Sony have announced their acquisition of Liverpool-based games studio, Firesprite (8th Sept 2021). Which raises the question, should we treat this development with excitement or an impending sense of doom? We’ve been here before…

Sony, of course, already has a presence in the city, dating back to 1993 when it bought out Psygnosis, probably the region’s most well-known developer, notable for scoring gaming hits on the Atari and Amega ST systems. Under Sony’s wing, but still retaining a degree of independence, the same team brought us the seminal Wipeout series of games for the PlayStation. Eventually, Psygnosis were rebranded as part of SCE Worldwide Studios.

In 2012 though, Sony closed their Liverpool studio, retaining studios instead in the South East, although they did thankfully maintain a presence at Wavertree Technology Park, managing business areas like testing, validation and localisation for games produced elsewhere. This meant it remained a significant local employer with around 500 staff. But what was going to happen to all the game-makers? Fortunately, after the closure of Sony’s Liverpool studio, there was no desire to give up. Five of its former employees including Managing Director Graeme Ankers and Lee Carus as Art Director, immediately banded together to found Firesprite and it has done rather well. Since launching, the company has grown rapidly and now employs 250 people, making it a significant city centre tech industry employer. Yet, unless you were paying close attention, you could be forgiven for having missed it. Firesprite’s success seems to have been by and large missed by local politicians and media.

Now that things have come full circle and Sony has acquired Firesprite, this could potentially be a worry for the local digital sector. Beyond Liverpool, Sony has form for closing studios, shutting down Evolution Studios in Runcorn in 2016, Guerilla Cambridge in 2017 and Sony’s own Manchester studio in 2020. Games can be a sink or swim business. Could history once again repeat itself and the jobs at Firesprite move elsewhere? Hopefully not and the signs so far are good, with seemingly several new games in the pipeline for Firesprite under Sony. A more positive narrative is that this combined business of Sony’s existing operations in the city and Firesprite means Sony Interactive Entertainment now employs approximately 750 people in Liverpool, split between Sony’s new city centre office in the former Liverpool Echo building and Firesprite’s Fleet Street office. This at a stroke makes Sony one of the larger employers in the city centre and one of the largest tech employers in the region. Arguably it puts Liverpool at the heart of Sony’s European interactive entertainment business. This is something local leaders and the press should be shouting from the rooftops about.

It’s not so great a leap to imagine the whole operation combined into the former Liverpool Echo complex, which still has empty space, including the old print hall which, with enough investment and creative thinking, could be converted into a bold games studio complex. Imagine seeing SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE lit up in big illuminated letters from your ship on the Mersey. That would be a big sign, pun intended, that Liverpool is a city of the future.

Interactive entertainment is one of Liverpool’s economic success stories… but you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a passing mention of it in local economic development documents.

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It’s not all about Sony though by any means. Another major studio, Lucid Games, employs around 150 people in its Baltic Triangle base and there are a variety of other interactive entertainment firms of various sizes and specialisms in the region including Milky Tea, Ripstone, Wushu, Draw & Code, Cosmonaut and Starship amongst others. One of the few big foreign direct investment successes for Liverpool in recent years was Avalanche Studios of Sweden opening a Liverpool studio in 2020 to go with its existing operations in Stockholm, Malmo and New York.

So interactive entertainment really is one of Liverpool’s economic successes stories and a major unique selling point. The city is one of only a relatively small number of locations in the UK that can be said to be a centre for the industry. Yet, despite this decades-long strength in the gaming sector, local authorities seem to have done little to promote it over the years. This is especially strange for a high growth industry which creates well paid, rewarding (if sometimes intense) creative jobs, and one with relatively low barriers to entry for young trainees. That said, one important public investment in the sector locally has been The Studio School in Baltic Triangle, which helps prep young people to enter the industry.

More could be done though. But first our city leaders and those organisations responsible for driving investment into the City Region need to step up and recognise the golden opportunity that this sector represents. Despite the fact that the sector is already successful and growing, you would be hard-pressed to find anything more than a passing mention of it in local economic development documents, let alone on front pages where it deserves to be. Interactive entertainment should be just as high a priority for the region as the port and tourism. The games industry is a credit to the region and for that we should thank those working within it. The time is now for more public sector effort to back this up.

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Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle district

At the moment, Liverpool City Council’s recent draft cultural strategy barely even mentions games, while it mentions the film industry repeatedly. The local Liverpool City Region Growth Hub makes a better stab at things with its LCR Tech initiative promoting the sector, yet it seems interactive entertainment has been siloed within ‘tech’ rather than being considered as one of the City Region’s cultural as well as technological strengths. Given that the walls between film, games, events, online content and other forms of art, culture and entertainment are collapsing rapidly, this seems short-sighted. Interactive entertainment is as much as part of the Liverpool City Region ‘culture’ sector as the film industry. I would argue more so, as the creative leadership of these games is in Liverpool, whereas the majority of filming in Liverpool is location shooting for projects led from elsewhere. Why doesn’t the Liverpool Film Office expand its remit to all forms of digital entertainment, with some new game sector experienced staff recruited to help grow the industry locally? Such an investment would pay for itself very quickly many times over.

We should shout about the success of this sector in the region more, but more also needs to be done to ensure Liverpool doesn’t lose its competitive advantage in this global industry. The city has already lost some of its advantage in the much more lauded film sector. Despite the city being one of the most filmed in the UK for decades, it is now far behind other areas in the development of film studios. In the time Liverpool has been discussing developing Littlewoods Studios, numerous film studio projects have sprung up across the UK, some of them even going from planning to fully opening in that time. Belfast alone has had permanent, large-scale sound studios for over ten years and is expanding aggressively, whereas Liverpool is yet to complete its ‘pop up’ Depot film studios and with no start date yet announced for the main Littlewoods project.

In contrast, the games industry in Liverpool is already up and running, innovating and growing as one of the biggest clusters of its kind in the UK. Today, concepts for digital interactive experiences created and developed by professionals in Liverpool are being enjoyed worldwide. Yet, it would be easy enough to lose this advantage without the right support and promotion. A few years ago, the sector came fairly close to exiting the city when the two largest studios (Sony and Bizarre Creations) pulled down the shutters in quick succession. Contributors to Liverpolitan have spoken to games industry insiders in years past, who felt the region’s authorities were not then placing enough importance on supporting the sector, taking it for granted, while at the same time Greater Manchester was forging ahead developing MediaCityUK and attracting digital investment globally.

Perhaps things are better now, since the creation of the City Region Combined Authority. Yet even there, the sector struggles to receive the same sort of attention as other ‘designated economic growth areas’ such as green energy, modular construction and advanced manufacturing. While these are all important sectors, the region needs to face up to the fact that, in those sectors, we’re up against equally strong, if not stronger, offers from other areas like Yorkshire and the North East. Yet the Liverpool City Region has a real competitive advantage in interactive entertainment arguably now unmatched in the UK outside of London and its satellite, Guildford. Aside from the well paid employment and the training and advancement opportunities the sector offers for local young people, the opportunity for further re-purposing of unused former industrial space in the city – always popular for studios – is another benefit. Not to mention the fact that, while the sector may not attract tourists, games are globally cool and a brilliant marketing opportunity for the city that is contemporary rather than historic.

LCR has a golden opportunity with interactive entertainment and it cannot afford to miss this chance again.

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Make no mistake, high growth in this area could be transformative for the region. You only have to look at Montreal, Canada for an example. In the 1990s, Montreal was struggling from decline in its manufacturing industries. (sound familiar?) Ubisoft was attracted to open the first real games studio in the region in an old industrial building in the city, starting with 50 employees in 1997. At the time, a much smaller operation than Sony in Liverpool.

From that small beginning, Ubisoft Montreal now employs 3,500 people and is one of the largest games studios in the world. Many other studios have followed their lead to set up shop in the region including Electronic Arts, Eidos Interactive, THQ and Warner Bros. This was achieved by strong public and private collaboration, notably with also significant national support from the Canadian Government. Montreal is now the fifth largest games industry city in the world and the sector has spilled out into the wider region, now employing around 11,000 people across Quebec. Imagine if the games industry in Liverpool in the 1990s had been nurtured in the same way? Oh what could have been…

Similarly, in Malmo, Sweden, a former shipbuilding city which had experienced severe economic decline (sound familiar?), the growth of a games industry has also had a huge impact. Malmo is now home to over 30 studios, has its own cross-city sector trade organisation, Game City, and training institution, Game Assembly. Malmo pitches itself as the European capital of games.

Why shouldn’t the Liverpool City Region have the same level of ambition with this sector? LCR has a golden opportunity with interactive entertainment and it cannot afford to miss this chance again. So we’re laying down a challenge to our regional leaders: prioritise digital interactive entertainment in terms of publicity, grant funding, space allocation, development support and political will. This is a call for local authorities to work hand-in-hand with the region’s interactive entertainment sector and throw their shoulders fully behind Liverpool as the UK capital of games!

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