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

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.

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.

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.

Share this article

What do you think? Let us know.

Write a letter for our Short Reads section, join the debate via Twitter or Facebook or just drop us a line at team@liverpolitan.co.uk