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Cities of Culture: what use is the accolade 'European City of Culture'? Not much, when that city continues to neglect its historic buildings, as Glasgow so shamefully has. Will Liverpool do better?
Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Gavin Stamp
It passes comprehension why any city should want to undergo the ordeal of hosting the Olympic Games. The event causes much inconvenience to its citizens and leaves the city saddled with massive debts as well as a handful of re usable sports facilities. And the kudos is dubious. There are, however, civic titles that do seem to bring benefits as well as prestige, and the principal one these days is to be European City of Culture. This year it is Genoa, a happy choice given that city's architectural and artistic riches and the strenuous attempts made to clean up and revitalise an ancient but somewhat seedy port.
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As each country in the European Union takes its turn to have a City of Culture, Britain has had its candidates: Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008. To the average tourist or the blinkered metropolitan, neither city might seem as cultural as, say, Bath or York, but in fact both cities have very well-stocked galleries and museums as well as magnificent architecture (most of it nineteenth century). But it is certainly true that the European City of Culture award has become closely connected with urban regeneration and the chance of inward investment. And Liverpool, once an economic and political basket-case best known for labour unrest as well as the Fab Four, has certainly made great efforts to recover.
It is, however, worth asking whether the City of Culture accolade is always an unmixed blessing, for some in Liverpool were apprehensive when their city defeated Newcastle in the bid for the title. Local councillors tend to have a rather different view of culture from civilised citizens, and the title can seem a sort of fig-leaf behind which undesirable commercial developments can be encouraged. An admirable local pressure-group, Save Our City, points out that remarkable early Georgian buildings in Liverpool's Rope Walks quarter are still giving way to new commercial developments and apartment blocks, with the encouragement of the council. Cheering as it is to see magnificent but long-derelict warehouses by the docks being converted into flats, it is depressing to find that the attrition of Georgian Liverpool continues.
Another problem of being a City of Culture is that it encourages the show off 'landmark' building designed by an architectural superstar. Architecture, like other areas of life, has been undermined by our celebrity culture and each city thinks it needs a building with an internationally-known brand label. So Brighton wants towers by Frank Gehry, Salford has the Imperial War Museum by Daniel Libeskind and Edinburgh can boast the notorious parliament building by the late Enric Miralles. As for Liverpool, there was a now-defunct scheme for a shopping centre designed by Philip Johnson. Then came the proposal to build a tautologically gratuitous 'Fourth Grace' overlooking the Mersey near Pierhead, and of the several designs submitted in competition by big names, one by Will Alsop was chosen. Known as 'The Cloud', this was a sort of big blob on Alsop's trademark stilts. Behind were to be two wobbly towers of apartments, while the flat public space by the Mersey was to be enlivened with giant ripples.
Mercifully, this project has now been abandoned. It was consistently unpopular with the Liverpool public (when asked) and had no easily definable purpose other than symbolic. As Liverpool has, in truth, built little of any merit since Herbert Rowse's Art Deco buildings of the 1930s, perhaps The Cloud should have been applauded as an contemporary attempt to emulate the assertiveness of the existing 'Three Graces' (the Royal Liver, the Cunard and the Port of Liverpool Buildings), but its inchoate pretentiousness was quite alien to the monumental opulence of the Edwardian buildings. Certainly Liverpool has an architectural tradition which verges on the megalomaniac--think of the unbuilt design by Lutyens for a Roman Catholic Cathedral that was going to be bigger than St Peter's in Rome--but that ambition was based on commercial wealth as well as civic pride. That wealth has evaporated. If Liverpool is a city of culture, the inescapable fact is that its culture is largely a legacy of the past, and the city's magnificent buildings seem like the product of an entirely different civilisation to that of today.
The same is true of Glasgow, which was the first city to make positive use of the European City of Culture award and change its image. It already had Kelvingrove and the Burrell as well as a magnificent surviving collection of urban and suburban Victorian and Edwardian buildings (as well as a medieval cathedral), but it was perceived by both locals and outsiders as a dark, depressed former industrial city. 1990 helped change all that, and visitors, having seen some cleaned-up sandstone buildings and noticed smart shops, assumed the place had been transformed. But has it? The City fathers still bend over backwards to accommodate commercial interests; new buildings--commercial and residential--of abysmal quality are allowed, and the old are still allowed to decay and tumble. Glasgow has always had a strong American character, reflected in particular in its early-twentieth-century architecture, but today much of the city looks like parts of Detroit.
