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Liverpool: Capital of Culture
Contemporary Review, May, 2004 by Richard Whittington-Egan
There is the mighty Exchange, with its vast quadrangle, known as 'The Flags', where the cotton men used to pace up and down, conducting their deals. And there are the twin cathedrals; Sir Gilbert Giles Scott's towering and magnificent Anglican Liverpool Cathedral, quarried out of Woolton's red sandstone, and the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King--'Paddy's Wigwam'--at either end of a street named Hope. These are all brick-and-mortar testaments to the city's success.
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And there are more recent testimonials to Liverpool's greatness: the Mersey Tunnel; the Beacon, a mushroom-topped stalk, similar to London's Post Office Tower, that thrusts its challenging head 450 feet up into the Liverpool sky; and the thriving Liverpool Airport. The construction of the riverside promenade at Otterspool is another latter-day embellishment that has contributed to Liverpool's continuing upgrading excellence. As for some of the more outlandish manifestations of 'futuristic modernity', inverted egg boxes and the like, which have raised their brazen glass and concrete faces to the Mersey sky, one nurtures (shall we say doubt?) severe misgivings as to their permanent aesthetic value.
The dismal acres of slum property that festered about the desolate wastes of world-notorious Scotland Road, the legacy of Liverpool's failures, which used to exist in cynical, cheek-by-jowl proximity to the city's totems of its success, have all been swept away by the cleansing twentieth century's post-war broom, and spanking new housing stands proud and fresh new grass grows green in the place of the old stained cobbles.
Life in Liverpool has never been easy. Its prosperity, founded on salt, slaves, and the sea, and expanded through cotton and corn, developed against a stark industrial landscape and a harshly realistic intellectual climate. For all that, its citizens possess, are possessed by, an odd vein of laconic humour, an acerbic, self-mocking, native wit: a vein exploited so successfully by such comic exports as Robb Wilton, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Tarbuck, Ken Dodd, Paul O'Grady aka Lily Savage, and Ricky Tomlinson. Merseyside should, says Ken Dodd, be known as Mirthyside!
Sons and daughters of Liverpool have reached eminence in the more serious departments of life, too. Strangely, with the exception of Nicholas Monsarrat and his novel, The Cruel Sea, none of these has been connected with the ocean-going life. There have been politicians like Gladstone; literary figures like William Roscoe, Felicia Hemans, Mrs. Craik (author of John Halifax, Gentleman), Augustine Birrell, Arthur Hugh Clough, Richard Le Gallienne, and Wilfrid Owen; artists like George Stubbs; sculptors like John Gibson, John Deare, and the outstandingly talented modernist, Arthur Dooley; musicians like Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Simon Rattle; medical trail-blazers like Hugh Owen Thomas, a founding father of British orthopaedics; shrewd legal intelligence like F. E. Smith, the first Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Justice Lynskey, and one of the first women High Court judges, Rose Heilbron; commercial geniuses like Viscount Woolton, and great social reformers like Anne Clough, organiser of poor relief, Eleanor Rathbone, an early champion of family allowances, and Margaret Beavan, whose protracted efforts in the cause of child welfare were to secure for her the ultimate honour of becoming Liverpool's--and Britain's--first woman Lord Mayor.
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