Liverpool: Capital of Culture

Richard Whittington-Egan

IT came to many people as a very great surprise, not only that Liverpool could be considered as a serious contender for the title of 'European Capital of Culture 2008', but that the city that straddles the Mersey should actually have won it. To me, as a Liverpudlian born and bred, it came as a matter of pride, but no great shock, for I have always been aware of the fact that Liverpool, city of change and challenge, has been a culturally pioneering place. Possibly because of its essentially immigrant origin, it has always displayed an exceptionally strong willingness to experiment. Side by side with the ruthless slavers and hard-headed and flint-hearted merchants, there march through the pages of Liverpool's history powerful men with noble souls and tender social consciences, whose achievements in the field of culture and caring for the welfare of society were legion.

As far back as 1971, Liverpool founded the world's first school for the blind. In 1842, it installed the country's first public baths and wash-houses. In 1847, Liverpool's Dr. William Henry Duncan became Britain's first Medical Officer of Health. And District Nursing, the N.S.P.C.C., and the R.S.P.C.A. all originated in 'the grimy city on the Mersey'.

It is only to be expected that so enlightened a community would give due weight to education: Liverpool's School of Civic Design was the first in the world, and its School of Tropical Medicine was the first in the country. Its Architectural School has long held the reputation of being one of the foremost in Britain, its Medical Faculty is held in universally high esteem, and the University Physics Department made vital contributions in the years of the rising science of the atom.

This progressive attitude has been well maintained in the sphere of commerce. It was here, in Church Street, that the American 'Nothing over Sixpence' store opened its first British branch, and in Ranelagh Street, in 1856, David Lewis created the first people's department store of its kind in the country. It was Liverpool that, in 1715, dug one of the first commercial wet docks in the world; in 1830, established the world's first passenger railway; in 1893, opened the world's first electric overhead railway, soon christened 'the dockers' umbrella'--the demolition of which, back in 1957, was referred to as 'a piece of civic vivisection'.

And that is another thing for which Liverpool is distinguished. Oddly enough, a city that has always been almost fanatically interested in its own history, it has continually contrived to find reasons for tearing down anything that threatens to become a historic monument. That is why you will search Liverpool in vain for any building older than the Church of Our Lady and St. Nicholas, known as the Mariners' Church, the Town Hall, or the Bluecoat Chambers, and none of these is much more than a couple of hundred years old. It follows that the prevailing architectural style of the city is Victorian, with the occasional relief of some clean-lined fragment of the Georgian.

The civic buildings are functional in an uninspired way. The 'temples of commerce' in the downtown business quarter are, with a few noteworthy exceptions and modernistic additions, unrelievedly gloomy examples of a building tradition which tended to confuse the fussily ornate with the decorative, and, intending to impress, succeeded only in oppressing. The main shopping thoroughfares of Lord, Church, and Bold Streets, achieve, in spite of a dearth of any really good buildings, and a hotchpotch of eccentric styles, quite a pleasing effect.

Not that Liverpool is without its architectural splendours. Rodney Street--the street of doctors--though nineteenth century in origin, breathes all the grace and charm of the eighteenth. Gladstone was born at No. 62. There are, too, scattered about, secluded squares and dignified streets of fine old houses; but the paint flakes, the plaster drops, and neglect tenants too many of them. Once the proud residences of merchant princes and princelings, they have fallen sadly from grace. In the curve of a fanlight, the solid assurance of a pillared portico, echoes of a former elegance linger, but where spacious lives were once lived now huddles of poverty exist. Immigrants from more distant shores than those of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have made them their own. Bombed out of Pitt Street more than sixty years ago, the Chinese have long since taken gentle root in what used to be one of Liverpool's loveliest areas--Nelson Street and Great George Square. And in houses which, ironically, once belonged to the prosperous slave-masters and captains of the slave-ships, West African and West Indian settlers and their generations of Liverpool-born descendants dwell in peaceful freedom.

The heart of Liverpool does not beat in the center of the city. The shopping streets, the brooding commercial quarter, the neon-lit pleasure-ways of pubs, clubs, theatres, and the odd surviving cinema, all these are only arteries--main arteries, perhaps, but still arteries. The life-blood of Liverpool pulses from the waterfront, and the springs that feed it are the Mersey's tidal streams.

Behind a massive river-wall, lapped in whispers by the murky waves, is a vast open space that smells of seaweed, tar, and salted mud--the Pier Head. The western limit of this windy plaza is the river itself, with its half-mile stretch of landing-stage, boasted the biggest floating structure in the world, and its bustle of pert little ferry-boats which, dodging like terriers between the prows of the big ships, carry their human cargoes over the water to and from the dormitory towns of the Cheshire shore. To the east it is bounded by what is probably the best-known landfall in the world--the sky-scraping Royal Liver Building, with its masthead eyrie of 'liver' birds, the solid, foursquare, down-to-earth Cunard Building, and the skittishly cupolaed Dock Board Offices Building, with, solemnly presiding over all, the black fret-work lantern of the Mariners' Church.

Here, on this Tom Tiddler's ground, poised between land and water, is the key to the whole character of Liverpool, for nowhere can one long forget that it is a city and a port. Southampton may have stolen much of the glamour of the big liners, the passenger traffic, but the merchant-venturer romance of the sea belongs to Liverpool, cannot be wrested from its historic grasp, clings still about quays where the pungency of eastern spices, mingling with the gentler, less sharp, fragrance of oranges out of Africa, seems yet to perfume the air.

It is here that Liverpool garnered the harvest of the Seven Seas, stowing it in gloomy cyclopean warehouses--one of which, the Stanley Tobacco Warehouse, is the largest on earth--ranged bleakly along the river lip.

Liverpool is distinctly cosmopolitan and has been aptly described as 'the provincial metropolis of the United Kingdom'. Many factors have contributed to this, the chief one of which, perhaps, is that not only river, but human tides also have washed the city's shore. And Liverpool is a city of contradictions. It has been--is--a place of considerable wealth and culture, as well as somewhere where the pinched face of what passes for twenty-first century poverty can still be painfully plain to see.

Reflected, however, in the mirror of Liverpool's prosperity are the city's fine buildings. There is the fabulous St. George's Hall, 24-year-old Harvey Lonsdale Elmes' architectural masterpiece, apostrophised by John Betjeman as 'surely the finest secular hall in England', and one for the preservation of which he would willingly be burned at the stake. Within it is the Assize Court, which has been the scene of such notable British trials for murder as those of Mrs. Florence Maybrick, the lady of the fly-papers; the terrible sisters, 'Catty' Flanagan and Margaret Higgins, the arsenic poisoners of Scotland Road; the Veronica Mutineers; Lock Ah Tam, the gentle Chinaman; William Herbert Wallace, the Man from the Pru'; and the Cameo Cinema murderer, George Kelly: hanged in 1950, conviction pronounced unsafe in 2003.

There is the Walker Art Gallery, which opened its doors in 1877, and contains a superb collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and the Tate Liverpool, founded just sixteen years ago, where is housed the National Collection of Modern Art in the North of England. There are the magnificent libraries: the circular Picton Library, modelled on the Pantheon, domed like the skull of an intellectual, to which Hall Caine, brought up in Liverpool, always referred nostalgically as his university, and the neighbouring William Brown Library. There is the Philharmonic Hall, replacing the original--where my great-grandfather, Jakob Zeugheer Herrmann, was the first conductor--burned down in 1933. It is fascinating to learn that Herbert Rowse, the architect who designed the new Philharmonic, opened in 1939, found a source of inspiration in the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

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.

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.

Modern names that have brought literary distinction to the city of their nativity or adoption: poets--Carol Ann Duffy, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten; playwrights--Alun Owen, Alan Plater, Willie Russell; novelists--James Hanley, Malcolm Lowry, and Beryl Bainbridge.

Liverpool's roll call of distinguished and discerning visitants is impressive. The first great writer to make the pilgrimage was Chaucer, arriving in 1358, as a member of the travelling household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Unfortunately, he left no record of his visit, no traveller's tale. Daniel Defoe, arriving three hundred years later, said: 'Liverpool is one of the wonders of Britain ... There is no town in England, except London, that can equal Liverpool for the Fineness of the Streets and Beauty of the Building'. Thomas Carlyle, a frequent visitor, 'rather liked Liverpool and is people'. Thomas De Quincey used to stay in 'the many-languaged town of Liverpool' and Charles Dickens was wont to say that Liverpool lay in his heart next to London. It was at Argyle Street Police Station that, in the 1830s, he enrolled as a Special Constable, in order to investigate the seedy underworld of Sailor Town. It was in Liverpool that he set his cap, unsuccessfully, at 19-year-old Christiana Weller, spinster, of Anfield. She was to marry his friend, Thomas Thompson and become the mother of Alice Meynell. Dickens was a great favorite in Liverpool, where he gave many of his virtuoso reading performances while Thackeray gave a series of lectures at the city's Philharmonic Hall.

Gerald Manley Hopkins, John Masefield, and Hugh Walpole were all subsequent fleeting visitors. Carl Jung said that Liverpool was 'the pool of life', having, with a psychologist's shrewdness, observed the city's essential vitality, and its people's irrepressible, impertinent joie de vivre. Adolf Hitler is reported to have spent a year in Liverpool in 1912. He stayed with his half-brother, Alois, who kept a guest-house. The Fuhrer-to-be left no recorded comment in the visitors' book of history. However the event later gave the Liverpool novelist Beryl Bainbridge the idea for her novel Young Adolf.

From the opening of its first playhouse, the Drury Lane Theatre in 1759, the drama has been 'a potent force in the development of a Liverpool tradition'. The Theatre Royal, opened in Williamson Square in 1762, latterly a cold storage premises, witnessed across its stage a procession of the finest artists of their age. Among those who played their long-remembered hour there were Mrs. Siddons in Hamlet, Joe Grimaldi, the immortal clown, and in January 1832, Paganini gave three concerts there, my great-grandfather conducting.

During Victorian and Edwardian times Liverpool proved an enthusiastically theatre-going city. It is a quality still well evidenced. The Playhouse in Williamson Square--'The best repertory company in the kingdom', pronounced J. B. Priestly--has been the nursery of a number of Britain's finest acting talents, among them Liverpool-born Rex Harrison, Michael Redgrave, Rachel Kempson, Diana Wynyard, Robert Donat, Flora Robson, Richard Briers, and Rita Tushingham. And the Everyman Theatre, set up in what used to be Hope Hall, a Victorian rebel revivalist preacher's chapel, has successfully embraced and exploited 'advanced' productions of various kinds. An interesting and little-known fact is that the Empire Theatre, built in the nineteen-twenties, had no bar, because it had been modelled on a New York theatre which had been erected in the days of Prohibition. This shortcoming was rapidly remedied!

To cult rather than to culture must be assigned those popular folk interests, those crowd pullers, the Beatles and the Liverpool and Everton football teams.

Throughout its history this enigmatic city has proved--as might be expected of a place one of whose sons, John Bellingham, assassinated a prime minister, Spencer Perceval--a political paradox. Parliamentarily represented by a Labour majority, it has at the same time remained municipally solid Conservative, and maintained, for more than a quarter of a century, a sound economic equilibrium under the successive regimes of a redoubtable triumvirate of Tory knights. Sir Archibald Salvidge, who ventured and brought off the [pounds sterling]7,723,000 gamble of the Mersey Tunnel. Sir Thomas White, who developed Speke, the first of the city's industrial estates. Sir Alfred Shennan, who forged ahead with the new policy of trading estates, and piloted Liverpool through the perilous days of the Second World War. The modern equivalent in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool of the privateers and merchant princes of old were men like Vernon Sangster, and John and Cecil Moores, with their colossal pools empires and nation-spanning chains of mail order and department stores.

Liverpool's epicurean contribution to culinary culture, her plat de la ville, is Scouse. This is effectively a pot of stew originally compounded of cheap cuts of mutton, potatoes, and onions. An occasional additional ingredient is pickled cabbage. Blind Scouse is the mixture as before, but with no meat in it. Recondite argument has long wafted to and fro as to the origin of the name of this exotic dish. It is widely held to be derived from a sailor's favourite fare of stewed meat, ships biscuits and miscellaneous available vegetables. Much beloved by, especially, Scandinavian seamen, who called it lobscows.

The great jewel in Liverpool's crown is, of course, the Albert Dock development, which is, indeed, not only stunningly impressive, but highly educative without tears. This massive project of urban renewal marks its twentieth anniversary this month. Some 600,000 people visit its attractions every year.

Other, but no less fascinating attractions include that Victorian glass-and-iron marvel, the Palm House, in Sefton Park. It offers enormous potential. Events therein have already featured a concert--albeit fund-raising--of Gregorian chant by candlelight. Out at Mossley Hill, is a very charming old house, 'Sudley', the former home of Miss Emma Holt, of the prosperous shipping-line family. She left house and grounds and her family's fine collection of paintings to the city. It is now open to the public. Also not to be missed is the extraordinary maze of underground tunnels and halls reamed out of the sandstone bedrock 180 years ago, in the diminishing shadow of Boney, by the wealthy and eccentric tobacco tycoon, Joseph Williamson, the Mole of Mason Street, also crowned 'King of Edgehill'.

Over the centuries the little fishing settlement by the Mersey pool, has, nourished by the interest of kings, beginning with King John's charter of 1207, steadily blossomed into a wide and far-flung territory, embraced now within the convenient portmanteau-word, Merseyside. But no matter how deep into the surrounding country the city may stretch the tentacles of industrial, or mere housing, development, wherever one goes one sees buses bearing upon their fronts the legend 'Pier Head'--the Pier Head, where Liverpool begins and ends, and the music of the seaport city sounds in the blustering wind, the hooting of ships' sirens, and the raucous mewing of the gulls.

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