The curse of Bilbao

Groinwich! Potentialising potential. Scrofcastle! Going Places. Smeltbury! Enabling inspiration. Dundee! City of discovery. Bubochester! A runway to creativity. Griminster! We're an energy pathway. Swarfield! Trailblazing connectivity. Newport! City of reinvention. Scurviedale! A town in a hurry. Oxterton! Networking receptivity. Scrapieburn! An opportunity compass. Southampton! Cruise capital of the UK. Longut! Incentivising incentive. Festerford! Meeting tomorrow's challenge yesterday. Felchinborough! A world cafe. Newcafard-on-Sea! Regenerating regeneration.

The night of 29 May 1985 I was at Palavas les Flots near Montpellier. The hotel room telly was broadcasting herringbone tweed. I hurried along the street, then another. Cafe after bar was telly-free. I kept looking at my watch. Then, at last, a glimmer through a salted window. I entered the bar - which any other night might not have been the bar from hell - and, before even looking at the cantilevered telly, asked the barman if there was any score. He fixed me with a rheumy, possibly alcoholic, certainly psychopathic eye and replied menacingly: "Yeh. Thirty-five dead."

This was when I realised that the European Cup Final at Heysel had not even begun. It didn't get better. The house Alsatian, sprawled across the floor like a crocodile, had its master's mien. The half dozen or so punters were mutterers: "Angliches... 'ooli- gans... salopards... meurtriers." Etc. There was no question of making an exit. The game began. It ought not to have been played. The accusatory stares continued.

Eventually an atypically conciliatory drinker suggested to his chums that I was not to blame. He addressed me and asked, what is it with the English, what is it with Liverpool? I pointed out that Liverpool was no more typical of England than Marseille, then the European race-hate capital. But, he insisted, they're doing something about Marseille.

Whatever the something was hadn't been apparent in that graffiti'd war-zone a couple of days previously. What are they doing about Liverpool? Well, some people would like to give it to Dublin, but Dublin doesn't want it. And then, of course, they've got the Garden Festival.

That is what they're doing. My interrogator's incredulity was no greater than my own when I realised what I had said. We laughed.

Football apart, Liverpool in the early Eighties was notable for strikes, Militant, riots and the loss of 20 per cent of available jobs and 10 per cent of its population. The then Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, sprung into action. He was a square peg in Margaret Thatcher's second administration - whose motto was sauve qui peut. Heseltine, on the other hand, was a closet welfarist, he believed in statist noblesse oblige. He had the bright idea of solving all of Liverpool's ills with a "Five Month Pageant of Horticultural Excellence and Spectacular Entertainment".

His bright idea was not his own. It was over 30 years old and German. Bundesgartenschauen had been held every second year in West Germany since 1951. These were the years of the German economic miracle, when that vanquished country triumphantly entered the Golden Age of White Goods. Heseltine put two and two together. Planting flowers would occasion the Scouse economic miracle. Hydrangeas in blossom would achieve so much more.

Three-and-a-half million people visited the Liverpool Garden Festival in 1984. Yet, astonishingly, Liverpool's rate of unemployment remained high and its per-capita income low. The Garden Festival was however massively influential in other regards. Its central building presaged the squalid Millennium Dome (another Heseltine wheeze, it should be recalled). And, much more importantly, it proved to be the foundation of a new industry. Or, rather, of an industry which presented itself as new. The Regeneration Industry. Regeneration - in the sense that it was applied to the Garden Festival and its intended consequences - was a new usage of that word. What does it signify? And just what is the Regeneration Industry?

It's a bandwagon. The bandwagon has been rebranded. It is now the brandwagon. Re-branding is a euphemism - for euphemism, literally a joyous way of describing something. Describe it by a different name and it becomes different - that, anyway, is the hope.

Describe what was known, circa 1958 to 1973, as comprehensive redevelopment as Regeneration and it is stripped of its deserved connotations: crassly ill-conceived motorways through the centre of cities such as Glasgow; the alliance of dorkishly neophiliac municipal authorities and vandal builders which ripped the heart out of countless small towns and turned them into parking lots.

Describe architectural determinism as Regeneration and the stick of this-vertical-sump-is-good-for-you is replaced by the carrot of this-is-stylish-living-for-a-new-millennium - because you're worth it.

Describe volume building as Regeneration and off-the-peg neo- vernacular hutches mutate into off-the-peg neo-modernistic apartments. There remains not a single volume builder in Britain. They are all urban regenerators now. That hairy cleavage peeping cheekily from above the waistband is not builder's bum, it is urban regenerator's bum. It is telling that Building, the deftly positioned trade weekly whose special pleading for construction and yet more construction is relentless, has spawned an equally parti- pris, equally clever offshoot. Entitled, it goes without saying, Regenerate.