A man calling himself Billy of Liverpool’s Yesteryear has been posting up old photographs of Liverpool, the city of my birth, on Facebook. The main nostalgia axis for Billy is the 50s, 60s and 70s – the post-war years of economic development. Edwardian, Victorian and even earlier architecture were threatened by the feverish expansion of the motor car industry. Buildings casually demolished for car parks, motorways, road extensions, flyovers and roundabouts. Trailing just behind the car was the ubiquitous office block. So pubs, often as large as grand hotels, streets of two up and two down houses, thirties estates, traditional shopping squares, the tough remains of cobbled streets and much more besides were unceremoniously uprooted and destroyed.
Setting to one side the necessary demolition of some dreadful slums this was naked, cultural vandalism of a high order: more a blind, insensitive progression than social progress. Then side stepping real social betterment came a piling on of new tacky architecture un-complimenting a wrecked central Liverpool, now with vastly increased space for its polluting cars, that justified the inflexible Local Council axiom – we are bringing you progress, you can’t stop it and don’t even try to.
“That most logical of 19th century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
On Photography by Susan Sontag
I left Liverpool in 1971 to go to Sussex University. Yet roughly once a year I went back home to see my family. In 2009 my older brother died, whilst Mum and Dad had passed away some time back. Since then I’ve only visited Liverpool for one day trip and a weekend stay with my niece. Nostalgia for my roots has been kept in abeyance, deflected and even ignored. I haven’t pinned for Liverpool. I’m still a northerner at heart but now happily southernised from living in London for 43 years. Flashes of memory make me a little wistful but I don’t sentimentally dwell, hard and fast, on the past. Yet show me a photograph of Liverpool during the time I was young, or before I was born, and it exerts an irresistible pull. So the Billy photographs had me yearning. Not a longing to be back then but leisurely pass through, sit down and eat at that table of memory once more.
Clayton Square, Edge Hill, Lark Lane, Smithdown Road, Ullet Road, Granby Street or Wavertree Road. Place names when linked, as they once looked like, to black and white photographs, are irrevocably part of me. Although I only lived in Toxteth (Liverpool 8) Wavertree (Liverpool 9) seemed, from my young child’s point of view, a great distance away. Scotland Road was tarred as the roughest of areas and was, according to my mother, a “dirty road where only common people lived.” Lark Lane, both bohemian, posh middle class and on the fringes of Sefton Park seduced me. The great Victorian landing stages and tunnels of the Pier Head were awe inspiring. I could go on.
Opening again my copy of Liverpool Our City.Our Heritage by Freddy O’Connor I found even more streets and buildings, in parts of Liverpool, I’d rarely visited. Not all have gone. The most prized listed buildings, for the cause of tourism, survived. I mean contractors may still plant an incongruous hotel in front of the Liver Building but if you strain your neck and look up you will still be able to see the iconic Liver Bird. Yet travel a few miles out of the city centre and the scene becomes increasingly mournful. Why demolish that? Why build that? Why put a road there? What happened to the grass?
I’m not a student of architecture or sufficiently au fait about its styles, movements and fashions. I’ve a superficial knowledge about buildings and cityscapes but like most people possess an innate sensitivity to architecture that delights and inspires. I’m not an anti-modernist. I think the good new must co-exist harmoniously with the good old. Why couldn’t the English town planners of the past 50 years have learnt from Paris how to achieve this? Cultural Heritage is a big noble world. Did Liverpool live up to it? No, it lived down to it because of city planner Graeme Shankland.
‘Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’.’
Architectural History Vol 65, 2022 (Editor Mark Swenarton)
If the money hadn’t run out in the 70s then Shankland would have fully realised his brutal, philistine ‘vision’ for the city. Of course the vandalism continued into our new century. The UN agency declared that Liverpool Waters, a 5.5bn project by Peel Group, to build on derelict land resulted in “serious deterioration and irreversible loss” and “significant loss of to its (city centre) authenticity and integrity.” In 2004 Liverpool was given a Unesco World Heritage status. In 2021 that status was removed mainly because of the crap architecture, bordering the magnificent Royal Albert Dock restoration, and the building of Everton’s 500 million football stadium involving the demolition of the Bramley Moore Dock closed in 1988.
This all brings me back to photographs and existence. That so many of the old Liverpool buildings and streets now end up dead in a photograph and only alive for the people, still living, who once inhabited some of them. Of the places that have survived, like the two up and two down of my home 79 Cedar Grove, there will be a fondness, tense love and critical affection. Yet I’d prefer not to have nostalgia for, lost only in time or lost through demolition, Liverpool architecture: only a kindly remembrance of my heady growing up: my freedom and existence in those once intense 50/60s haunts, both private and public, of a great city.
“Architecture for Thinkers. An insight is needed (and that probably very soon) as to what is specially lacking in our great cities – namely, quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection, places with long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too sunny days, where no noise of wagons or of shouters would penetrate…for us godless ones to be able to think our thoughts in them. We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in these halls and gardens.”
Nietzsche – The Gay Science
When will such city plans be drawn up? Only in my dreams.
vastland 