Lauren Laverne, bubbly presenter of BBC2’s The Culture Show, reckons: “Culture
is everything. It tells us who we are and it tells you something about your
identity; where we’ve come from and where we, as people, are going.” This is
culture in the sense of “rave culture”, or “Minister for Culture, Media and
Sport”, or President Sarkozy’s recent description of Yves Saint Laurent, the
frock-maker and inventor of the see-through blouse, as a “creative genius”.
It’s also clearly how the organisers of Liverpool’s year as European Capital
of Culture see things. It’s about Tall Ships’ Races, the World Firefighters
Games and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. It’s about Liverpool
“rolling like its river to the emotions, to the optimism, to social and
racial harmony”. Liverpool, like Rome, they point out, is built on seven
hills. Well, yes - so is Sheffield.
Culture in Liverpool has always been about pop music and football, too, with
the city boasting a staggering 56 No 1 hit records and the sacred pilgrimage
sites of Anfield and Goodison Park. During his sermon in the Anglican
cathedral, I even heard the bishop using a simile derived from Stoke City’s
recent promotion to the Premiership to colour his theological point. Now,
culture also seems to be about shopping. The new, £75m Metquarter mall, with
its Armani and Hugo Boss and Café Rouge, is spoken of with the same civic
pride as the Tate.
It’s all a bit puzzling, though. The shopping malls are thronging, but the
docks are silent. The seven-mile dock wall of the Port of Liverpool was
likened by Herman Melville to the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Walk down to the
Mersey on a summer’s evening now, with the sun setting over the great river,
and you’ll see a single tanker across on the Birkenhead side, offloading at
the Shell refinery, a couple of small container ships, and that’s it. It’s
all very quiet. “Too quiet,” as they say in the movies. “I don’t like it.”
Instead, the old docks have been “developed”, and the jewel in the crown is
the Albert Dock. In its 19th-century heyday, this magnificent Victorian
Grade I-listed edifice, around a handsome basin, would have been a bustle of
trade and commerce, dealing in silk from China, tea and sugar and salt,
indigo, bales of cotton - and, before all that, slaves. Out on the river
would have been the great Cunard and White Star liners, the Mauretania and
the Olympic, sailing for America, so vast they needed six tugs to pull them.
Today, the Albert Dock is all about heritage, recreation and culture: the
oxymoronic “leisure industry”. There are no more tea clippers or dirty old
tugs here now, but there are sleek white cruisers called things such as
Sarinda and Djinn Palace. And, while there is no more shipping, there is
shopping. In a nautical memorabilia shop, you can buy Aran sweaters, little
brass telescopes on mahogany tripods and even a replica RMS Titanic pie
knife for £59. The surrounding warehouses are clubs, wine bars and
restaurants, with white jeans, tight T-shirts and lashings of false tan on
display - and that’s just the men.
The merchant seamen and dockers are gone, but perhaps their sons are now
pulling pints of continental lager in Café Rouge, their daughters serving
lattes in Caffe Nero. Thus, a new pride and self-respect will be born in
Liverpool.
In much of the centre, there is the same spirit of glossy enterprise and
confidence. They knocked down the Cavern Club in 1973, an act not just of
cultural vandalism, but of mind-boggling stupidity. Now a tourist-friendly
version has appeared in its place - the original was “very noisy and very
smelly”, remembers the local poet Adrian Henri – using the same bricks and
built to the same dimensions, a notice explains a little desperately. It’s
especially popular with the Japanese, who may not be able to read the notice.
Then there is the huge new Liverpool One development, with “the largest John
Lewis outside central London”, “new concept fixtures” resulting in “a more
shop-able environment” and “nine pieces of artwork in the Espresso Bar”.
Culture, y’see!
Far beneath the pedestrian precinct outside, a slab of ancient dock wall has
been preserved, carefully protected, chrome-fenced and glassed over with a
shield-sized oculus. People crowd round and peer down, clutching their smart
rope-handled shopping bags, searching for the murky Mersey past, but the sun
glances off the glass and you can’t make much out. “I can’t see anything,”
one girl says. “It’s just a mirror, isn’t it?” Well, sort of.
The Capital of Culture is also a culture of capital. There is a lot of money
talk around. This year is forecast by optimists to bring in £2 billion of
investment and 14,000 jobs. A dissenting voice is that of Professor David
Robertson, of John Moores University, who points out that £7-£12 billion
worth of central government and European funding is due to come to an end
soon, and the city’s use of that windfall has been “very frothy, focusing on
tourism, short-term spending and increasing spending on shopping”.
Meanwhile, two care homes are due for closure and the council has promised
“service reviews”.
The McCartney concert at Anfield was a long way from the manicured and bogus
New Liverpool. Hugely good-tempered and atrociously organised, it made you
think, Liverpool: the Naples of the North. The air was thick with the smells
of cigarette smoke, chips and rain; and, at the food stand, you could get
chicken balti pie and a mug of Bovril. You’re wary of becoming the kind of
tourist who doesn’t want his Liverpool smart and prosperous, preferring it
deprived and shabby and picturesque. It’s just that this felt alive, where
the New Liverpool feels dead.
We queued in mud and rain for an hour, repeatedly getting sent the wrong way
by stewards. Someone said: “At this rate, we’ll just be in time for Hello,
Goodbye.” I said I’d heard a rumour we were going to get Bruce Springsteen.
“Yeah,” chipped in another voice, “and I heard we were going to get Gerry
Fookin’ Marsden.”
The Zutons and Kaiser Chiefs were fun, but McCartney was superb. He fumbled
the opening to Penny Lane, apologised and started again. He played Something
on a ukulele given him by George Harrison, showed us a bit of Bach they used
to play on their guitars to show off, and how he stole it for the opening of
Blackbird, and you realised that this really was living history in front of
you. By the time he got to Hey Jude, and Yesterday and Let It Be, and
Anfield was filled with the sound of 35,000 voices singing along in perfect
harmony, dull would you be of soul not to feel moved. All that sentimental
guff about Liverpool being somehow “special”, and having “a great heart” and
“the people” – my God, I was beginning to think – it’s all true.
The next morning, I went to Toxteth: pubs vandalised, half burnt-out and
boarded up, badged with the graffiti tags of Smiggers, Maca and Batesy;
street after street seemingly deserted, the occasional newsagent with the
cashier huddled in a booth of thick security glass; scraps of municipal
grass-land, neglected and unmown. This is only a mile or so from the bars
and boutiques of Albert Dock – but then Tower Hamlets is only a mile from
the City of London. Either way, it’s a long mile.
From every street running west, you can see the broad grey stretch of the
Mersey: the lifeblood, the moneymaker.
Not a ship in sight. No noise, no smoke, no work. The view is like a mockery.
Closing off the end of each street are spiked railings. Down below, you can
see the new dockland developments, the glossy car dealerships, the expensive
riverside apartments. But you can’t get down to that from here. You can’t
get over the railings. Finally, I found a pub that was still open. Was the
year of culture really going to help Toxteth? “Oh, yeah,” said the barman
with confidence. I was surprised. “Just as soon as Ian Paisley becomes Pope.”
Nearby was a once proud Grade II-listed building in the last stages of decay:
the Florence Institute for Boys, known affectionately to the locals as “the
Florrie”. When it opened, in 1890, it was the first purpose-built
youth club in Britain, on the scale of a grand town hall. “A place of
recreation and instruction for the poor and working boys of this district,”
you can still read on the wall. It had a library and a gymnasium, and
organised regular trips to the Lake District. It finally closed down in
1987, and now it’s no more than a roofless, burnt-out pigeon roost. The EU
says the European Capital of Culture is about “regeneration, social
inclusion, education and business”, but these haven’t got as far as
“Liverpool 8” yet. Too far off the tourist trail? Prince Charles visited
last year, and was dismayed to find that this howling shame of a building
now officially belongs to - his mum. He, too, promised to help, but so far .
. . nothing. If there is a sadder symbol of Liverpool’s decline, I didn’t
find it.
Liverpool today is a Potemkin village. And for all the froth and gush about
creativity and culture, investment isn’t getting to where it hurts. Alexei
Sayle, in his excellent new television series on his native city, says that
it exhibits optimism, sure, but “the psychotic optimism of a man with a
broken leg who insists he can still run the marathon”. It’s a battered and
bleeding heavyweight of a city, struggling to haul itself off the canvas.
But it has an astonishing charisma - and I can still hear the sound of
35,000 voices ringing in my ears, singing about “times of trouble” and “all
the lonely people” and “take a sad song and make it better”.
Alexei Sayle’s Liverpool is on Fridays at 9pm on BBC2
