As the European Capital of Culture 2008, this Merseyside port is riding high on a tide of enthusiastic nostalgia and a happening arts scene.
It was a spectacle befitting a city that has an irrefutable position in the pantheon of popular entertainment. On January 11 2007, Liverpool inaugurated its year as European City of Culture with a riotous mass of community choirs and aerialists, a ballet of dancing cranes (a nod to the city’s former shipping might) and Beatle Ringo Starr, tanned and sprightly for his 67 years, drumming like a man possessed in a lit-up shipping container.
As 20,000 locals gathered beneath the neoclassical columns of St George’s Hall, rubbing their hands against the winter chill, a lilting Liverpudlian accent echoed into the inky night sky as it recited these lines of poetry: “Eight hundred different stories, 800 different songs; 800 different cultures, 800 different tongues… 800 different rhythms in 800 different streets; 800 hearts all dancing to one beat.”
To Liverpudlians, these couplets – from Liverpool Saga (2007), an 800-line poem written collaboratively by locals and poet Roger McGough to mark the 800-year anniversary of the city’s founding charter – bear a resonance much deeper than the lip service many cities pay to multiculturalism.
Throughout its history, Liverpool has harnessed its fate to the neighbouring ocean. For 200 years, this once-mighty port presided over a massive tide of human migration. More than a million emigrants fled from a famine-afflicted Ireland in the mid-19th century. Nine million Europeans passed through en route to a new life in the Americas from the 1830s to 1930s. The Chinese diaspora from Shanghai formed Europe’s first Chinese community. And, to the city’s ongoing shame, slave ships once swelled the municipal coffers, accounting for more than 40 per cent of the transatlantic slave trade at its peak. As the New World thrived, the tide turned the other way. By the 1950s, the ships entering the smooth waters of Albert Dock were disgorging wealthy second-generation Americans and their exotic imports – notably the crackling vinyl pressings of a new musical genre, rock’n’roll. These precious Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley 78s would inspire a bowl-haired quartet of Liverpudlian teens to fuse a new sound – Merseybeat – which went on to conquer the world.
Yet, by the time the Fab Four were meeting in the front room of the modest McCartney home to riff on the opening chords of Love Me Do, Liverpool had slipped from its giddy summit as “the second city of the British Empire”. In the late-20th century, as Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester bounded ahead – courting multinationals and reinventing themselves for the modern age – Liverpool reeled from the loss of its lifeline docking work (containerisation having spirited the shipping industry to South-East Asia almost overnight). Struggling with low employment, the city became notorious for its militant unions and “scousers” – a nickname derived from a fisherman’s dish – who were unfairly stereotyped in popular British parlance (and TV sitcoms) as “scallies” or “chancers”.
“Liverpool has had it tough, but we’re a city of believers,” says Phil Redmond, the successful Liverpudlian TV producer drafted in to oversee Liverpool’s 2008 City of Culture launch. “We just need something to believe in beyond football.” The 2008 City of Culture schedule of events promises just that. Throughout the year, Liverpool is unveiling the fruits of a £3.5 billion ($7.6 billion) public and private investment – including the £900m Liverpool One city centre retail development, the cutting-edge Wilkinson Eyre-designed Echo Arena 10,000-seat stadium, and a cruiseliner terminal at Princes Dock – an attempt to woo the explosion of cruising predicted as the baby boomers retire. Also, more than 300 events, exhibitions and performances will train the spotlight on Liverpool’s wit and achievement in the arts, including dozens of international premiers and the much-feted return of Paul McCartney for the Liverpool Sound concert at the 45,000-capacity Anfield stadium.
Fortunately for a city vying to establish its relevance in the 21st century, it’s not all about golden oldies. Liverpool’s art scene, in particular, is flourishing. The Tate Liverpool (the first Tate gallery to open outside London, in 1988) housed the controversial 2007 Turner Prize for contemporary art – Mark Wallinger’s protest against the Iraq war – and has proved inspirational to a new generation of visual artists, many of them weaned by the Liverpool School of Art & Design, John Lennon’s old alma mater.
When Antony Gormley’s Another Place, an installation of 100 man-sized cast-iron statues, appeared on the wind-whipped sands of Crosby Beach, Liverpudlians dressed them up, climbed on their shoulders and treated them as their own. The artist enjoyed their reaction so much he gifted this touring exhibition to the city. It isn’t the first time Liverpool has distinguished itself as a democratiser of the arts: the popular rubbed shoulders with the avant garde when John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed together here in the 1960s, and when the Atlantic was bridged by working class kids effortlessly absorbing the strains of American blues.
Liverpool’s performance poetry scene, which spawned the dark wits of Roger McGough and fellow ’60s Mersey poet Brian Patten, is also showing evidence of a quickened pulse. The Everyman Bistro, where in his heyday McGough would thicken the air with his frank take on the realities of urban life, is again host to performance poets – every Wednesday night. The city’s modern music scene is also picking up the beat. Korova – a venue that has contemporary local band Ladytron as one of its backers – is fast becoming a hotbed of musical invention, featuring acts teetering on the verge of the international big time such as the Klaxons and Too Many DJs.
To quote one of the city’s most famous sons, it’s been “a long and winding road” for Liverpool. But with a buzzing nightlife, high graduate retention and the reawakening of a dormant self-confidence, there’s plenty to get Liverpool grooving again – not least the Liverpudlians’ indefatigable love of life. As one local entrepreneur puts it: “I’ve always thought that if I could bottle the feelgood spirit in Liverpool, it’d be the fastest way to become a millionaire.”
Stay
62 Castle St
62 Castle Street.
Atlantic Tower
Chapel Street.
Hard Days Night Hotel
Central Buildings, North John Street.
Hope Street Hotel
40 Hope Street.
Malmaison
William Jessop Way, Princes Dock.
Shop
Cricket Designer Wear
10 Cavern Walks, Mathew Street.
Liverpool One
76-78 Lord Street.
+44 151 232 3100.
Metquarter
Between Victoria Street & Whitechapel.
Eat & Drink
Circo
Albert Dock.
+44 151 709 7097.
Korova
39-41 Fleet Street.
+44 151 709 7097.
London Carriage Works
40 Hope Street.
+44 151 705 2222.
Ma Bo
16 Nelson Street.
+44 151 709 4551.
Mayur
130 Duke Street.
+44 151 709 9955.
Simply Heathcotes
Beetham Plaza, 25 The Strand.
+44 151 236 3536.
The Cavern
10 Mathew Street.
+44 151 236 1965.
The Monro
92 Duke Street.
+44 151 707 9933.
See & Do
Albert Dock
Hope Street
Source: Qantas The Australian Way June 2008