Historic liners sail into Liverpool to help revive the Mersey beat
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Version 0 of 1. As Liverpool readied itself this weekend for its biggest civic spectacle of recent years, a taxi driver turning into North John Street called out encouragement to another: “The job on at the docks is unbelievable. The queue! Get down there.” Tomorrow morning, in a celebration of the city’s ocean-going past – and ahead of seven weeks of cultural events designed to underline the comeback of a great port – one of Cunard’s vast cruise liners, Queen Mary 2, will join her sisters, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, for an unprecedented “river dance” at the mouth of the Mersey. The arrival of the “Three Queens”, as the shipping line marks its 175th anniversary, will make maritime history and form a dramatic opening fanfare for the One Magnificent City festival that will run through the summer, showcasing the city’s artistic and economic rebirth after the dark days of the 1980s and 90s. Liverpool, former second city of the empire, is pushing for A-list status again. As Danny Boyle pointed out on Friday when he opened Home, Manchester’s £25m arts centre, it should not be a competition: a major city need not compare itself culturally to London, nor see fellow northern cities as rivals. “If you look at some European countries, they invest equally in multiple cities,” the film director said. “The way you make the country cohesive is you have these cities which are huge beacons for the whole country.” But when resources are scarce, and getting scarcer, it’s a hard urge to fight. “We can’t take more cuts here,” said Liverpool’s mayor, Joe Anderson, this weekend. “We are reshaping the city and using its new brand to give confidence to business, in spite of the problems we are facing with the reduced government grant and one of the lowest incomes from council tax. We have 11 of the 30 poorest wards in the country up here.” After three years as mayor, and two years before that as Labour council leader, Anderson says he is still determined to make Liverpool “the most business-friendly” urban environment in the country. Awaiting the positive impact of a new deep-sea container terminal and high-speed train links, he has even, he said, dropped the politically loaded term “council”, preferring just to talk about “the city”. Liverpool is climbing up the list of Britain’s favourite destinations and now perches at number five. Last year saw cultural events bring £55m into the local economy and 50 cruise liners berthing in a docks area once written off as a relic. But does all this buoyancy justify Liverpool’s reputation as the British city that was truly saved by cultural initiatives? And will it be enough to see it through more rocky times? Musician Martyn Ware, of Heaven 17, thinks it will. “Liverpool is getting there again, economically and artistically,” he said, a few days after unveiling The Crossing, his atmospheric sound sculpture in the South John Street shopping precinct. “Having the City of Culture here back in 2008 gave Liverpudlians the confidence to push the boat out – no pun intended. There are real creative private and public partnerships going on now. It is easy for me as an artist to be brave, but much harder for a council, so I salute them.” In the past year, £300m has been invested in city centre tourism and the 2015 artistic calendar kicked off last month with Peter Blake’s jazzy redecorating of the Mersey ferry, and continues this weekend with Sound City, a three-day festival of live music and arts. Ware’s 3D sound installation takes pedestrians on an audio sea voyage back in time to the early decades of the last century in New York and then forward to modern-day Liverpool. “It begins each hour and visitors never hear the same journey twice, as it all depends where you are. In the middle you might hear seagulls, wind and sails flapping.” The venue, sleek shopping centre Liverpool One, is already a big draw in the city. It is bucking the national trend for retail stagnation and boasting a 7% increase in sales, concentrated on high-end fashion. Later in the summer designer Wayne Hemingway, founder of the Red or Dead label, will preside over Transatlantic 175, a festival around the docks that will honour the city’s close cultural links with Manhattan. “The themes were reasonably obvious and once we heard that Tate Liverpool was already mounting a big Jackson Pollock show, we wanted to create a big American vintage event that would celebrate the beatniks and the music of the 1950s.” The transatlantic theme will be carried through into street food and also observed in a classic car cavalcade, rolling through city streets on the Sunday after America’s Independence Day. Hemingway is keen to pay homage to Liverpool fashion, too. “For me, it is a political thing,” he said, “because when I came here in the early days of punk and disco, people were always more dressed up, more emphatically dressed than they were in Manchester, and yet the city is always given a bad fashion image. When television covers the races at Aintree its always shows someone badly dressed, yet at Ascot they show someone looking good in, say, a Philip Treacy hat. These things really affect the image of a place, and it should stop.” After staging a huge public fashion catwalk event, his transatlantic weekend will finish with a light show on the stately Cunard building, as the Queen Mary 2 leaves the Mersey for New York following her summer stay. The city’s annual literary festival, born out of the dockers strike and the involvement of writer Jimmy McGovern, has been extended beyond May and also reflects the city’s connections with New York. Madeline Heneghan, director of Writing on the Wall, a community organisation that coordinates projects and events to celebrate writing, has invited Walter Mosley, author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins mysteries, from New York on a rare visit to add his weight to this year’s theme, American Dreams. “It is probably too early to say how Liverpool’s economic revival will go, but, as a great port, those cultural links with the rest of the world have never gone away. It is a city that looks outward,” said Heneghan. Anderson, the mayor, believes the new container terminal will soon allow the city to compete once again with the capacity of European harbours such as Rotterdam and Le Havre. “There is a lot to do, but this is a city that is being transformed. It is a question of balance. I have to make sure that the people on the residential outskirts of the city don’t feel disenfranchised by what’s going on, and that the impact of the creative resurgence actually filters down.” Peter Lloyd, whose book Bombed Out! chronicles the punk and new wave scene in the city, is also a former Liverpool musician. He points out that both Eric’s Punk Club and the Cavern Club in Mathew Street were situated in former fruit and vegetable warehouses. Declining industry made space for new art. “Now, I am struck by the way the fortunes of the port are chasing the regeneration of the city,” he said. “It’s like the port and the city have finally turned full circle – a far cry from the late 1970s, when massive hauls of cocaine and marijuana, ingeniously hidden in ships’ cargoes, seemed to be our biggest imports.” |