There were many booms in the years leading up to the Credit Crunch, but one of the most visible was undoubtedly in the arts. After years of chronic underfunding by the previous Conservative administration, New Labour’s victory in 1997 saw a massive increase in funding for arts and culture in the UK. Museums were made free again, large-scale public commissions like Gateshead’s Angel of the North became commonplace and every city scrambled to organise a range of cultural festivals and open new arts facilities.

The increase in funding was especially prevalent in more contemporary, avant-garde and esoteric avenues. Up until this point, ‘modern’ art, especially the conceptual, was a largely London-based phenomenon. Save for a few brave regional municipal galleries and usually poorly funded ‘alternative’ spaces.

As the money ramped up, a plethora of new contemporary arts spaces was opened across the UK. Such facilities were promoted as the catch-all solution to a host of problems in these areas; combating social exclusion and economic weakness, regenerating derelict land, increasing tourist revenue and re-branding downtrodden areas suffering from negative stereotypes. This belief was encouraged by many of those that had been operating with success in the ‘alternative’ sector in the preceding years and held sway with local authorities inspired by the oft-quoted ‘Bilbao factor’, after the regional city in Spain that saw visitor numbers soar after it became home to a branch of the Guggenheim.

This trend of using public art galleries as a regeneration tool in the UK can be seen to have started in Liverpool. With the Tate pushing for more exhibition space, the then Conservative government directed them to open a gallery in Liverpool’s redundant dockland warehouses in the aftermath of the 1981 Toxteth riots. Tate Liverpool, which opened in 1988, has since provided a model for not only Tate Modern at Bankside, but also abroad, including the regional Pompidou Centre in Metz, France and Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden amongst others.

Tate Liverpool also helped to provide the inspiration for similar schemes across the UK and, since 1997, contemporary arts centres have been opened in Middlesbrough, Gateshead, Walsall, Glasgow, Nottingham, West Bromwich, Manchester, Wakefield, Sheffield and Margate amongst others.

The opening of such institutions was a success in many ways, and helped increase access to, and interest in, contemporary art across the UK. Yet, as this expansion trundled on, the flaws in such cultural regeneration plans became more apparent and problems began to set in. As contemporary art emerged in the regions it began to face tensions it wouldn’t have done in London, with its guaranteed middle-class art-going audience.

Despite the well-meaning behind the new arts centres, many quickly became accused of not bringing the regeneration benefits they promised and of being elitist islands of art in places that otherwise remained unchanged. Such centres were derided for being unreflective of ‘local’ culture, and of ignoring audiences beyond the artistic elite. Many were also criticised for only employing small numbers of highly educated ‘outsiders’ and ignoring artists in their vicinity in favour of international ‘star’ names.

Having helped begin the trend for culture-led regeneration in the UK regions, Liverpool was also the place were these issues came to a head twenty years later. The city’s European Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008 prompted many to examine the conventional logic of such schemes and the tension between bought-in ‘international’ culture and the reality for those living in many of these deprived towns.

Directors, Curators and Programmers have had to increasingly face this tension and criticism, and it has only worsened since the Credit Crunch. With local authority and Arts Council funding being cut and private sponsorship hard to come by, such facilities have had to increasingly justify their own existence much harder than they had ever done before.

As such, those in charge of these institutions are now undergoing a rapid re-assessment of their role and future sustainability in these changed times. They face a tough challenge of finding a balance between local needs, sound financial footings and high-quality artistic integrity.

Although difficult, this can be achieved with skilful programming, much in the same way that regional theatres have operated for years. A mixture of ‘blockbuster’ shows, experimental and risk taking shows and something with a local focus can all be done in a year. This must be coupled with providing opportunities for local artists and a proper engagement programme for the wider community that is taken seriously and not treated as an ‘add-on’.

Operationally too, there has to be a happy medium between employing the best staff from wherever, and enough local people to, not only provide opportunities that they would have once had to move to London for, but to help shape programmes with knowledge of, and concern for, local audiences and their tastes and quirks.

Achieving such a balance is not an easy task, especially in an era when budgets are being cut to the bone. The fear is that some will panic and sway their centres into lame, crowd-pleasing parochialism or, equally bad, rampant naked commercialism. While it is important for such venues to have different income streams such as corporate hire, becoming a conference venue with some nice, unchallenging stuff on the walls would defeat the object of its existence as a public arts institution.

These are challenging times for cultural venues, but they also represent a real chance to do things differently, to take the opportunity that has been created by opening such centres in deprived areas and for them to really make a difference, in artistic, social and economic terms, to their locality. The cuts should prompt a new openness and new ways of working, forming links across the community to provide programming for all.

Those institutions that don’t adapt can’t complain if public sympathy for their cause is limited after so much money was spent, and now so much money is being cut back from all areas of public life. Now can be the time of real flourishing for cultural centres in the regions, for those that pursue their own identity with focus and openness and have one foot in the local, one foot in the global, not merely be regional franchises of the international art word.

This article appeared in the September edition of Object of Dreams magazine. An abridged version also appeared in Arts Professional.

By Kenn Taylor

“An epoch or a civilization cannot be prevented from breathing its last. A natural process that happens to all flesh and all human manifestations cannot be arrested. You can only wring your hands and utter a beautiful swan song.”

Renee Winegarten

THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, the medium has often been used as a way of capturing what will soon be lost.There is a long tradition of photographers trying to preserve something of both landscapes and people at the point before they are gone forever. Kevin Casey’s images of abandoned public houses in Liverpool fall into this tradition.

These photographs are a systematic archive of the disappearance of what were once, both culturally and architecturally, a key feature of local communities across the country. They are also a lament, and a tribute, to what was contained within these public houses. After all, though we may admire old pubs for their cornices, brass rails, wood panelling and frosted glass, it was the life and community spirit that once existed within these now abandoned buildings that makes most people nostalgic for them.

These photographs are also a stark reminder of the urban decay that, far from being turned around by the regeneration schemes of the 1990s and 2000s, has continued apace in most areas of Britain. The uniformity in composition and the repetition of form in these images bring to mind the work of German photographers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Except that while, in the 1960s, the Becher’s documented post-war industrial expansion and the increase of automation, here Casey documents the decline of Western industrial culture and the communities that relied on it. Yet, despite the frank depiction of the current state of these buildings, there is also a sense of empathy in the images. An empathy that could only come from a photographer native to Liverpool who had personally witnessed the decline of many of these pubs and their communities.

The number of pubs in the UK has long been in decline, as patterns of life and work have changed. However, the rate of closure has increased in recent years, with over 6,000 shutting down since 2005. Those that remain are now being battered on all fronts. The smoking ban, cheap alcohol in supermarkets, high tax rates on alcohol, problems with entertainment licences, big-money video gambling machines in bookmakers and the inability to tap into the lucrative pub/restaurant market have all hit many local pubs. Added to this is the domination of the pub industry by large, ruthless pub companies, keen to maximise their returns on supply charges and rent, leaving tenants struggling to make a profit. In turn, these power blocks of pub companies, with their collective buying and bargaining powers, are squeezing out the smaller operators. Above all, the deep recession we are currently experiencing, has driven down money for leisure right across the social strata, making people rethink how they spend their more limited incomes.

Pub closures in the UK peaked in 2008 and, although levels have since reduced, the number of pubs going out of business remains depressing. At the time of writing, closures are running at the rate of 39 a week, with a total of 2,365 pubs lost during the whole of 2009. This shocking rate raises a variety of big issues, from job losses and reduced tax revenue to abandoned real estate rotting away, but the effects are felt most in the communities that these pubs once served.

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) estimates about 40,000 of the UK’s 60,000 public houses are ‘community pubs’ – those which serve the people who live or work around them. CAMRA suggests that the benefits of having a pub in your local area include support for local charities and sports teams, having a space for social interaction and providing a place to drink in a safe, regulated and controlled environment. This shows the profound effect the loss of a local pub can have on a community although we should also be careful not to romanticise the local pub entirely. It is easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles at the glazed tiles, wood-block flooring and frosted glass and forget that the tiles and wood block flooring were easier to wipe the blood and spit off and the frosted glass meant that the man of the house could drink away his wages unnoticed while his wife and children starved.

Even today, it must be acknowledged that pubs can also be a blight on a community, and many welcome the shutting-down of problem establishments in their area. There has been a history of some pubs being centres for criminal gangs, drug dealing and violent incidents, not to mention anti-social behaviour, vandalism and theft from those leaving the pub at the end of the night. For some urban communities, these pubs add to their many and complex problems, not help solve them.

This highlights the fact that the photographs in this book also reflect something wider, that of the changing nature of Britain’s urban communities in the 21st Century. From the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the 1960s slum clearances to the present day, photographers have been drawn to the inner-city and its people. Liverpool, in particular, with its striking urban changes, has often been a favourite subject.

So what does this latest survey of our changing urban environment tell us? What else can we see in the landscape where these abandoned pubs sit? It is not a happy story wasteland, boarded-up houses, crumbling industrial buildings, local shops as abandoned as the pubs. In some photographs, the signs of communities clinging on despite all of this can be seen, but nowhere in these pictures is thriving and, in many, the communities themselves are struggling as badly as the pubs on their corners.

It may not be a happy story, but it conveys a truth that reflects not just on Liverpool but much of the UK. These dead pubs are simply the most prominent examples of dying communities, a dying culture even. For generations, cities like Liverpool grew on the back of their commerce and industry. Now, as the industries have declined, the culture and way of life that surrounded them has slowly ebbed away, despite the best efforts of many within these communities. The Victorian architecture of the pubs, and the rows of terraced houses and industrial buildings that usually surround them, are a marker of a time past, a culture now gone, that will soon be as much a memory as the rural and agricultural Britain that the Industrial Revolution replaced.

As patterns of life and work change so inevitably will behaviour and culture. The consumer dream of choice that Britain has bought into has reduced the need for community pubs. Fifty years ago, in cramped family-filled houses with no central heating and limited home entertainment, the pub was one of the few escapes for many.

Now, why go the pub when you can buy cheap alcohol from the local supermarket, relax on your sofa, watch the match on your own big-screen television or play computer games, in the comfort of your own home for as late as you want?

There is, however, also something of a fightback on behalf of pubs. There have been many innovative solutions to stave off closures including co-operative community takeovers with pubs also taking on the role of general stores, cafes and even post offices. Most of these successes, however, have been in rural communities, often home to a wealthy commuting population. A CAMRA survey meanwhile suggests that over 80% of pub closures are urban.

In other UK cities, closed-down pubs have found new uses, everything from restaurants to money transfer facilities and even a canoe centre. There are some examples in Liverpool – one former pub in Seaforth has now found a new life as a branch of KFC, while another, The Clock in Everton, is now a successful community centre. Many more lie empty though, symptomatic of Liverpool’s perpetual economic malaise. Can these measures to save pubs succeed when the culture pub-going was based on has fundamentally changed? Can we, or do even want to, preserve in aspic what was a once-lively culture that is now in decline? Or, should we just accept that things will always change, and that there is a different future for drinking establishments? That will concern the traditionalists but let us remember that the grand ‘gin palace’ pubs we now revere, like The Vines and The Philharmonic in Liverpool, were viewed in similar ways by Victorian and Edwardian society as today’s media tend to view our ‘vertical drinking establishments’ – as garish and decadent places whose false glitz and glamour seduces the lower-classes to drink and doom.

Today, most young people in Merseyside prefer drinking in city centre-based bars and clubs and this poses problems. As much as drunken and violent behaviour happened in local pubs, the fact that they were still located within the communities that people lived in, with different generations drinking together, usually put a brake on such outbursts. City centre bars don’t have this self-regulation, and it has been suggested by the police that areas of concentrated bar development, such as Concert Square in Liverpool, actually intensify unruly behaviour by containing a large number of drinkers in a small area.

Concert Square was one of the pioneering developments in the UK for modern bars with dance-floors and outside drinking areas. Its developers advocated they wanted to give Liverpool the kind of ‘sophisticated’ outside drinking area that they had seen in Europe, and the development was replicated throughout the UK. Any visitor to Concert Square on a Saturday night could easily see that this has not come to pass, and that the violence and destruction that are features of weekend nights across the UK is at least partially a result of this failed aim. British culture is simply not like that of continental Europe and introducing 24 hour city-centre drinking will not covert British drinkers to slowly sipping a red wine on the terrace.

Liverpool might be the focus for Casey’s photographs but this city is merely at the extreme end of a national phenomenon. Social disorder and urban decay is prevalent, in varying degrees, from Burnley to Nottingham, Stoke to Newcastle, and Swansea to Ipswich. Leisure-led regeneration has been trumpeted as one of the answers to problems of urban decline since the 1980s but, once again, Liverpool has shown the rest of the country the error of its ways.

Since the credit crunch, the leisure-led regeneration myth has largely been debunked. Luxury flats, art galleries and shopping centres may improve cities but they will not, on their own, renew the communities that live next to them and, without wealthy residents to move into these new developments, they will not even replace those communities as they have done in places like London and New York.

Post-industrial cities of the kind that are now found throughout Britain are a relatively recent development. The future of urban areas, like the ones Casey has photographed, is uncertain. Many of these places, such as Kensington, Anfield and Seaforth, were once fields or sand dunes. In these pictures we can see grass and foliage slowly reclaiming what was once built over in the rush for a growth that is now retreating. Perhaps, one day, these streets will be fields and dunes again. Maybe the glass and steel bars that have transformed our city centres will eventually spill out into the districts that surround them. Yet, all of the issues that surround climate change seem to indicate that we could once again become more dependent on community. Most people seem to agree that we have lost something in our consumer-led, individualist culture that is unsustainable. Perhaps, then, the local pub has a future?

Indeed, it must also be pointed out that, despite this photographic survey, CAMRA recognises that Liverpool has, perhaps, the best collection of traditional pubs in the UK outside of London, though most are in the town centre and the wealthier suburbs.

The irony is that Liverpool’s poverty has actually helped preserve many of these pubs, which in wealthier cities would have been swept away by money-generating developments. These pubs, coupled with Liverpool being one of the few cities to retain an independent local brewery, Cains, has made the city a hotspot for ‘real ale tourism’ – a growth area for pubs. Real ale fans tend to be financially better off and might keep these pubs alive. Ironic, perhaps, that in the 1980s, it was the middle classes who appeared to favour the new style of bars over the traditional working-class pub. Whatever happens, this photographic survey of pubs, of Liverpool, of Britain’s urban environment in 2010, will remain a poignant document of its particular time. Casey’s efforts in scouring Merseyside for these buildings, in some cases on the day they were being demolished, are to be admired and have resulted in an important book that will be increasingly appreciated as more of our traditional landscape is lost in the coming years.

This essay was one of several pieces of writing by me that appeared in the book Closing Time (ISBN 9781904438854) published by Bluecoat Press in December 2010.

Liverpudlians are often accused of paranoia about how they are viewed by others, but it is little wonder when we see yet another broadsheet article about the city peppered with references to the Toxteth riots, militancy and striking dockworkers (Spending cuts: Liverpool facing ‘worse than the worst-case scenario’, 22 October). Yes, that is our history, but the city has moved on. The article opens with the line “Liverpudlians have long been exasperated at the persistence of the ‘gizza job’ tag bequeathed by … 1980s drama Boys from the Blackstuff”, and then goes on to tread over the same tired old cliches.

One hundred and eighty years ago, Liverpool and Manchester became the first two cities in the world to be connected by a railway.

The driving force behind this was profit based on geography; Manchester’s damp atmosphere was good for spinning cotton and Liverpool’s proximity to the sea was good for shipping that raw cotton in and manufactured goods out. The railway shrunk the distance between the two, cementing their growth, but this was not just an important moment in the history of these cities, it was an important moment in the history of the world.

No industrial development has had such a sudden and transformative effect as the steam railway. It fuelled a revolution that not only changed the way we live fundamentally, but even the way we thought and perceived the world. Though the railways were built for freight and profit, they had the almost unintentional tandem effect of making passenger travel much easier and faster, speeding up communication and thus the spread of ideas, concepts, cultures, and, ultimately, change.

Information from London could be transported to the north of Scotland in a newspaper in a day. The slow shifts that would have once happened over many generations were replaced with a rate of change that destroyed old patterns of existence much quicker than anything had done before. The railway even revolutionised time itself, as scheduling led to the first standardised measure of time across the country. The effect of these changes can only be understood by us in the context of the transformative effect the internet has had in our own living memory.

This speeding up of the world was controversial at the time and many fought it, from William Wordsworth and John Ruskin to The Duke of Wellington, who feared that railways “will only encourage the lower classes to move about needlessly”. Doctors suggested that human organs could become displaced while travelling at these new speeds and farmers feared that thunderous locomotives running through the countryside would stop cows milking.

The last two never came to pass, but the railway and the Industrial Revolution it helped power did have ill-effects on countless people’s lives. Many migrated to the expanding towns for better wages, but found themselves working in dangerous factories for long hours, tied to the routine of a machine and living in squalid, cramped conditions. Yet the Industrial Revolution also freed people from the fields, increased wealth in general and, gradually, conditions did improve. Life expectancy increased and education spread. Despite the massive upheavals, people adapted, survived and prospered.

The human capacity for innovation and overcoming barriers continues to accelerate to this day, and we’re becoming used to it. We expect obsolescence and change, we expect newer, faster and more powerful. These forces driven forward by the intense development of technology and that most human desire it seems, always to advance. One hundred and eighty years ago a newspaper travelling from one end of the country to the other in a day was wondrous. Today the fibre-optic wires that carry the internet aid the transfer of information globally literally at the speed of light. The Industrial Revolution that the railway heralded has passed. We now live in an Information Age.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was a giant leap forward in the speeding up and shrinking of the world, but this has come back to haunt the towns and cities on its route. As the twentieth century drew to a close, industry in the Western world, and the culture that had grown up around it, declined and a post-industrial revolution swept across North West England.

Like the Industrial Revolution before it, this changed society immeasurably, and was also driven by technology and transport. The development of the container shipping reduced transportation costs so much that it became cheaper to make things in the Far East and ship them back through docks in southern England than it was to import the raw materials through Liverpool and make them here. Finally our speed of consumption overtook our speed of production.

Just as the Industrial Revolution was resisted by those who wished to protect old ways of life, as was de-industrialisation. Yet it seems that such revolutions are inevitable however much we may try to resist them. It can seem like the end of the world when such changes are ushered in, and for some cultures and some people, it unfortunately can be. Somehow though, in the end, humanity always seems able to adapt, survive and thrive in changed conditions. That is not to revel in the upheaval and destruction of ways of life, but to accept the inevitability of change and marvel at the continued capacity of the human race to move forward.

What then is the future for Liverpool and Manchester, who both rose up by creating a faster world only to be cast back down by it? Today, both cities are trying their best to be centres of the Information Age, with new developments on the sites of now long gone industry that aim for a high-tech future. Is this the start of a new age of success for the two cities? Or, was our age of consumption one to mark their end?

Edge Hill, on the route of the original Liverpool to Manchester line, is the oldest operational passenger railway station in the world. It is also home to Metal, an organisation trying to forge a new creative culture in the heart of an old industrial area. If anything can make the places that line the route of this railway relevant again, it’s new, creative, revolutionary ideas. Fostering such a culture can only help with the hope that these cities will continue, and that maybe even the wheel of history will turn in their favour once again.

Whatever happens, the journey continues. It never ends.

By Kenn Taylor

The piece originally appeared in the exhibition guide accompanying the ‘Dream Machine’ exhibition, held at Metal, Edge Hill as part of the Liverpool Independents Biennial 2010.  A digital version of the guide is also attached: Dream Machine Exhibition Guide – Metal

There is currently a minor war taking place between the owners of one of Liverpool’s oldest nightclubs, the Blue Angel, known to many as ‘The Raz’, and the occupants of the block of flats which back onto it.

The situation has been rumbling on since the apartments were put up several years ago, with the residents unhappy about the level of noise being generated by the club. But a Facebook group in the club’s favour has attracted 5,000 members, and nearly 900 people have signed a ‘Save The Raz’ online petition.

Things took another turn this January, when the nightclub’s decks were seized by the Council. With no sign of them being returned, the Blue Angel’s owners were forced to expensively reinvest in a new soundsystem. If moves like this continue to hamper the club’s operation, it could be forced to close, ending a nightclub presence on the site of nearly 50 years.

The club’s appeal against the council order started yesterday (May 12). Solicitors representing the club argued that levels of noise coming from the venue have not been measured in a scientific way and that it is impossible to distinguish between the establishment and others in the area, which as a whole is always very noisy.

But Jonathan Eaton, representing the city council, said: “Although we accept residents can’t expect a Liverpool of tranquility associated with Belgravia Square or the open countryside, we have produced enough evidence to show it is a significant noise and interrupts sleep patterns. On no basis should these people expect to put up with it.”

Fun, cheap, tatty and unpretentious, the Blue Angel is unmistakably part of Liverpool. And when nowt but a few arty types and squatters lived in the city centre, such a complaint would have been unheard of. But as down town becomes full of apartment blocks, this could become and increasing problem – as the young urbanites living in these flats find that they aren’t getting enough sleep to be able to cut their big deals in new media public relations and city centre rental marketing in the morning.

Thing is though, what seemingly attracts people to living in town is the easy availability of thrills and entertainment, the vibrancy, the buzz, the bright lights and excitement. Well, all of that is generated by people having a good time, hitting the town and letting their hair down. And the thing is, it ain’t pretty, and it certainly ain’t quiet. Especially in this city were not only do we really know how to party, but where often the harshness of life means we need to party.

Worst case scenario – could we see these residents getting all the clubs in town closed, or forced to be quiet. Where would we go out ofnthe tiles then? Set up discotheques in West Derby? Night spots in Tuebrook? Town is ultimately for mixing, be that to buy and sell goods and services, or to find your life partner. And anyone who wants to buy into city centre living should accept that, though they may officially be residents, the central area belongs to everyone in the city.

If you want peace, go and rent a house off Lark Lane and pretend that the world is full of wine bars, trees and birdsong. If you want the excitement of living in town, accept that its going to involve putting up with a lot of cheesy disco tunes and relationship arguments at 3am, and broken glass and vomit when you go out for a pint of milk in the morning.

You can’t have it both ways.

Ominously a wrecking crane swings past my window. There to tear down another mistake-in this case the 1960s Colquitt Street College-an ugly example of the past, now surplus to requirements and unfit for conversion.

In its place will rise ‘Elysian Fields’ – named after the resting place of the gods in Greek myth. A moniker that may be a little over the top for what is just yet another one of the many identikit blocks of apartments that are springing up around Liverpool. And it’s symptomatic of everything that is happening in the city centre today.

Originally from the stix on the edge of the city, I’m now lucky to live right in the heart of town – and in somewhere remarkably cheap – as Liverpool celebrates its year as the European Capital of Culture. However, things are changing at an astonishing rate and my digs will probably not remain in my income bracket for much longer.

Every time I leave the house it is a step into the middle of the frantic pace of change. Every day another half-decayed house is surrounded by scaffolding, or a former scrap of wasteland masquerading as a car-park gets a billboard promising a future light and airy block. Walk past a building one day and by the next it will have disappeared. A street that you can get down on Monday will be, by Wednesday, roped off as behind it a white tower crane and another framework of grey and crimson girders rises up-Because all modern buildings look the same on the inside.

There is a palpable sense that the very fabric of the city is being transformed, and it is both frightening and exciting in equal measure. Every part of the town center from the waterfront to cheap shopping area of London Road, from the business district to the edge of Everton, from the cultural quarter of Hope Street to where I live, an area now marketed as ‘The Ropewalks’. By the time I’d first began to hang around this part of town a few years back, its former grandeur had long since succumbed to the passage of time and the pace of change. In all its variety, it was crumbling and semi-derelict. This meant low-rents, and so many of the buildings found new lives as artists studios, independent shops and markets, not to mention some of the best clubs and venues in the city nestling next to the odd traditional business clinging on; from sign writers to drinks wholesalers.

Despite its artistic community the area remained unpretentious, anywhere with so many lock-up garages had to be. The buildings, even as they began to rot, had their decaying brickwork buried under a healthy covering of fly posters, graffiti and the slow reclamation of nature as green growth poked through every crack. The area was falling down, no one can deny that, but it had a great variety of life in it. With Liverpool’s slow economic renaissance – and the rise in the fashion of inner-city living in Britain – some wealthier people began to move into this slightly ‘bohemian’ area and a few apartment blocks sprang up. They were praised – these flats where usually conversions, saving buildings that would have otherwise collapsed.

Their occupants were no doubt attracted to an extent by the rough charm of the area and its rich heritage. The area once housed some of the city’s richest merchants, it contained the city’s first library, and was before that it was an important industrial area, were rope was made – hence, ‘Ropewalks’.

One site in the area, my current home, is the former Royal Institution building on Colquitt Street. This organization was founded by poet, anti-slavery campaigner and businessman William Roscoe in order to bring art and learning to the giant industrial city Liverpool had become by the 1850s; Liverpool University was later to emerge from this. Before that the building had been the home and warehouse of Thomas Parr, the merchant who built it in 1799. It is a unique surviving example of this kind of structure in the UK, it is grade II listed and was a key building listed in Liverpool’s successful bid to become a World Heritage Site of UNESCO. In addition to hosting my digs it is also home to two nightclubs, Barfly and Bar Fresa, thus making it probably one of the few World Heritage Sites to have its own disco.

This sort of unpretentious mixture of rich heritage and modern life in the area is what made it special. But with Liverpool’s resurgence via regeneration, and the subsequent rise in property prices which was massively speeded up by it winning the title of European Capital of Culture for 2008, I wonder how long, I, or people like me, can afford to sleep, drink, dance and work around here.

With the mass of new property being constructed, the city is being cleaned up. The cracks and weeds and graffiti and posters are disappearing, as are the clubs and studios. Replaced by new buildings; for the most part those ‘Elysian Fields’ style apartments with a restaurant/cocktail bar at the base. Over and over again the same mediocre, foursquare structures are repeated, with only different balcony railings to distinguish them if at all. Some older buildings are retained, those with ‘character’, to be converted for similar uses.

The wild reclaiming growth coming out the buildings is replaced by neat but emaciated looking trees in metal-containers. And in between the flats, desolate squares are created complete with imitation marble and uncomfortable benches. Skinny saplings and asymmetric paving may look good in scale models and artist’s impressions but these soulless, dead spaces remain conspicuously empty throughout the day save for the odd homeless alcoholic or skateboarder. People would rather eat their pasties on nearby dirty, busy Bold Street.

One development in particular, the ‘East Village Private Estate’ on Duke Street, must rank as one of the most depressing sites in the city. Its gray apartments surround a dank square, with a pathetic fountain at its center. Hard wired with CCTV everywhere and covered with PRIVATE PROPERTY. CHILDREN MUST BE ACCOMPIANED NO DOGS. NO CYCLING OR SKATEBOARDING signs. It is a bleak place even in the sunshine, even the residents of the building hardly ever sit there. The East Village is actually quite lucky in one respect in that at its base it has restaurants. Many of these blocks simply have un-let, boarded-up voids under them. And with their secure underground parking, razor-wire topped gates and balconies far above the street below they give a sense of being cut off from the street, and the city, and life. This side of Liverpool is becoming a city of straight lines and security measures.

Just across the road however there is a different prospect, showing the city is still at the point of change. It is a row of decaying buildings full of cracked windows. But at its center is the WAH SING CHINESE COMMUNITY CENTRE, while next door is The Big Issue Liverpool office, both with their varying mix of punters usually floating about outside keep some life in the area. But how long will they all be able to stay where they are with the rising rents? The redevelopment now approaches the 1980s social housing between Chinatown and the waterfront with its small community and own schools. Will they too one day find themselves moved on as the land the homes were built on, once virtually worthless, rises?

‘The Ropewalks’ is just one area, but the same story is being repeated all over the city. Slow, organic change has been overtaken at an astonishing rate by mass re-development.  Down on Princess dock, once home of the Irish sea ferries, more new offices and flats are being put up right next to Liverpool’s famous waterfront buildings. Walking around there the thing that you notice-other than how crap the buildings look in comparison to the adjacent famous ‘three graces’-is the silence. There’s nothing above the wind and the vague hum of the air conditioners in the area, despite the fact that so many people live and work there. Another dead space, symptomatic of much of the inner-city regeneration in the UK. Anyone who has spent time in the regenerated docklands of Manchester or Glasgow will attest that even though the imaginative post-modern museums, galleries and flats that fill these spaces look nice sunlit in two-page spreads in The Guardian, in the flesh they seem desolate, cold and patchy, with dereliction still visible just on the edge of the picture.

Not only is much of the new city cut-off, cold and dead, but a lot of it is no more than a façade. I have mentioned the tellingly empty shops under the apartments before and even many of the flats themselves remain un-let. The new cocktail bars and restaurants often close quietly not long after they are launched in blazes of glory, though the local media and dignitaries that were there at the opening are conspicuously absent as the bailiffs move in. And, with the world economy seemingly in downturn, how much more growth can be expected in expensive shops and restaurants?

The key thing at the moment is creating a new image of the city rather than a new city. Liverpool’s administrators are keen to have the city seen as go-ahead place to do business and therefore move it firmly away from the stereotypical 1980s images of militancy, strikes and despair that were only partially consigned to the dustbin with the Capital of Culture win, and that even today dog the city to an extent. But sometimes it is getting forgotten that the city is still not as wealthy as it appears on the surface. Image is important, but there must be something underneath if it is to be sustained. Whilst the new buildings themselves often have a look of being temporary and cheap, flimsy facades hung off steel frames, with the distinct impression given off that they could fall down as quickly as they are rising up.

But perhaps I’m getting a little too Joni Mitchell here-luxury apartments replacing parking lots. It’s easy to be cynical. Things are far from all bad in the Liverpool, and many new developments such as the new arena on the waterfront and the FACT multimedia complex have both been welcomed with open arms. Even some of the flats, cocktail bars and chic offices of graphic design companies have been single-handedly responsible for saving fine, old buildings that were on the slow, painful road to collapse while the council dithered. Much too has been learned from the mistakes of the past, and Liverpool’s last great re-development in the 1960s when vast swathes of the city were demolished at the behest of planners’ grand designs-to many peoples eternal regret. Actions such as the saving of the well-known biker’s pub The Swan-now sandwiched loud and proud between a luxury apartment block and the FACT center, jukebox blaring out. By the same token we are also seeing some the atrocious 1960s and 70s structures that litter Liverpool being torn down; few people lament the loss the Duke Street multi-storey car-park, the Moat House hotel or the Paradise Street bus station.

These changes have also had a strangely positive effect on artists in Liverpool.  Many can scarcely believe that after so many years of stagnation that the city is changing so fast. It is impossible to ignore and for all the artists in the city, from musicians to photographers, it is a subject that many feel compelled to discuss; much as many of Liverpool’s creative people in the 1980s could not help but be influenced by the decline of the city.

Art is often at its best when it is reacting against something and in the wake of these disliked developments and the Capital of Culture win promoting principally the more marketable aspects of culture, a reaction against it has been created and a definite counter-culture has emerged, causing a wholesale examination of what exactly this ‘culture’ thing is. And I can’t imagine that if any other city in Britain had won this title that this would have happened.

One example would be Mercy, an award winning fanzine and independent artistic collective. It had humble beginnings, originally founded by a couple of art students as a way of getting their work noticed. But on its arrival in 2002 it inadvertently became the focal point of a reaction against the creation of the image of the shiny, clean, new Liverpool; a good place to do business populated by well-mannered, educated people. Mercy pointed out that the homeless alchy’s who hang around the Bargain Booze on Hardman Street are as much of a part of the culture of Liverpool as the art-deco Philharmonic Hall up the road. There have been many other reactions. A punk band night was formed under the banner ‘City of Capitalist Vultures’. Massive campaigns were mounted to save the Quiggins alternative shopping complex, the Parr Street Recording Studios and The Flying Picket music venue that were all threatened by new developments, meaning that Parr Street Studios was saved from closure and alternative premises were found for the other two.

And maybe as the city moves into the future it is simply returning to the old. ‘The Ropewalks’ was once home to Liverpool’s wealthy merchant class in the nineteenth century, so why not in the 21^st century its wealthy new-media class? The urbane, sophisticated businessmen and women: those who like to eat sushi, buy paintings and attend the theatre. To simply be against these kinds of people or having private apartments in general is nothing more than inverted snobbery. Let them have their apartment blocks with silly, pretentious names. All major cities have these kinds of people, and what many artists find it hard to admit is that it is often these ‘bourgeoisie’ with their spare cash and time help to keep theatres and galleries in business, however unfashionable that may be.

It is also true that it is important for the whole life of the city for it to have successful businesses, because without a strong economic engine underneath, everything else falls apart-as Liverpool found in the 1980s. So it is also daft to be totally anti-business and anti-development. Indeed the buildings that symbolize Liverpool, the famous ‘three graces’ on the waterfront, are all palaces of commerce; insurance, shipping and docks respectively. Not to mention the fact that much of the city’s fine public buildings – from St Georges Hall to the Central Library, Walker Art Gallery and Sefton Park – were all paid for by private capitalist benefactors in their day.

But therein lies the problem.

Because most of Liverpool’s previous wealthy residents, the patrons of arts and charities and benefactors of public palaces quickly buggered off when the going got tough and the city ceased to be a profitable place to live. They abandoned their houses and business and distanced themselves from the city they had once proudly run, leaving only those who could not afford to go behind to try and rebuild something.

So the empty warehouses and homes were turned into markets and studios and clubs and some new life rose out of what was left to rot. But now Liverpool is again, to an extent, a profitable place to be, and the indigenous and independent culture that survived, created by those who stuck by the city and kept the heart of it alive, is being pushed aside and forgotten in the rush to bring in the money. This fiercely independent culture of the city, that stood the years of knocks and ridicule, the culture that made the forgotten ‘Ropewalks’ fashionable, is being pushed out to the fringes again and potentially crushed in a desperate, grasping attempt by the city to become accepted. The strong willed Liverpool that is being lost, though at times arrogant and self-important, was nevertheless honest. But now the city that once defied central government and tried to take on the world (people forget that the dockers strike of a few years ago managed to cripple half the ports in the world before its collapse) now seeks the simpering approval of the South East and the tourist Dollar.

Of course this is not unique to Liverpool. The same thing happens the world over, form New York to London, once an area becomes a fashionable and desirable place it immediate begins to lose something of what made it that way. And there is always that nagging thought; is this brave new luxury apartment filled world is still better than riots, dereliction, despair, ridicule?

Perhaps. But we may find out to late that there was actually more life in Liverpool 1 when it was decaying. Maybe what is being created will become resented as being dead and soulless, the money will leave just as quickly as it came and once again it will be up to those left behind to start again. As much as I hope it won’t, it may come to pass that this new dawn for Liverpool will just be another mistake that we will have to tear down.

By Kenn Taylor