future yard

The Future is Birkenhead: cultural development on the left bank of the Mersey

Kenn Taylor

By Kenn Taylor

Later this year, the town of Birkenhead becomes an art gallery. The Town is the Gallery, a large-scale, multi-venue programme will encompass everything from pop-up galleries and public art installations to workshops and participatory projects. Ryan Gauge, co-founder of organisers Convenience Gallery, says, “Using the town as the canvas, we’re working to achieve the aim that anywhere can be a place for arts and culture.” Taking place over several months, the programme will peak in September. “We have had contact from over seventy artists so far and we’re really excited by all the proposals,” Ryan adds.

On the Brightside, Convenience Gallery in Cahoots. Photo: Convenience Gallery

The Town in the Gallery will be something of a culmination of creative growth which has been building in Birkenhead, my hometown, over the last few years. Not so long ago, like many similar post-industrial places, if Birkenhead was mentioned in the media at all, it was negatively. Yet, there are some who are now saying The Future is Birkenhead, as a set of cultural organisations, plans and projects are shaping into something other areas could learn from.

The outfit which has perhaps blazed the biggest trail in the town is venue Future Yard. Attracting national attention for everything from its community ownership model to its training programmes – and for coining that tongue in cheek slogan, The Future is Birkenhead.

Future Yard. Photo: Robin Clewley

Craig Pennington, Future Yard’s director, details what drove its foundation: “There’s a huge wealth of artists from this part of the world. There was little in the way of support for artists and very little in the way of access to the industry for local young people. The idea was: stop thinking about a venue as a nice-to-have cultural asset. Think about it as an absolutely key anchor institution that can bring about dynamic and meaningful change in a place.”

That Birkenhead is now listed on touring schedules alongside much larger cities is powerful, but Future Yard’s impact goes beyond that. “Now 80% of the employed staff in the venue have come through our Soundcheck training programme,” says Pennington.

Photo: Robin Clewley

These however are just two examples of culture-focused developments making change in the town. If all goes to plan, within a few years Birkenhead will have at least two creative studio complexes with event and exhibition spaces; two sites dedicated to fostering wellbeing through creativity; a artists residency space in an former observatory; two new museums and a new park with spaces for cultural activities. For the most part, this is all happening in places that were previously empty or underused.

While these developments are happening in co-operation with the local authority, it’s significant that they are by and large being defined and led by grassroots organisations. This is in contrast other past examples of cultural regeneration in post-industrial places such as in Gateshead and Bilbao. Pennington says: “You have a small number of organisations with shared aspirations and ideas, but working in different ways and in different spaces. Clustering those geographically has had a profound impact.”

Another of those organisations is Open Door, which provides mental health support. Birkenhead, in common with many post-industrial areas, has poor health outcomes, so such a charity is vital. But how did they end up running the Bloom Building, which hosts everything from workshops and exhibitions to performances and events?

Bloom Building. Photo: Lydia Tweed

“Bloom is rewriting the rules around how the worlds of culture, community, social action and mental health can flourish together,” says Frankie Hughes from Bloom. “Reimagining not only common approaches to mental health, but also how culture can act as the catalyst for change and cultivate social value.”

Open Door are now planning an additional new facility called ‘Joy’ developed in partnership with a local NHS Trust. The aim is for it to be a national centre of excellence in how culture and wellbeing sit alongside clinical services. Development Director Ella Holland says: “Arts and culture will bring people to the centre; everything within it should all wrap around this central theme.”

In some ways, these developments should not be a surprise. Birkenhead had the world’s first municipal park and the first school of art outside London. It was also home to an important Arts and Crafts pottery and one of the few UK firms to produce fine tapestries. Creativity and urban innovation are rooted in its history, yet this has been obscured by the profound impact of its economic decline.

Make Hamilton Studios. Photo: Graham Smillie

The town’s history is the focus of another of Convenience Gallery’s projects. Ryan Gauge says: “The Uncovering Birkenhead’s Working Class History project is about championing local memories, stories and histories. Birkenhead is at a pivotal point in its cultural development and we want to ensure the people’s history is a part its future.” In the longer term, Convenience Gallery are also looking to open their own space.

All this cultural development isn’t happening in isolation; it’s part of a wider masterplan the Council say is the town’s biggest transformation since rebuilding after the devastation of WWII. Crucially, it does not fall into the trap of thinking that cultural projects alonecan regenerate a post-industrial town, as has happened elsewhere in the past. Connecting some of these developments up will be the new Dock Branch Park. Created from a long-abandoned freight railway line, the park will include space for outdoor exhibitions, installations, performances and education. As well as a new museum, The Transport Shed. These projects are particularly personal for me, as my dad worked for many years in the attached railway workshops.

Dock Branch walking tour. Photo: PLACED

Architecture and design practice OPEN is working on plans for the area. Director Jaimie Ferguson says: “Dock Branch Park physically connects the key features in the town centre and provides unique new green spaces as part of a transformed public realm, but it also says a lot about how Birkenhead sees itself in the future.” He continues: “We’ve also been collaborating with artist Di Mainstone to develop ideas for a cultural programme around a bio-diverse revolution.”

Impression of Dock Branch Park. Image: Open

So far so good, but is some of Birkenhead’s cultural growth simply due to the extensive urban development that’s taken place in central Liverpool, so close by? Gentrification might be a concern. Yet as a phenomenon, gentrification tends to have its most negative impacts in cities (and their satellites) which have the largest concentrations of wealth and power. While it might one day become an issue for Birkenhead, it is currently a long way down a list of bigger challenges around employment, poverty, health, dereliction and access to opportunities and services. There of course is the crux that underpins many of the UK’s problems – intense over development in some places and deep-seated underinvestment in others.

I ask Craig Pennington what he thinks is needed to ensure everything achieved so far in terms of culture and community is built on: “Whenever you have a situation where profound change is happening in a place,” he says, “you have to be really, really mindful of the fact that local people are at the heart of shaping what that change is.”

Convenience Gallery co-founder Andy Shaw agrees: “Naturally with change comes some apprehension that it might be something not for local people, but Birkenhead feels like it’s doing it differently. It’s grassroots and community-led.”

Make Hamilton Studios. Photo: Make CIC

If what is currently happening on the left bank of the Mersey means one thing for other areas, it’s that cultural development in post-industrial places has to be driven by local needs and opportunities. By specificity and originality. Not only will this serve local citizens better, uniqueness is also what attracts wider attention.

Ryan Gauge says: “We would love to see more jobs created locally and especially within the creative industries, passing on opportunities for the next generation to have tangible creative careers and to really see these as accessible and viable options.” 

Future Yard outdoor space. Photo: Robin Clewley

This is a key point. To make a regular living form creative work, you usually need to be part of a wider infrastructure. Can this cultural growth lead to increased employment in the creative sector locally? Perhaps even five years ago, this may have seemed a pipe dream. Yet there appears to be some increasing dispersal of cultural jobs away from the south-east. That area’s huge dominance adds to the inequalities of the sector. Channel 4’s move to Leeds and the BBC to Salford have attracted attention, but organisations from Hachette to Art UK and EMI have also been shifting operations northwards, while smaller cities like Sunderland and Wakefield are developing their creative sectors significantly. Could this be the next step for Birkenhead?

While writing this, I began reading The North Will Rise Again by Tyneside based Alex Niven and kept thinking of a quote he opens with, taken from the processional banners of Durham miners: 

”The past we inherit. The future we build.”

Photo: Robin Clewley

This piece was published by The Quietus in May 2023.

Frequent Electric Trains: new culture in Birkenhead’s empty spaces

Kenn Taylor
Future Yard venue during development
Future Yard venue during development

By Kenn Taylor
Images by Robin Clewley and Graham Smillie

Growing up in an overspill estate of Birkenhead, with Liverpool being a short bus ride away, the city always seemed to be the nearest place where things happened. Where those posters and flyers led to. Where independent shops and venues existed which gave further glimpses of a world of art and culture. One that seemed fascinating but also closed off. Later, when I did enter that world, I found that while it did open up so much for me, some of the cultural scene was indeed elitist and exclusionary. Remote from how many people in Merseyside lived their lives. Trying to navigate a way into the creative industries when you had no family connections or real understanding of how it all worked was not easy, and there seemed to be nothing to help you to figure it out. It was experiences such as these that later led me to spending much of my career doing community cultural projects.

Birkenhead itself did have its own cultural gems, including the brilliant, long-established Skeleton Record Exchange, where I would visit regularly to part-ex CDs so I could buy new ones. Trying to get the best deal so I could hear enough new music in a time when there were few other options. Skelos and its big, brightly painted red arrow are, I am pleased to say, still going. Meanwhile the music chain stores in the ambitiously-named Pyramids shopping centre, which represented the future in Birkenhead in the 1990s, have long shut down.

Interior of Future Yard venue
Interior of Future Yard venue

Birko was the classic boom town of the 1800s, which grew rich quickly off the back of the shipyard set up by the Laird family. This wealth paid for the fine Hamilton Square, the largest concentration of Grade I listed buildings outside London, and Birkenhead Park, the world’s first municipal public park, with Europe’s first street tramway running between them. Since then, the town’s fortunes have been inextricably linked with the rising and falling tides at the shipyard which still looms over Birkenhead physically, psychologically and economically. The dramatic vista of Hamilton Square, with its station tower promising FREQUENT ELECTRIC TRAINS, retains its visual impact though. However, for the moment, many of the buildings around the square are empty, including most of the Town Hall itself.

Exterior of Future Yard venue
Exterior of Future Yard venue

For a long time, the centre of Birkenhead was dominated by its post-war shopping centres, while this older part of town slowly died off. However, as retail struggles, new attention is being paid around here. The founders of the key Liverpool region music magazine, Bido Lito!, have set up a Community Interest Company (CIC) and turned an empty building into a new 350 capacity music venue. Called Future Yard, it’s planned to be the UK’s first carbon neutral grassroots venue. As a precursor, they painted THE FUTURE IS BIRKENHEAD in bright pink letters on the front while work went on inside. The venue builds on the Future Yard music festival held in 2019, which took place over several locations including the historic remains of Birkenhead Priory. Hidden behind an industrial estate, the Priory, which includes the oldest standing buildings in Merseyside, represents the history of ‘the headland of birch trees’ before the industrial revolution. Its tower gives dramatic views across the Mersey and the waterfront, with you standing high above the massive vessels in the shipyard propped up precariously for repair.

Future Yard’s venue opening was hit by Covid, but they have delivered online shows and have an array of gigs lined up as restrictions lift. As a CIC, Future Yard has a social mission which asks questions like: ‘How do we leverage the social and economic power of music in struggling towns?’ and ‘How do we provide new career pathways into the live music industry?’

Nearby meanwhile, in what was once the Borough Council’s Treasury building, a new venture called Make Hamilton Square has opened up, set up by another CIC which already runs successful studios in Liverpool. Housing creative workspaces, it also includes a new small urban farm and an events space. Make similarly has a social mission which includes: ‘to remove barriers to people joining the economy, by making things themselves and becoming self sufficient’.

Make Hamilton Square
Make Hamilton Square

As central Liverpool has redeveloped, areas which I knew as largely derelict have become the Ropewalks and Baltic Triangle and cultural centres in a way I couldn’t have imagined. As sure as the wind blows though, cultural spaces in them have been threatened by redevelopment. As such development in Liverpool grows, could Birkenhead become a new local mecca for culture and music? Or is this just the cultural scene being pushed further out – a ‘temporary utopia’ to facilitate more traditional forms of redevelopment?

Garden, Make Hamilton Square
Garden, Make Hamilton Square

Hopefully, with Future Yard and Make being CICs planned with sustainability in mind, this could make the difference. Future Yard recently received financial support to buy their own building. A long way from trashy but cool venues existing until their landlords get offered a better deal. If these initiatives and others like them are to succeed, they need to be able to control their spaces and receive proper protection and support long term from institutions, authorities and funders.

Still too many young people in Birkenhead and many places like it are not given enough opportunities to experience creative arts, develop their interests or get their own work out there. Despite everything that’s happening at the moment, places like Make and Future Yard are progressing and offering people new spaces to grow in. Projects such these could create a situation where those FREQUENT ELECTRIC TRAINS are bringing more people to the town than they’re taking out. They point to a different kind of future for Birkenhead. A different kind of future in general.

This piece was published by The State of the Arts in May 2021.