Liverpool and a new juncture of arts and regeneration
Words: Kenn Taylor
Images: Kenn Taylor and Kevin Crooks
Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse is the largest brick-built warehouse in the world. This fact though does not really describe just how striking and imposing it is as it looms over the smaller buildings and now largely abandoned quaysides at the northern end of Liverpool’s old dock system.
My own first memories of Stanley Dock were as a young child in the early 1990s when I’d regularly go with my family to the ‘Heritage Market’ held on part of its ground floor. The market was a bit of grassroots capitalism encouraged in the 80s by Liverpool’s brief Militant Labour administration after the building had shut as a warehouse. My dad liked to go to buy ‘second hand’ tools and my mum liked to buy meat joints that would be sold loudly by auction. I’d usually be kept placid by my parents buying me some form of plastic tat and a hotdog. The vast and decaying edifice, of which the market only occupied a fraction, fascinated me and I’d try and wander off to the abandoned bits, only to be dragged back.
From a young age I absorbed from my parents and the wider community, the huge sense of sadness about so much of the waterfront area of Merseyside falling into ruin and abandonment. Especially from my dad who’d trained as a railway fitter just north of Stanley Dock at Bankhall workshops, before they, like so much else, closed as the dock system and related industry shrank from the late 1960s onwards. My mum’s family too had lived in this area on Boundary Street before they were re-housed to Norris Green. My parents were older than some and remembered Merseyside in the post-war boom era. I inherited their sense of the essential tragedy of the area’s subsequent economic decline and of the terrible impact it had on people and the area’s culture. That more things could have been done to mitigate it. As well as a hope, desire, need, that one day things would improve and not be in such decay. That there would be opportunities for people again, that Merseyside would once again be somewhere that attracted people from all over the world not lost them.
Bacchanal spirit
Many years after this, after managing get myself a precarious junior job in the arts, just as austerity is beginning to kick in, I once again find myself in Stanley Dock. By now the Heritage Market was in decline. What brings me to the old warehouse this time is a party for the Liverpool Biennial art festival. There’s free booze, good music, dancing. Lots of people I know. Having grown up wanting to be part of the creative world, but worried I might never be able to, it feels great. I end up chatting to an arts person who isn’t from Merseyside. They say: “It’s great that Liverpool has all these abandoned buildings you can do stuff like this in.”
The sentence sticks a little in my craw. I let it go, but I always remember it, the tension it caused in me. On the one had, who doesn’t love a party in an old warehouse? But then, to not realise that while abandoned buildings are fun and adventurous for some, for many more who walk past them every day, they’re not exotic or interesting or an opportunity. They’re tragic. Palpable symbols of decline, of lack of opportunity, of deep-rooted decay. And while a warehouse to rave in might be more fun than a conversion into mediocre flats, neither really solves the underlying issues such an area has. But hey, it is a party. I go back to dancing.
Later, I read a quote by Marsha Cusic in Mark Binelli’s book The Last Days of Detroit which reminded me of that situation: “Some of the people coming here bring a sort of bacchanal spirit, like they’re out on the frontier and they can do anything…Detroit isn’t some kind of abstract art project. It’s real for people. These are real memories. Every one of these houses has a story.”[i]
As I grew older, I became increasingly interested in that hard question, what do you do with buildings, an area, a city, that has lost its original purpose? How can opportunities be created for the people who relied on a now vanished economy? Is it hopeless, will any planned urban change always result in worse outcomes for people already living there? Or is to just leave somewhere as it is to rot or be picked over even worse? Once, such questions were confined to certain regions of the world deemed to have ‘failed to adapt’, like Liverpool, who were often blamed for their own decline by the powers that be. However, in my relatively short lifetime such questions have, tragically, come home to roost for ever more of the UK and huge swathes of the Western world.
Rum warehouse to rum bar
A few years on again I find myself sat outside a now converted warehouse on Stanley Dock. It’s a beautiful sunny day and the new Titanic hotel bar has chairs on the quayside. The water in the dock glints in the sun. The sound of the reconstruction of the bigger, main warehouse across the dock carries over gently. I’m sat with a friend from a similar background who also remembered the Heritage Market as a kid and now lives in social housing nearby. We’re having a cold drink and talking about our experience of this building, how, as much as we enjoyed the market, most of Stanley Dock was barely used by it and was decaying around it. We both find the effect of sitting there almost surreal. While my parents never imagined all this could be ruined, we never thought we’d see this place no longer be a ruin. That was all we had known.
I thought then of that person in the Biennial party. How our views would probably offend them. The ‘interesting’ decay replaced by refurbishment and re-opened for this development. But to me and my friend who both well remembered Merseyside at its nadir, to see this building well out from the centre of town restored, lively, well used, and employing people again, was pleasing. The alleged glamour of the ruin, much like the alleged glamour of poverty, is the preserve largely of those who haven’t had to grow up with it.
But as Stanley Dock redevelops, it’s a prominent island surrounded by a series of initiatives, developments and grassroots initiatives which are increasingly attracting attention. Plans which suggest potential solutions to its industrial decay, but also raise thorny questions relevant to the further economic and social regeneration of Liverpool and further afield. Questions of power and place, creativity and capitalism, incomers and long-established communities.
In this piece, I’ll touch upon them all, but focus mainly on the one closest to the hopes and fears in my heart, the Ten Streets.
What is the ‘Ten Streets’?
The Ten Streets are well, ten streets, from Saltney Street to Oil Street between the Stanley Dock complex and the edge of Liverpool city centre. Streets once dominated by dockside industries and warehouses when the nearby quays were bustling. The buildings on them are in varied states from still thriving use to total decay and abandonment. ‘Ten Streets’ is now also the name of plan for this area.
Claire Parry, who’s worked for Liverpool City Council for 10 years in planning, has worked on the development of the Ten Streets Spatial Regeneration Framework (SRF)[ii]. I ask Claire to explain what this is actually is in simple terms: “It’s a planning policy document essentially, so it sets out land use designations and it looks at development principles, how you want developments to look. So it will describe heights, materiality, the style of building. With Ten Streets given that it’s located in part in the World Heritage Site, heritage is quite an important factor there. So, it looks at new development in relation to the existing fabric. It sets a bit of a vision.”
While plenty of people are increasingly interested in the whys and wherefores of urban regeneration, many switch off once the complex and often seemingly grey world of planning comes into it. However understanding the role, possibilities and pitfalls of planning is essential to getting to grips with such urban change. “We had a launch in Feb 2017,” Parry explains, “which was a vision for the area and ten big ideas, owing to these ten parallel streets which was initially the focus.”
Before there was a plan though, there was already change. The area had long been in decline. Although it retained a fair amount of small scale industry, a lot of this was slowly leaving for more modern business parks nearby. With land and buildings generally having low value, the area was increasingly derelict. So far so Western post-industrial world. And, like in many similar places before, including other parts of Liverpool, this combination of interesting old buildings, few neighbours, especially of an evening, and cheap rents brought creative people into the area.
One of them was Kazimier, which first emerged when some artists who’d moved to the city took over an abandoned night club in the centre. ‘The Conti’, once a haunt of Liverpool’s 80s footballers, was turned into a new independent venue called The Kazimier, where I had some of the best nights of my life. Their organisation grew to become much more than that, as its Director Liam Naughton explains: “We’re hands on artists. Pursing some ideological goals in output. A lot of those are to do with placemaking, showmaking, running venues and being vessels for other people’s artistic content. Doing something interesting and trying to blur the boundaries between leisure and social and artistic practice.”
It was practicality that first drove Kazimier to the Northern Docks area: “We came because we were expanding as a creative outlet and we simply didn’t have a big enough workshop in town,” says Naughton. “That worked out and we took on bigger projects that we could deliver out of this building. So we grew whilst still running the venue in town.” This need for space was what attracted them to the area rather than any wider potential, as he explains: “We never chose up here because we thought ‘it’s going to be an amazing, buzzing area one day’. We were just like ‘isn’t it great that nobody is up here, we can do our own thing and be completely left out of the rhythms of the city centre.’”
Soon though, they expanded their Northern Docks site into a venue and moved wholesale to the area after their city centre club was redeveloped: “We all miss the club because it was a magical room. But it was also holding us back,” says Naughton. Their new site, known as The Invisible Wind Factory, is now one of the largest creative spaces in the Liverpool, as he explains: “It’s a venue on two floors that’s delivering concerts and club nights and installations and immersive theatre, things along that nature. We have a basement venue underground which is more intimate and smaller and is for smaller, more experimental and weirder stuff. We’re a bit Bauhausian in that everything is under one roof. So, we have got a big giant workshop with electronic lab, music and video editing suites, resistant materials workshops. Project rooms were we’re making things and testing them out before we take them to their field. Then above the venue we run 22 artist studios upstairs. So, we have a community of people housed here in the North Docks. We have a café here, I’m probably missing some other things out…”
Very similar reasons drew to the Northern Docks another of its key cultural sites: “I was a remote worker for a sports governing body,” says Liam Kelly, Director of Make Liverpool. “Worked on my own from home full time away from the head office in London. On the back of achieving a life ambition, representing Great Britain, coming back to the stark realities of working from home, I ended up with poor mental health. One of the remedies for that being to work with and around people. So, I did a call out to friends about sharing office space, studio space, and several friends replied. We gave ourselves a name, became a collective, took a studio space. Then we sort of just scaled that up.” Make then wanted to expand beyond traditional shared office-style workspace: “We realised what our tenants needed was a pool of resources that they didn’t necessarily have to pay for but could pay to use,” elaborates Kelly. “We researched it, realised this was a thing, a maker space, part of a maker movement. So, we pitched the idea to a social investor, the Beautiful Ideas Company, they gave us seed capital to take over a building in the north of Liverpool.”
Make did look at investing in the area that had been their first home, Baltic Triangle. This had been developed over the previous 10 years as a creative industries area south of Liverpool city centre. However, as speculators moved into Baltic to capitalise on its new trendiness, this put Make off, as Kelly explains: “We looked in Baltic but because of the story of an area regenerating, there were buildings available, but they were landbanked and we didn’t want to do something temporary. We wanted a big fat lease where we could put down roots and make it sustainable. We didn’t want to repeat the same old, same old temporary use of space with no exit plan, eventually get gentrified out, wash, rinse and repeat.” So, having been introduced to a landlord in the area by friends at the Kazimier, they took over an old factory in the North Docks that had various times produced scooters and ambulance equipment.
So, for quite pragmatic reasons, this industrial area started to gain a creative bent. The pursuit and use of ‘marginal’ urban space has been deeply linked to art and culture since at least the 1960s. What’s changed in the last ten or fifteen years is where the margins are, and how long they stay margins. As in other places, such spaces were once found right in Liverpool’s centre, symptomatic of its extreme decline that buildings were so cheap in the city’s heart in recent decades. As things improved and the centre regrew, what was the fringe moved further out. This a localised version of more extreme urban change in bigger and richer urban centres.
It was the redevelopment of Stanley Dock by developer Harcourt after years of schemes never quite getting off the ground (A Historic England article described it as “the biggest adaptive re-use challenge in Europe”) and the start of cultural organisations like these moving to the area, that gave rise to the City Council putting together the Ten Streets plan. Claire Parry notes these streets have been in the Council’s eye for a long time: “This area’s always been looked at, and it pre-dates me, for the last couple of decades. But because it was so big and other projects got prioritised at the time, this one always got a bit left behind. More recently with Harcourt investing in Stanley Dock, that created a bit of a catalyst in terms of interest in the area. Then there was a lot of creative businesses that started to relocate there in the past sort of five years, so that kind of focused our minds.”
So, with this change already starting to happen, why does it need a plan from the Council? “To try and just coordinate it a little bit,” says Claire. “We’re certainly not responsible for this happening, it was kind of already happening anyway. It was to try I suppose to help it on its way. One of the things we’ve learnt from with Baltic Triangle is that didn’t benefit from an SRF. So, there was not really any kind of piece there for planners to use to try and shape development moving forward.”
Learning from the Baltic Triangle
This point from Claire is crucial when considering the role of the local authority and an SRF in the area. It’s worth touching on the related history of Baltic Triangle here at the other end of Liverpool, oft written about as Liverpool’s hip creative district.
Baltic first began to emerge around 2008 when, with Liverpool’s pre Credit Crunch property boom and the city’s European Capital of Culture status, creative spaces such as venues and studios began to be moved on by re-development from the ‘Ropewalks’ area, which had emerged as the new ‘alternative district’ in the 1990s, itself partially deliberately engineered by the authorities since the late 1980s. Ropewalks had grown as the city’s older 1960s-80s ‘alternative district’ around Mathew Street was redeveloped. A familiar pattern, although with Liverpool’s sluggish economy, this was a slow process that took almost a generation to happen each time in those cases, so was much less noticeable than now.
The Council and other authorities response to the issues of creative places in Ropewalks being pushed out was as it had been in earlier decades: ‘move to this new area’, which was named by the planners as ‘Baltic Triangle’ because it was, well, a triangle of land near the Baltic Fleet pub. Prior to that it was known as the ‘Waterfront Industrial Area’. I used to walk through it to my job in a call centre further down the docks when it was still very much a quiet, declining industrial area of small factories and depots. In fact, prior to its new creative status, Baltic was considered as being designated a ‘managed prostitution zone’ by the city.
It’s important to note, as Baltic’s development has sometimes been written about as ‘wholly organic’ that in fact, it was both deliberately planned as a new creative district and that also there was also scepticism from many in the creative scene that it would work. ‘You can’t plan something like this!’ was the mantra. Some of the first creative outfits to move to Baltic were publicly funded outfits such as Liverpool Biennial, who were encouraged to go there. Importantly though, the Baltic Creative CIC was set up around the same time with funding from the now defunct Northwest Development Agency. This created studio space that crucially was directly owned and controlled by a Community Interest Company committed to creative industries and reinvesting any surplus generated in the area and supporting creative industries. This along with other studio space held by the likes of Elevator, led the development of Baltic as a creative district with others, notably venues like 24 Kitchen Street and Constellations, following.
Crucially however, no planning framework was put in place at the time. So, as the district began to emerge as cool, Baltic was ripe to be picked over by property speculators and soon what were often poor-quality flats began to be thrown up, threatening the creative outfits in the area. Parry details the situation from the Council perspective: “I think what we realised with Baltic is that while it’s got a mixed land used designation, the feel with that is that it has become very residential dominated. What we have tried to do with Ten Streets is retain the employment focused designation to try and retain the job creating focus of the project. We’re keen not to get an imbalance where maybe the infiltration of residential in here becomes too much and the employment led focus of the project will be lost.” A SRF in the Ten Streets won’t prevent speculation entirely, but it will help a great deal.
Parry details the process of the SRF getting put in place: “We thought this would be something that would be good to do. But we needed a mandate to do that, so the consultation event in February 2017 with these ten big ideas was just a kind of starter for ten, literally, to see what people’s ideas and what people’s feedback on that. It proved really successful, everyone really liked the idea and the plan, so we used that to inform the SRF then moving forward.”
Involvement
“That whole branding announcement and positioning of it came after we were here,” Liam Kelly details, “maybe a year after.” Although he does feel Make Liverpool were involved in the planning as soon as this began: “That all happened really quickly, and they came to us to talk about it.” Kelly continues: “There was no consultation pre giving it a name and an identity and all that sort of stuff. But then they obviously consulted on the SRF, that then came out. Then they set up a steering group to which we were invited to and we host in our building.”
I ask Parry if Ten Streets with its cultural and creative ideas, has made it different from the usual planning procedures? “We’ve tried to engage with social media a bit more, given that it’s got this creative district twist to it”, she says. “We tried to look through Twitter as a way of plugging that document and engaging with people that way and it’s got its own website. I think it’s got the most impressions on Twitter out of all the Council projects.”
Kelly feels this engagement has been meaningful: “I definitely think we have been listened to. I think our relationship with the Council is excellent. We put quite a lot of effort into that and I feel like we have benefitted from that.” Though he points out the challenges facing a Council engaging with an area like this: “I generally support what the Council are doing and think they’re sensitive to certain things but they’re a Council and they will inevitably upset some people. People will definitely make mistakes. City Councils are huge, they are always going to struggle to talk to the grassrooots of any community no matter how much they try so they’re always doomed to fail in certain aspects.”
Liam Naughton also feels Kazimier have been part of the conversation: “They basically kept us in the loop. They sort of said it’s all going to change, and they want to do this in the right way possible and these were early stages. As the months developed Ten Streets came as a name and advisory groups started forming. A Councillor was getting involved and they were like, ‘can you contribute to the aspects you care about in this area and inform this masterplan document, the SRF?’ So, we have been staying engaged without becoming fatigued really.” Crucially Naughton feels that they have had impact in the process too: “I believe we have had a good influence on it. Because this could have just been quite simply a development zone for industrial use. And in some level, that’s what it is, if you look at the SRF document. What’s added to it is they want to keep the creative industries at its core and they want it to have culture as a big part of these ten ideas. That was really from just a few of us being involved with that and saying, ‘well yeah you have a great opportunity here’. Liverpool is a capital of culture and is a city that’s negotiating culture in its devolution and it’s the only one in the country that’s wanted to fight for that. That’s got to follow suit with how it develops, and Liverpool relies massively on that. I think we’re very lucky to live in a city were the authorities recognise that and see the benefit.”
However, Kelly points out how thin some consultations on the project are: “I think the amount of returns they got from the feedback consultation stage were really low. I think it was in the hundreds. In terms of collecting feedback, it’s really high, but in reality it’s a sample and that sample goes and forms ‘well 99% of people support of this programme’. Well yeah, out of 150 people. So I do understand why people are cynical about it. But in general, I think they’re doing well. They’re doing a lot, considering how terribly resourced they are.”
This is echoed by Joel Hansen, Editor of Scottie Press, which has been a north Liverpool community newspaper for decades, as he details: “The Scottie Press is Britain’s longest running community newspaper, been going for 47 years. The paper was created directly from unthoughtful city planning almost. In the 1970s, the second Mersey Tunnel was essentially built through the last remaining community in Scotland Road. As a sort of protest against any further city planning destroying communities, the Scottie Press was created to unite locals, unite neighbourhoods and give a voice back to the working-class people who lived in those areas.”
Once again with Ten Streets and other developments in the area, planning has come back to the fore of their coverage: “I feel there’s an underlying feeling of scepticism in some regeneration projects,” says Hansen, “because of the negative consequences of regeneration projects in the past. It’s one of them, people want to see things before they believe it.”
While there has been discussion and dialogue between the arts community, the Council and developers about Ten Streets and media and online coverage of this, there has been less thought to how this plan will connect to nearby residential districts and what it will offer them. This is something that’s happened time and again in debates about culture-led regeneration and gentrification. Powerful developers and authorities are always heard and often so too are the usually well-educated, well connected and good-at-communication creative people, even if they have ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ power. While people who have lived and worked in areas for generations can get forgotten: “We’re talking about the people and their descendants, who worked on the docks and worked in them factories,” says Hansen. “They’re the people who made that area what it was today, and I think it’s a shame that there hasn’t been enough effort to delve deeper into the community and not just the surface area of maybe a few of the new arts companies that are starting to crop up.”
Hansen has featured Ten Streets in Scottie Press, but feels he had to do the legwork: “I’ve reached out to Claire and part of the whole project I’m trying to run through the paper is to maybe perhaps put a little bit more pressure on Ten Streets to include the community more, and make them more conscious of the people living here who have lived here all their lives. They didn’t approach the paper, which has a very good reach to people who might not see advertisements online or see these consultations.”
Close to the Ten Streets, it’s worth noting that neighbourhoods like the Eldonian Village are amongst the best examples of non-gentrification, community-led urban regeneration in the UK. For years Eldonian was the only place in the UK to have won a United Nations World Habitat Award. Yet this is rarely talked about, even in some of the architecture and urban studies press in the UK or the broadsheets. In fact, if Eldonian gets written about at all its often framed in contempt from the small coterie of quite privileged, London-based men who dominate such discourse: ‘The community rejected the visions in glorious concrete of architects, planners and theorists and built instead average looking houses with gardens. How bland. How dare they’ sums up usually how it goes.
As a result, positive lessons to be learned from urban development in Liverpool, which also built the first ever Council housing and had some of the first housing associations amongst a range of other urban innovations, are often ignored by the wider country and world. Crucial in the lessons being learned with Baltic Triangle and Ten Streets is that, if given the attention they deserve, they could help influence models for areas dealing with the same issues much further afield.
Optimism and scepticism
Liam Naughton feels if Ten Streets is given the opportunity to fulfil its potential, it could be powerful and have UK wide impact in terms of how such areas are developed: “I would love it if just doubled down on being an exciting place for culture and arts. Buildings assigned to just being artist studios or DIY gallery spaces, more places for performance venues. If there’s opportunities there we’ll fill them in this city. People will fill them. Working with the pressure groups and the Arts Council and interesting agencies up for helping with problems. We could do something interesting here. Grabbing those challenges we’re seeing in the arts right now. You could be ambitious with it.”
Yet this positive vision could yet go unfulfilled. Liam Kelly feels the biggest threat to the Ten Streets idea is from speculators: “Concerns are really obvious,” he says. “Spiralling uncontrolled rising rents and property values before anything has actually happened. One of the biggest pains we experienced in the Baltic was land banking and unrealistic expectations from landowners about value property was worth. Then all that crap student accommodation that went up really quickly and started threatening the grassrooots venues in the Baltic.” Kelly acknowledges that the Council only has limited powers to control developers, especially now their funding has reduced so much: “It’s all pretty complicated stuff and the Council doesn’t really have the power that people expect it to. So, unscrupulous people who want to cash in are the biggest threat.” Though he too remains optimistic: “In terms of the positives, we want to create a destination that really does actually do amazing stuff and attract the right kind of investment to be able to keep on expanding what we’re doing. Take the lessons that we learned in the Baltic and bring them here.”
It’s worth noting here the distinctions between culture and regeneration in overheated cities like London and New York and in under-resourced ones like Liverpool which I wrote about in more detail here[iii]. While the former usually dominates urban discourse and the latter experience some of the same phenomena, the challenge for cities like Liverpool is in some respects the inverse. Rents are rarely a problem outside of a couple of popular areas. An average house in Liverpool costs 1% less than 10 years ago[iv]. The real challenge the city has is the same it’s been for decades, a lack of quality jobs. An issue which sees a shortage of training spaces for young people and more experienced residents piling on trains to Manchester every morning to work. The city loses its talent to the wider world and then further struggles to attract companies and good quality investment because of it. In fact one of the reasons so many poor-quality private flats have been built in Liverpool in recent years, has been that it’s easy money for low-grade local developers. While owners of land that’s been often fallow for decades are keen to cash in on it quickly. With the general low demand, developing space for businesses doesn’t offer the same returns. So new businesses can’t find enough space, while bigger ones stay away from investing and it becomes a vicious circle, especially with public spending locked down. A development such as Ten Streets, if managed well, could help provide for the growing demand for creative business space and the people who use this space in turn support arts venues. However, such space must be free from predatory speculation, both for the creative scene and more pragmatically because the city desperately needs space for the new jobs being created.
I ask Claire Parry if she thinks the SRF can work as intended then, reduce landbanking and poor-quality residential construction? “Yes, that’s what it does,” she says. “The ten parallel streets are very much employment focused, so the development principles and the land use designation in that section of the document restrict residential development.” Having heard similar promises from others before, I ask Claire to state in black and white, if a speculator buys a load of old buildings and wants to kick a creative occupier out for flats, they’re going to come up against the framework? “Precisely that,” she says with confidence. “That’s where this differs to the Baltic, which has mixed used designation. This is industrial designation predominantly.”
How about those remaining industrial users? While over the years many have folded or moved to more modern premises nearby, some remain and provide important jobs. One of the worst aspects of the famous Docklands redevelopment in London was that it pushed out remaining industrial users, further shrinking the number of working-class jobs in London. Parry is also blunt that these should also be protected: “It’s retained its industrial designation in the SPD, so it’s not changed that.”
Parry agrees however, for the area to be successful as a creative centre, a delicate balance is required between the Council protecting the area from speculation and being too heavy handed as the project lead. She highlights the tightrope that must be walked between a free for all for creatives, only to end up being removed by the speculators, and a dry Council dominated scheme: “It’s a difficult thing we have to balance. If there was one of these documents in place for Baltic it might have actually helped, but it seems though if the Council steps in it all becomes very kind of clinical and the organic nature is lost. What the hope is with this is we can have the best of both worlds, it’s not too prescriptive, things can just happen, but within the parameters set in the document.”
As it moves on, if those behind Ten Streets can keep all its stakeholders on side and some of the optimism they have, it will go a long way to keeping the best intentions of the plan alive. Inevitably though, doesn’t a massive developer like Harcourt which has invested millions in redeveloping Stanley Dock have more influence that a couple of art school graduates opening a bar? “No that’s not really the way I work,” says Parry. “We have this advisory group, that has a representative from different types of businesses sat around it. It’s an open kind of talking shop for everybody. I wouldn’t say Harcourt have got any more influence that anyone else. I’d hope no one thinks that’s, but I’m sure they do, because it’s the general kind of misconception that you’re sided with a developer more than somebody else.”
Liam Naughton though thinks power imbalances remain, albeit with perhaps with a wider circle of involvement than most urban development plans:
“The big players are quite clear, it’s the City Council, with Harcourt the main developer and then Peel as an important thing to factor in as they’re right next to each other. So really, they’re the major voices in the room as they’re the ones who can make the big decisions. So, it’s more important than, us, in terms of who gets listened to, as that’s where power lies really. That said, I’m not cynical. They have listened to us. The Deputy Mayor Ann O’Byrne Chairs a meeting we get invited to which is about having our say on certain things. It’s an Advisory Group, so they don’t have to do it. But there’s so many important voices in the room, if you suggest something that makes sense, it will get explored on some level. In the end the big boys will get what they want. That doesn’t mean that not everyone is holding hands.”
Naughton thinks key to success will be putting in serious planning protection for culture, like in Berlin where music venues are now protected in law: “Planning policy just needs to protect music venues,” he says. “Seeing what’s going on with Agent of Change being debated in Parliament. That’s great. You have to protect arts spaces as a matter of policy otherwise you’d never really win against these powerful developers.”
Joel Hansen of Scottie Press shares some of the same tension I do. Not satisfied with the area remaining in so much decay, he wants it to grow and thrive again. Equally he remains concerned about the impact of rush building by speculators: “I’d really like to see it develop,” he ponders. “I’d like to see Stanley Dock and the Ten Streets and the Atlantic Corridor [A wider concept to revitalise the dock system] to put Liverpool on the map again. To put Stanley Dock on the map of the world. Which it once was, as a dock it was central to the world’s industrial process. It would be fantastic to see a resurgence in those streets. I’d like to see all them abandoned warehouses flourish again.” For Hansen though, retaining and more importantly, respecting the human heritage of the people who built and worked these docks and warehouses, is paramount: “We have to put in some effort to conserve the memory of thousands and thousands of people who worked in them areas. How that could be done, you could name a thousand different community projects that you could operate that could support that. I’m all for the growth of the city and in and around Stanley Dock.”
There remains concern from some though about how the Ten Streets plan may impact on arts spaces in the area. Drop the Dumbulls or ‘Dumbulls’ is a venue in a former pub that is the latest incarnation of a grassroots music and arts venue that has existed in several sites temporarily (one an old gym, hence the name) which subsequently got re-developed. In its latest incarnation the founders wanted a permanent base and so bought the shut down former Bull pub, opening around the same time the redevelopment of Stanley Dock by Harcourt began. When the Ten Streets plan came out, it appeared that Dumbulls was up for demotion and a petition was quickly issued to save it. I ask Claire Parry, does the Ten Streets plan threaten grassroots initiatives like this? She feels it was all down to confusion. “The team had gone round and done a heritage townscape assessment of the buildings contained within there. Grade C buildings were identified, which weren’t in keeping with the character of the area, which is the key statement. Which I don’t think the document clearly articulated. Because we had so many comments people’s whose buildings were red, thought the Council was going to come in and buy it and demolish it, which was absolutely not the case. And The Bull pub was, wrongly, coded as red. It was just an error on the plan, which we picked up, changed and I actually went and met with them for about two hours, talking it through and they seemed pretty happy. After that meeting, there was then some kind of online petition saying the building had been coded wrong, even though I’d actually said it had changed and gave them a plan showing that. It’s been changed, it was an error in the first instance, it should have been green from the start. Bit of a storm in a teacup.”
She continues: “The Bull is not a listed structure, but it’s one of the old historic character buildings in the area. We’d never, ever do that again. That’s one the things that through this process we have learned a fair few things as well. I just don’t think it was worded clearly enough maybe to the layman om the street that the red doesn’t mean that it’s a problem.”
I had several positive social media conversations with Jake from Dumbells about the Ten Streets and their venue, but we could never quite make an interview happen. In short though, Jake was keen to point out they had arranged the meeting with Claire and that it wasn’t them, but some of their concerned patrons, that started the petition when the plan came out.
Could this be a wider problem, I ask Claire. The language and structures of planning can seem impenetrable to the layman. Does this not need to change if you want to involve people and have the openness and collaboration that the Ten Streets seems to advocate for? “I think it just wasn’t explained well enough in the document,” she says. “Because there was a number of people who raised the same concern, you think ‘well hang on, it’s not translated properly is it.”
Liam Naughton feels that there’s an opportunity for the Ten Streets plan to work, if the positive ambitions of the project are maintained and it doesn’t just become another generic urban redevelopment: “It’s going to be a challenging one to please everyone in the Ten Streets and we sort of think, if people just do a good job of it and keep it to the ambition we all said it was going to be a while ago and not retreating on the big ideas.”
Beyond the Ten: Vauxhall, Everton and Kirkdale
The focus of the discussion and plans of Ten Streets have been the former warehouses and factories adjacent to the docks. While some people do live in the immediate area, it’s always been principally industrial. Not far away though are residential districts that once relied on this area for their economic life. Vauxhall, Everton and Kirkdale are amongst the most historic districts of Liverpool, some of the most deprived parts of the UK and at the heart of where the idea of Scouse culture was born. These areas have faced challenges with poverty since the industrial revolution and growth of the low wage, insecure work culture that dominated this part of the city of docks, processing plants, warehouses and ship repair. This has only been exacerbated though since these industries fell into decline.
Joel Hansen is keen to talk about the longstanding nature of the communities in these neighbourhoods, rare in our rapidly changing urban times: “The community here and the neighbourhoods are so long lasting. People tend not to move out of this area. There’s a lot of places don’t have those core families who have been there for generations and generations and that is definitely still the case and they’re very close-knit communities.”
Liam Naughton reflects on the past of the area: “That golden era when everyone had a job. Not that long ago. Every building thriving with work. The docks were active. That’s not happening at the moment. But you can bring some of it back.” While some fear economic development, most people in north Liverpool with its high unemployment and low wages, need it. The question is though, will projects such as the Ten Streets provide jobs for local people?
“What I’d like to see from Ten Streets,” says Hansen, “and maybe we will see this further down the line, with the idea of bringing new sort of creative companies in, new start-up businesses. What effort is going to be put into training local people to be in contention with getting these jobs? That was something I brought up with Claire [Parry] and it seemed there was some effort being out in with Liverpool in Work, work on further educational programmes that might start preparing people for the new roles that are developing in the area.”
Again, Hansen would like to see these residential communities more involved in the development of the scheme, even if they are outside the lines of the Ten Streets official plan: “Because when you talk about consultations, there’s not many people who actually live in that area. It’s essentially warehouses. So, who are you consulting? Some of the businesses who are there currently, but there’s not that many people.” He feels there’s a need to reach out beyond the creative community and the developers: “There’s artists, that’s a particular community. In terms of the Ten Big ideas, where they talk about a collaborative approach and celebrating heritage, does that count Vauxhall and Kirkdale, or is that for the artists who are living around there? I think there could be more effort to include the further community.” He feels making the Ten Streets development link to its neighbouring districts will be vital to make it a sustainable success: “I think there needs to be something that’s going to integrate this changing time and hopefully educate people on what’s going to happen in Ten Streets. If there are these tech-based companies moving in, are community centres, training providers and schools putting the effort in to prepare the younger generation to get these jobs? There needs to be a lot more awareness.” Hansen sees Scottie Press as potentially playing an important role in brokering that relationship: “I’d like to work with the likes of Ten Streets and all those creative companies, to connect that out to the wider community, in Vauxhall, Everton and Kirkdale, who might read the paper but not have any connection to Ten Streets. I’d like Scottie Press to become the bridge between these two worlds. Reach out to these creative communities, see if they want to connect to these further neighbourhoods.”
Liam Kelly says Make Liverpool are already offering opportunities to young people, not just from the surrounding neighbourhoods, but disadvantaged young people in general: “On Thursdays we teach a group of kids that would otherwise be NEETs [Not in Education, Employment or Training]. We teach them basic construction skills,” he says. “We’re very much focused on an expanding our education offer. We’ve employed someone to look after that stuff. The kids that come and the people that come on our courses are from all over the city, including north Liverpool.”
Liam Naughton thinks more could be done by Ten Streets to engage nearby residential communities: “I really think the Eldonian Village probably hasn’t been engaged with properly at this consultation level. Because that level was really about the Ten Streets within it. I imagine they’re oblivious to what’s going on.” Key for Naughton is that such redevelopment represents the first significant economic opportunity in the area for a generation: “If you speak to the local Councillor, Joe Hanson, he’s very positive about it [Ten Streets] all of this, because the city has not focused on this area his entire life. So now when people have got an axe to grind about something, it’s because there’s an actual opportunity to grab.” Naughton also highlights that Liverpool has a very long-established Traveller community on Oil Street, them being given this designated site when it was low value industrial land. Have they been involved in the Ten Streets plan? “I have met with them about five times,” says Claire Parry. “We have a Traveller Officer who went to every family with the feedback form and wrote it down on their behalf. So, I’ve had a number of meetings with those guys. It’s only the females that turn up, which is something else I’ve learned in this process. I’d not engaged with the Traveller community before.” What though do they think of the plans? “They’re pleased that there’s stuff happening in the area,” says Claire. “They were keen to know if the road was getting upgraded outside and it is. The initial conversation was they assumed they were getting jettisoned somewhere else, which isn’t the case.”
Ten Streets and bigger plans
While the Ten Streets is the focus of this piece, part of the deeper interest in this area is how it is surrounded by other developments of very different kinds. On one side the award-winning Eldonian Village mentioned earlier and adjacent the already started redevelopment of the Stanley Dock complex. Different again over the dock road is the long planned but slow to progress Liverpool Waters scheme on abandoned quaysides by property giant Peel Holdings, which promises modern flats and offices. Then at the northern tip of this, Everton FC are proposing a new stadium. If even half of these plans completes, it will be the biggest impact on this are since the rapid expansion of the dock system in the Victorian era. How will all these varied developments sit together?
“Hopefully complementary,” says Parry, talking of Liverpool Waters. “They’re two very different offers and very different styles. Tall buildings on one side then restricted heights on the other with Ten Streets. We’ve worked with Peel a lot, Peel are on that advisory group too and they’re obviously keen to see the area regenerated and improved. It’s quite different. What we’re trying to focus on with Ten Streets is the employment side of things. Whereas what they’ve got a focus on is a lot of residential across there. And offices, but different types of offices. So, we see that all as complementary uses being brought together near. Some of the new access roads going in are going to connect the area up in a much better way.”
Parry feels the Council’s involvement will help link things together: “What we’re trying to do and one of the reasons we extended the SRF boundary of Ten Streets was to pick up the surrounding development and regeneration context, so they’ll link to the Eldonian Village and then they’ll link to Liverpool Waters and the potential new stadium further to the north at Bramley-Moore.”
Liam Kelly however is more sceptical that Liverpool Waters will reach them any time soon (it covers the whole dock system between the modern operational port and the city centre) or impact on their plans: “Our tenancy in this building is fifteen years. I’d be shocked if they broke ground within the next fifteen years on the barren land that is opposite us. It’s just not going to happen.” He continues: “They’ve got the Isle of Man Ferry Terminal to build. They’ve got loads to do. So, it isn’t going to happen here in ten years. They will build, but they’ll slowly build down from the sites they’ve already got.”
In terms of the overall ecosystem of the area, Naughton feels the larger scale developments planned might actually help the Ten Streets get the infrastructure it needs, but would not be able to realise on its own scale: “The players like Everton have decided they’re going to move where they’re going to move and there’s things they need to have in place to make that work, they’re going to need access. Us winging saying ‘we need a train station!’ That’s not a reasonable demand, we’re not big enough and we don’t bring enough people. But Everton will need a station, no question, that’s a bigger catalyst.”
Naughton hopes the wider waterside developments will lead to a riverfront you can walk the whole length of, the first time since industrialisation: “Once it starts developing and it will open up. Things like access. Demanding people can walk along the river. That’s got to be a big deal. That area, the dockland, it’s never belonged to Liverpool. The wall was designed to keep people out.”
As regards to the stadium, Hansen like me is an Evertonian and as he says, “It’s hard to be unbiased.” He continues: “I think the Everton stadium is great, for Everton, but I truly believe it will be great for the city as well. Depending on what it looks like, but I imagine the architecture will be significant. I think the benefits it could bring to the further community is that Everton as a club have quite a strong consciousness towards the communities of Liverpool. Everton in the Community their charitable arm is very active all over Liverpool.”
I’m similarly a supporter of the new ground, especially as one of the world’s great stadium designers, Dan Meis, is working on it. Fandom aside, a high-quality modern stadium would be a great asset in such a football obsessed city and could be a catalyst for further development of the whole area. Especially as the planned stadium site is adjacent to a sewage farm, so isn’t likely to be developed for much else. However, as I’ve seen no less than three Everton new stadium plans collapse in my lifetime, I’ll believe it when I see it. Furthermore, very careful planning will be required to integrate it with all these other planned developments.
In terms of engaging the wider community, Liam Kelly thinks Everton’s long history of community and charity work and its Premier League funds might have more impact than the Council in social change in the area: “I’ve got more faith in Everton doing that with Everton in the Community than I would in the Council. Not because of intent, but because of resource. Everton’s community stuff has been amazing really, well documented. If the stadium came down here, I could see them being open to those kinds of conversations and doing more of that kind of stuff.”
Echoing Liam Naughton’s comments about decades of under-investment in the area, Joel Hansen notes the impact of the initial development schemes in the area already under way, such as heavy investment in the road system: “Already the new road networks are beneficial. I think these are all great signs, I think that things are improving. There’s also rumours for a new Vauxhall train station, that would be massive. This area is a little bit segregated, you must walk at least ten or fifteen minutes to get anywhere else. I think the new stadium and bringing new accessible routes to the area is great.” But he also sounds a note of caution. While the economic development is welcome, he fears possible negative impacts on local people being able to remain in the community: “In regard to the bigger sort of Atlantic Corridor, Liverpool Waters project, it sounds great. The future of the city. But again, there’s remains some fear that almost the dock area and the surrounding area are going to become more popular and potentially locally people might be priced out.”
What next?
The Ten Streets SRF is in place, a steering group is regularly meeting, things are happening. But what is the timescale for Ten Streets to develop as intended? “It’s a ten-year plan, moving forward,” says Parry. “It’s already happening, and it has already been happening for a number of years. The Titanic Hotel [In Stanley Dock] opened in 2013, the Dumbulls have been there several years, the Invisible Wind Factory. We’ve talked about the potential to develop up to a million square foot, if you look at the vacant sites or if you look were you could maybe bring stuff back into use that’s currently vacant. We have got down £200 million – £500 million development value to be brought forward over the next ten years.”
Where will this money come from, given the Council’s lack of cash?
“We’re trying to get as much money as we possibly can into the area and it will be easier to do that now we have got a plan in place,” says Parry. She suggests they’re seeking mixed funding model: “You have now got private developers putting applications in for a number of vacant sites. We’ve got access to things like Regional Growth Funding, local enterprise funds, Combined Authority funds. I know there’s little bits and bobs happening with the Beautiful Ideas Company, that people like Make Liverpool have been beneficiaries of, so that’s like small scale funds. The Invisible Wind Factory have got Arts Council funding to do certain stuff. So, it’s a cocktail of funding, that’s how we operate now, because the ways in which a Council can invest has changed massively.”
Conclusions
The plans for Ten Streets represent both Liverpool and wider ideas around culture and urban regeneration at an interesting juncture.
For Liverpool, it’s a sign the regeneration that’s been going on nearer the centre for some time is now, for better or worse, moving further outward. Even as Merseyside’s economy remains generally weak, it trundles on in a broadly upward direction compared to the situation when I was a child in the 1980s when it must not be forgotten, to many people it seemed like the area was in terminal decline.
On a wider level it demonstrates the growing complexities that have arisen in ideas around regeneration and redevelopment and their relationship to art and culture. Modernist ideas of mass redevelopment led by planners began to crumble from the 1960s onwards, influenced in part by Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the movement which followed it, which argued for the value of ‘unplanned’ street level culture and historic buildings. What Jacobs didn’t anticipate was her work would also help make such urban areas more fashionable with the middle and upper classes, especially creative people. In short, more people like Jacobs would move in to such areas and this would slowly change the ‘mixed’ community that she valued. As the planners became ever weaker, it wasn’t neighbourhood people as Jacobs envisaged that took over, but developers and financiers. To quote urban theorist Sharon Zukin: “Jacobs did not call for stronger zoning laws to encourage a mix of housing, factories, stores and schools. She did not support more permanent rent controls to ensure a mix of poorer and richer tenants, of successful businesses and start-ups.”[v]
As public authority was sucked out of urban development, property developers took the power and initiative. The likes of London’s Docklands and Liverpool’s Albert Dock were examples of public money priming private development driven by powerful, unelected development agencies. In the UK today, such public funds have largely dried up and the development agencies have shrunk or disappeared. At the same time, deprived local authorities have long since, through desire or more often force, coshed by successive Governments to follow the Neo-liberal approach of Manchester, adopted many of the former development agencies’ ideas. The vast overwhelming reduction in central Government support for local authorities has made every city in the UK think about how it might pay for itself, especially given how low and weak local taxation is in Britain.
At the same time as these power structures have shifted, so too has the view of ‘what works’ in regeneration and re-development. The ‘post planner’ era 1980s schemes were amongst the first to start to value old industrial buildings, but still favoured large scale re-development aimed at large businesses occupiers and private housing. Arts, small business, the grassroots and ‘alternative’ were usually seen as a problem to these schemes, or at least something to be ignored. However, as such developments proliferated, middle class tastes began to shift towards the ‘small’, ‘authentic’ and ‘varied’, against the ‘soulless’, ‘bland’ and ‘corporate’ just as they had done against the Modernist schemes of the 1960s. Developers and planning departments began to increasingly realise the benefits of having certain types of small, independent businesses in areas, retaining cultural venues, the pull of things like street art and ‘just enough’ rough and readiness that made an area ‘interesting’ and developments started to change shape.
Sharon Zukin in her seminal Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, captured the role that arts and culture and artists, or more broadly, humanities graduates, have played in changing declining industrial areas. Often bringing back into popular use buildings, even districts, that had been deemed beyond saving and only suitable for demolition. Coupled with the emergence in the belief of the creative industries as traditional industries declined, this was increasingly piggy-backed on and facilitated by developers. As well as local authorities, which critics from the biggest metropolitan centres should not forget were, in many cases, desperately trying to find ways to keep their towns and cities alive.
The speed and scale of such inner-urban change in the UK increased in the pre-2008 boom and indeed carried on in an even more unbalanced way after the Crunch as the power of the public sector was crushed and ever more organisations were pushed towards market-based thinking. Concurrently, the reduction in social security and traditional secure jobs for humanities graduates in colleges, charities and the public sector, pushed more of them also towards market-based thinking, setting up as sole traders or working in small businesses. As this happened, the issue of being disrupted through studios and venues being redeveloped became even more of an issue. Especially as the speed at which this happened seemed to keep increasing and in some major metropolitan areas, space became more of a premium.
Once young humanities graduates may have done ‘radical stuff’ in old warehouses or similar for several years, with little thought for the long term. Sustainability didn’t come into it, because surely the revolution was around the corner? When that didn’t come, most just moved on, getting a ‘proper job’ once they began to settle down. Increasingly though, those ‘proper jobs’ no longer existed, or at least in fewer numbers and far less lucrative than before. What was once the temporary action of the young increasingly became something that had to be framed within longer term thinking.
Developers and authorities have come to realise that crushing the creative aspects of an area can negatively affect the economic and social regeneration benefits they seek. Creative people too are now more aware than ever of their role in such urban change and indeed in urban life in general and what they bring to it. More aware also of the need to work to protect space and of their relative lack of hard power, even if they punch over their weight with their soft power. Similarly, while they themselves can often be exploited, creative people from more comfortable backgrounds can no longer be oblivious of the impact a developing ‘creative scene’ can have on impoverished and under invested neighbourhoods and those that have long lived in them.
We’re now in a mature phase when everyone, from artists to music fans to planners, developers and politicians, should be aware of the potential and pitfalls of inner-urban regeneration related to creativity and the arts. It is in this context that The Ten Streets emerges. While it retains some traditional industry, this will never again grow back in the same way. Thus, this huge swathe of industrial buildings need new uses or face crumbling to dust.
In a booming city, this would probably involve a simple conversion to residential and offices, with plenty of private capital going in because of the obvious return. But Liverpool presently has a limit to the number of flats and offices it needs and the margins on them are low. As stated earlier, it must be remembered that Liverpool is not an overheated city like London, New York or even Bristol. While theoretical discourse around art and urban change is dominated by looking at such places, the context for Liverpool and cities like it is quite different. Liverpool City Council knows well more than ever the truth that many choose to ignore: unless the city develops its economy more, creates better jobs and increases its tax base, it will always be at the mercy of the coming and going of external grants on the political winds to provide the services its people needs. It will continue to lose to many of its talented people and it won’t give its young people enough opportunities. Liverpool’s economy isn’t big enough to develop on its own and needs intervention, but the city has limited financial room to manoeuvre. As grants have been slashed, it’s often at the mercy of the interest, or lack of, external private capital, to develop. Meanwhile, the city is under internal and external pressure to preserve its historic districts, which is very expensive and increasingly hard because of the low demand for property and the slashing of grants. There’s no single solution to all this. Even while a change in Government may help things, it wouldn’t in itself solve the area’s long-standing economic issues which have their roots before WWII.
At the same time Liverpool, always noted, at least by those without prejudice, as an interesting and often radical cultural city, has much potential. It’s now a major centre for cultural tourism and its artistic output is growing in scale and recognition. However, this, like in so many places, has constantly been undermined by property speculation, short-termism and poor planning. Local authorities which claim to care about culture and the arts, in the Liverpool City Region’s case claim to have it at the heart of its focus, can no longer stand idly by when important cultural facilities are decimated in favour of poor-quality developments which, in some cases have shady origins and never get built anyway.
Liverpool is currently far behind in the stakes of getting big firms to move in. This kind of large-scale inward investment is important, not least in reducing unemployment in fell swoops and creating large enough numbers of training places for young people. However, it’s also problematic as big firms often come and go again, as Liverpool has learned to its cost. Encouraging smaller scale creative businesses, based around existing assets and organisations, can be a more sustainable model for economic development. There’s a real opportunity for the city here, but Liverpool has missed the boat more than once in recent decades. In the 1980s it had one of the biggest computer games design clusters in Europe, something that if nurtured may have transformed the city. But the Council navel gazed and never built on the opportunity. Much of it has since left. Similarly, as one of the most location filmed cities in the UK since the 1980s, only now, after many other cities have already done so, are we seeing the development of proper sound stages. Will Liverpool be able to take the opportunity presented by Ten Streets and build on it, generating more jobs in the creative and related industries, or will it squander the opportunity again? Ten Streets represents an opportunity for the city to do something different in urban development, in keeping with the city’s often radical history, rather than chasing generic ideas from elsewhere with increasingly diminishing returns.
With Ten Streets it’s clear that different voices are around the table and there’s some positive feeling about working together. Different people have different agendas, but the redevelopment of this area, if done well, could benefit all of them and benefit Liverpool far more than if it remains as it currently is. Whatever vibrancy exists in pockets, there is also plenty of dereliction that is beyond most grassroots initiative’s capacity to change. Not to mention the lack of infrastructure in the area. Ten Streets has the potential to seriously revive these streets as an economic area and offer space for the long term for the arts and culture scene in the city. It could make money for those that invest in it, create jobs and restore heritage. However serious notes of caution must remain. It could just as easily go wrong and alienate those who are currently putting so much energy into it at a grassroots levels.
A creative district wholly managed by the local authority, both the Council and artists admit would likely not succeed. Equally delusions about ‘just leaving’ the ‘organic’ development, essentially a lassiez-faire attitude, will only lead to the same driving out of creative outfits as the speculators move in, as has already happened in other areas of Liverpool and elsewhere. Thus, the Spatial Regeneration Framework, protecting the area in planning for employment use and restricting building heights, so making speculative residential developments less likely, could be key to seeing Ten Streets grow as a creative area. Such restrictions may also hold land values from skyrocketing. However, that isn’t guaranteed.
For Ten Streets to work though, it can’t just be done on trust, even if it does currently exist between the different parties involved, as the power imbalances remain huge. From hand to mouth creative outfits to impoverished local authorities and private developers with mixed records. The SRF will help, but more needs to be done. Protected land ownership is the next step. While it might not work for the whole of Ten Streets, if certain key streets or buildings could be passed to a Community Interest Company, as in Baltic Triangle, this would give a core base of locked in spaces for creative outfits and venues. However, the risk with this is a CIC would lack capital to secure space against bigger developers, so it would need some form of significant public financial backing to start it off, best leveraged by the City Council. Beyond this, a formally constituted board with equal voting rights for all members and actual clout on planning matters covering the area, could help formalise the relationship between the stakeholders. Such a group would have to be more than ‘advisory’ for it to have real teeth to protect and steer development in the area in the right direction. This could include looking at implementing rent controls in part or in whole in the area.
Such a model could see the CIC as a lead ‘developer’ in the area, generating rental income to keep sustaining and investing in more creative space. Yet at the same time leaving room for other initiatives to set up and operate in other buildings within a wider protective framework governed by a formal area board. Combined with the SRF, these things could make Ten Streets a potential model for other places dealing with the now well-established cycle of post-industrial to creative. If successful, it could attract artists being displaced from elsewhere, helping the city grow. The Ten Streets area being vibrant could help the larger developments nearby attract residents and other forms of business whilst keeping this area protected. While in turn such larger developments will help drive infrastructure improvements in the area beyond the scope and scale of Ten Streets.
Another paradigm needs to be considered though. Time and time again areas like this around the world have redeveloped, for the most part by creative people from middle and upper class backgrounds moving into them, but often they have ended up being cut off from the residential districts that were innately connected to such industrial areas and which suffered greatly when they shut down. A re-birth for the old warehouses of the Ten Streets will be great for Liverpool, but it will retain a terrible emptiness if this area thrives with artists and creatives from Liverpool’s comfortable suburbs and further afield while Vauxhall, Everton and Kirkdale continue to struggle. Much is made of the exclusiveness of certain private residential developments, while ignoring that creative communities can, even if inadvertently, have an exclusiveness all of their own. How can a redevelopment like this be leveraged to generate opportunities for local people as the growth of the dockside industries once did? It is incumbent on the local authority to manage this, but creative and other organisations must also do their bit, and indeed there are promising signs of this in Ten Streets. Any CIC or formal board with power in the area could have baked into its constitution that creating opportunities for residents in north Liverpool was part of its remit as well as protecting and developing creative spaces and restoring heritage buildings. While residents and community groups from these neighbourhoods should also be part of any area board and help steer its development.
At the heart of thinking about Ten Streets and other developments in this area, are questions of ownership and power. Who owns and who is responsible for such declined urban space? Property owners? The local authority? Developers who invest in it? The artists and creatives who’ve moved there? The established industrial occupiers? Or nearby long-time residents? There’s no one answer, though the power is as ever skewed to the developers, with local authorities, perhaps once the most powerful, now weaker than ever. Artists have soft power, but that is easily overwhelmed. Established residential communities may have numbers and longevity, but they have had their resilience battered over the years and need more economic opportunities. Everyone has a stake, everyone wants it to work, even if for their own reasons and some compromises will be inevitable. Can the structures be created and resources found to make it happen in the right way?
Ten Streets marketing talks about Ten Big Ideas. Really, for this area to be successful and sustainable, it just needs one big idea to work. That is to put formal structures and ownerships in place to give its mixed stakeholders a real say and control in how it develops. Not leaving it to chance or the whims of private developers. Ten Streets is just small enough to get some people with power and money to be bold and innovative, just big enough to test if it actually works. To help create a real and long-lasting creative district and in turn encourage some more inclusive economic growth. Perhaps in ten years I can revisit Stanley Dock again and see, not just a nice hotel where I can get a drink, but a restored building at the heart of something thriving and far more powerful. That is the kind of cultural urban regeneration we need to dare to hope for, but it is one that will only be achieved if those with the power keep listening, are brave and don’t lose sight of their big ideas.
Kenn Taylor 