Liverpool: Capital of Culture

Contemporary Review, May, 2004 by Richard Whittington-Egan

To cult rather than to culture must be assigned those popular folk interests, those crowd pullers, the Beatles and the Liverpool and Everton football teams.

Throughout its history this enigmatic city has proved--as might be expected of a place one of whose sons, John Bellingham, assassinated a prime minister, Spencer Perceval--a political paradox. Parliamentarily represented by a Labour majority, it has at the same time remained municipally solid Conservative, and maintained, for more than a quarter of a century, a sound economic equilibrium under the successive regimes of a redoubtable triumvirate of Tory knights. Sir Archibald Salvidge, who ventured and brought off the [pounds sterling]7,723,000 gamble of the Mersey Tunnel. Sir Thomas White, who developed Speke, the first of the city's industrial estates. Sir Alfred Shennan, who forged ahead with the new policy of trading estates, and piloted Liverpool through the perilous days of the Second World War. The modern equivalent in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool of the privateers and merchant princes of old were men like Vernon Sangster, and John and Cecil Moores, with their colossal pools empires and nation-spanning chains of mail order and department stores.

Liverpool's epicurean contribution to culinary culture, her plat de la ville, is Scouse. This is effectively a pot of stew originally compounded of cheap cuts of mutton, potatoes, and onions. An occasional additional ingredient is pickled cabbage. Blind Scouse is the mixture as before, but with no meat in it. Recondite argument has long wafted to and fro as to the origin of the name of this exotic dish. It is widely held to be derived from a sailor's favourite fare of stewed meat, ships biscuits and miscellaneous available vegetables. Much beloved by, especially, Scandinavian seamen, who called it lobscows.

The great jewel in Liverpool's crown is, of course, the Albert Dock development, which is, indeed, not only stunningly impressive, but highly educative without tears. This massive project of urban renewal marks its twentieth anniversary this month. Some 600,000 people visit its attractions every year.

Other, but no less fascinating attractions include that Victorian glass-and-iron marvel, the Palm House, in Sefton Park. It offers enormous potential. Events therein have already featured a concert--albeit fund-raising--of Gregorian chant by candlelight. Out at Mossley Hill, is a very charming old house, 'Sudley', the former home of Miss Emma Holt, of the prosperous shipping-line family. She left house and grounds and her family's fine collection of paintings to the city. It is now open to the public. Also not to be missed is the extraordinary maze of underground tunnels and halls reamed out of the sandstone bedrock 180 years ago, in the diminishing shadow of Boney, by the wealthy and eccentric tobacco tycoon, Joseph Williamson, the Mole of Mason Street, also crowned 'King of Edgehill'.

Over the centuries the little fishing settlement by the Mersey pool, has, nourished by the interest of kings, beginning with King John's charter of 1207, steadily blossomed into a wide and far-flung territory, embraced now within the convenient portmanteau-word, Merseyside. But no matter how deep into the surrounding country the city may stretch the tentacles of industrial, or mere housing, development, wherever one goes one sees buses bearing upon their fronts the legend 'Pier Head'--the Pier Head, where Liverpool begins and ends, and the music of the seaport city sounds in the blustering wind, the hooting of ships' sirens, and the raucous mewing of the gulls.