Liverpool

Empty of Everything but Shadows

"Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens;

Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east—America is provided for in the west;"

-               Walt Whitman

I’d never set foot in Liverpool before. My vision of it was that of a once prosperous docks which was now largely a scene of post-industrial decay. However, my ideas, if they had ever been accurate at all, were clearly now many years out of date, coming from the TV of the 1970s and 1980s. The Liver Birds and The Boys from the Blackstuff had given me no idea at all of what was really waiting for me.

Arriving in Liverpool for the First Time

I arrived in Liverpool on the number 500 bus which deposited me at the coach station opposite the Albert Dock. I imagined just how stunning and awe-inspiring arriving here by ship during the city’s heyday as a port, would have been. It’s still fairly impressive today, even arriving by bus. Having spent most of the 1980s watching television, I knew the Albert Dock as home to a floating representation of the British Isles which acted as a weather map for the mid-morning TV programme, Good Morning. Weatherman of the Year 1998 and convicted sex offender, Fred Talbot, would leap from Northern Ireland to the mainland every day to cheers from the unemployed, unemployable, housebound and students.

The Albert Dock, now the Royal Albert Dock, has rather more history than that, though. It is a series of red-brick, five-storey warehouse buildings arranged around all four sides of water a full four fathoms deep. The bottom storey is a series of arches with red-painted iron columns supporting the upper four floors. It opened in 1846 when Prince Albert was a very popular consort – apart from the two attempted assassinations - and still a young man rather than the name of a genital piercing. He opened the docks on 30^th July in that year. Even back then, when royals weren’t entirely pointless, it was mainly about declaring stuff open.

Liverpool

The area of water enclosed by the dock and the warehouses was equivalent to three football pitches – which were already the standard unit of measurement for anything between a double decker bus and Wales. By this time it is estimated that forty percent of all the world’s trade passed through Liverpool. The warehouses of the Albert Dock were considered the most secure in the city and were said to be fireproof, too, which meant that the most valuable cargoes such as tea, brandy and cotton were stored here. Even though changes in shipping technology reduced its use as a dock by the end of the nineteenth century, it was in use as a store right up until the Second World War. It was then requisitioned by the admiralty and used as a dock for smaller ships, landing craft and even submarines. Today it’s all pavement cafes and craft gin and gift shops.

This was not what J.B. Priestley saw when he visited Liverpool as part of his English Journey. He describes the city as dark and imposing. He even calls the docks gloomy. I suppose when he visited in 1933, the commercial use of docks such as the Albert Dock had stopped completely and they were just used for storage. Perhaps even that had ended as he says that the warehouses were empty of everything but shadows. That was probably just a good line, though. He found the city melancholy but that is about the last impression that either Liverpool or Liverpudlians left on me. Was it because Liverpool was in Lancashire and J.B. Priestley was a Yorkshire tyke? Who knows? He certainly was not impressed by the place. There isn’t a page of the book when talking about Liverpool that does not contain a synonym for the word grim.

That wasn’t an impression shared by Daniel Defoe when he visited a couple of centuries earlier, he called Liverpool “one of the wonders of Britain”. He even goes on to say that “there is no town in England, London excepted, that can equal Liverpoole for the fineness of the streets, and beauty of the buildings; many of the houses are all of free stone, and compleatly finished; and all the rest (of the new part I mean) of brick, as handsomely built as London it self.” He does tend to relate everything to London or talk of its connection to London. There is barely a place in the snappily titled A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journeys which isn’t observed through the lens of how it contributes or compares to the capital. Despite that, I enjoy touring Britain with him. It is amazing to see places you know through the eyes of someone who lived three centuries before you. That’s the remarkable thing about books: Daniel Defoe can have a thought in Liverpool in 1722 and that same thought can reappear in my head in the twenty-first century just because he wrote it down. That is totally incredible, it’s probably just about the best thing about being human.

Clearly the two travellers had differing views of Liverpool and saw a different city to the one that I can see today. It’s a point that Daniel Defoe brings up, that everything a place is can never be written down because the changes to a town or city are continuous and the interpretations of those who visit will always differ. It is unthinkable today to visit Liverpool without the idea of The Beatles being somewhere in your head but, of course, Daniel Defoe thought of the trade with other ports and saw the very earliest expansion of the waterfront and the amazing flourishing of the docks. J.B Priestley saw the decline of those same docks and the very end of Liverpool as a trading port. They would both be amazed by what has happened to the city since they saw it and astounded by the docks and the waterfront today.

Right next-door to the dock is a large landing craft from an Imperial starcruiser; huge windows - from which Darth Vader may survey the planet on which they have landed - look out both in this direction and toward the Liver Building. This landing craft is actually the Museum of Liverpool and it is my favourite kind of museum, a free one. I love learning about the history of the places I visit, I love it even more if it’s free. As it happens, I did make a donation to visit this museum because it is so brilliant. There is just so much to see but I was most drawn to the re-creation of “court” housing which showed what it was like for poor families living here in the heyday of the docks. The first dock in Liverpool, now known imaginatively as the Old Dock, had opened in 1715 but it was during the nineteenth century that the city really boomed and, as it did, the population soared. From just over 165,000 in 1831 to nearly half a million just forty years later, as people from the agricultural shires surrounding Liverpool and from the other side of the water in Ireland arrived looking for a better life.

As is always the case, great wealth for a few was built on the labour and, quite often, suffering of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. The court housing gave a glimpse of what their lives must have been like. The name court comes from the fact that a small alleyway ran off the main road and then opened out onto a courtyard around which the houses sat, all facing out onto the courtyard, the back of the houses being the backs of the houses in the next court. Families living in single rooms or cellars often with little or no furniture other than a heap of straw and rags and with no kitchen, no running water – except down the wall – and no sanitation. One or two privies were shared by up to ten families. The literature of the time talks of noxious effluvia and pestiferous gases, I could not have found better words.

The houses could be four storeys high and would often have a cellar, there was sometimes a family on each floor, often more than a dozen people living in each house. In the middle of the nineteenth century there were a little over 7,500 cellars in Liverpool and nearly 30,000 people lived in them. The court which is re-created in the museum shows life at 26 Court, off Burlington Street in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century. At around the time that the Albert Dock was opened, almost half of Liverpool’s population lived somewhere like this.

Court Housing in Liverpool

Living in the same conditions in 1856 at 29 Court, off Burlington Street was thirty-eight-year-old general labourer Joseph Blease and his wife Jane. Joseph’s first wife, Hannah, had died young at just thirty-eight. He married again, luckily this time he married my great-great-grandmother which, what with him being my great-great-grandfather, was an amazing coincidence. Their first son, George, was born in this court housing in April. George, brought up in these terrible conditions, did not live to see his first birthday.

In Liverpool at the time more than 60% of all deaths were in the under-fives. Joseph and Jane’s second son, Joseph Junior, was born two years later, by which time they were living in Maddox Street, Toxteth which does not appear to have been a significantly nicer place to live. Joseph Junior was my great-grandfather, his mother, Jane, died in the Brownlow Hill Workhouse in Liverpool when he was six. Liverpool at the time had the highest mortality rate in England. Joseph joined the army, which must have been better than staying in the city, and served in Afghanistan and Egypt before returning to England and meeting my grandmother Kezia. She had been brought up by her grandparents as her father, Job Cross had died when she was just two years old. Her grandfather, my great-great-great-grandfather was called George Cross though he died more than forty years before that became the name of a medal. It would have been nice if he’d married someone called Victoria.

It was fascinating to see here in the museum a little of what their hard lives must have been like. That they had lived and, in the case of little George, died in a squalid room just a few doors from the one depicted here was incredible. That nearly half of all the people living in one of the most prosperous cities in the Victorian world lived like this stunned and shocked me. There was so much more to the museum and there is so much more to Liverpool, it’s great, you really should visit if you haven’t got round to it yet.

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