The History of Liverpool (Full Documentary)

[Music] [Music] a person from liverpool is called the scouser which a lot of people think what's a scouser what does it mean well it actually comes and again it shows you liverpool's international heritage um i believe that are not from norwegian it's an old norwegian word it comes from something called nab scouse which was a dish usually a sort of thick stew name did originate from it being called lobscops which is like the scandinavian name but yeah it's a fairly simple dish with basically potatoes carrots we use ten up in ours onion and then there's the seasoning whether it be you know salt pepper we use a bit of tomato puree in ours and i think the secret to it is cooking it over a long period of time and that's where it gets all its flavors from so it's traditionally said you know it's either with beetles or red cabbage a lot of people and when we used to as a family well as me mum and dad used to do we always used to curvature mints but me mum would do it in a pressure cooker like cooked like whole onions or theirs and we dab that like as a starter like a a big chunk of like a you know a big onion with a big lob of like butter on there salt and pepper and we use that as a starter it's a family business well i've run it with my sister carly and mom and dad's had the place for 18 years now it seems you know we're fairly well established on the street it's so popular in fact that we've we've tried for like the past 10 years to try and get it in a marketable pouch or in a tin which we originally tried to do but now we're successful enough in order to put it into tesco's and it's you know it's that popular that people are now binded in tesco's and soon to be in asda another supermarket so long may it the scouts accent's actually quite modern comparatively speaking apart from people from foreign countries coming in here with a totally foreign language the local dialect of of liverpool was until the 19th century basically flat nasal lancashire it actually begins in about the 1830s with the arrival of the scots but they came here in large numbers and they brought their rolling gutteral back of the throat uh emphasis their accent the scots accent which began to affect local dialect there see you jimmy became our your de la that's where all that comes from from the scars of course in the 1840s we do have the irish who speak as if they're dancing a jig or a reel there's a banter in the way that the irish speak there's a twoing and a throwing the irish are incredibly bright people and they have a very sharp wit and liverpudlians are known for their wit their use of language their play on words we get that from the irish they also um enjoy this this uh verbal sparring that is so fundamental in the scouse psyche as well as the dialect we get that from the irish from the scots by the way we get our solidity our reliability our strength of character that affects the scouse personality too then the 1850s 1860s the final celts come in the welsh with their very musical type of speech have you ever noticed when you talk to a welsh man that everything he says always ends on an upbeat like this always very positive musical that's where we get our ability to sing play music write music they're very spiritual the welsh musicality in the dialect came to us which is why every scouse phrase again ends in an upbeat you go to other local dialects around britain it all ends like that but not scouse always ends upbeat [Music] [Music] the it was the crown that that ran the castle and he would have sheriffs on his behalf who would who would run it uh gradually two families start to emerge to dominate liverpool during the 13th 14th and 1500s and they are the molyneux and the stanleys and the molyneux work were with sheriffs of the castle and the stanleys uh they controlled the tower of liverpool which was just a little bit further down by the shoreline but they were vying for control throughout this this period and clashed on a number of occasions the thing you have to remember as well is that liverpool is a very new town it was not created until 1207. before that it's a tiny little fishing hamlet one or two little families that's all but liverpool is not mentioned in the doomsday book it wasn't important enough for william the conqueror to think of taxing it but wavertree kurt dale brombera crosby liverland chill walton walton wavertory mels all these places are in the doomsday book but not liverpool people will say oh i've seen pictures of the cast in the books yeah but they're not they're actually artist impressions and you'll find that they've they've looked at reports that have gone before the archaeological excavations they've looked at how people described it and that's how people have drawn it but there's no precise drawing or plan of the castle when it was there after the english civil war where you know the weather the middle classes are becoming a little bit more powerful in the area the corporation are now starting to look towards a more commercialized town and a port and they want to develop it they were pretty hamstrung before that you know they're under control of the crown local lords but now they've got these freedoms that have been bestowed upon them after the english civil war they can now start to expand and that's what happens they start to look at developing the pool area but so the the idea for the dock came uh in the queen and period and in fact in the early 1700s and they started to have the idea to fill in the pool and but within that to construct um a dock area and this is going to be the first enclosed wet dock of its kind in the world [Music] the early 18th century was a very interesting time in british history at the time of great change and social people and in liverpool in particular it was really the birth of the city today and the first slave ship to come into liverpool actually came in 1699 it was called the liverpool merchant um and in 1710 they built liverpool's very first wet dock that opened in 1715. the trade increased so much after that period that by 1750 liverpool had overtaken both london and bristol as the main frame trading course of britain what we have now is if you imagine a graph going along from the the first years 1207 onwards and it's coming along pretty pretty slowly and all of a sudden it just goes off the scale yeah this is the slavery triangle they call it um it begins really with three places britain the west coast south africa and the americas usually the west indies the caribbean that sort of area in the 18th century um a liverpool merchant would equip a ship with a crew they would load it full of european goods manufactured goods things that way it's available in africa guns alcohol steel weapons things like this and they were then shipped down to the west coast of africa where these goods were used to exchange for slaves that had been captured during war um so it was a sort of exchange system really we provided manufactured goods to the african tribes they provided the slaves to the liverpool slave owners the slaves were then crammed onto these horrific ships and quite often they didn't have room to move there's stories of extra decks being put in with only two or three feet gap between decks so the slaves could lie down they could pack in as many as possible and then they would sail across the atlantic to the colonies in the west indies and the caribbean and those slaves that survived the terrible journey would be put into work in the plantations of sugar and tobacco which were the two biggest crops of slavery in the 18th century the only slaves we had here were the personal property of local merchants they would have been house slaves house boys coachmen chamber maids and there were a number of those here but we had a black population of independent free black people going right the way back to the 18th century and it's important to say that every black person was not a slave these were craftsmen artisans poets musicians skilled people who came to liverpool as everybody else did to make new life for themselves chinese came here in vast numbers they started coming here in 1866 at one time we had the largest chinese population outside mainland china a chinatown with chinese architecture we have chinese dragons everywhere the local community center is known as the pagoda and of course the largest chinese arch outside mainland china at the entrance gateway if you like now to chinatown at nelson street but every nationality on the planet i think one can safely say is represented here in liverpool [Music] [Music] evie [Music] it started by mr lee who's my father back in he was employed as the chinese cultural officer and he started a chinese youth orchestra and in 1983 and in the summer and at that time there's no internet it's really hard to get hold of chinese culture medias and songs and all that and for the chinese parents it's almost like a gold dust because a lot of the children who's born here they don't have the identity about china because china has been closed for quite a long time so it's a way for them to encourage their children to know their heritage so it was very very supportive by the parents when we first started with this storm which is going to start as a summer scheme and then when the summer it finished but the parent naturally said to mr lee and polly green and said can you continue for the weekend if we continue for the weekend we will keep our kids to come so that's how it really started [Music] [Music] go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] complexion [Music] um [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we have the oldest black population anywhere in britain they were coming here not as slaves it's important to say this people think that liverpool was awash with slaves it was not and they weren't chained up to rail to railings or rings in warehouses or in dungeons and cellars here an old a red hat a bit of a herring here a red herring because people say there's this business about uh you hear about uh oh black people slaves were never brought to liverpool but in actual fact uh this is a myth they do get black people here there's no doubt about it there's evidence in the paintings and in the local magazine stately homes of rich people with these little blacks boys and girls dressed in sort of exotic clothes like big indian turbans not the right racial group even you know and and silks and the like uh they would have been brought by these seafarers these slave uh captains and sold to those people at a far big greater price than they might have got in the west indies but the difference between london and bristol and liverpool is liverpool and this this whole today too because they've got a huge population in london now the census tells us but the difference in the liverpool black relation black population is its continuity it continuous from the that's what makes it different and distinctive from any other community it's the oldest in europe simply because of its continuity a lot of port cities is that people who visit once or twice on trade voyages they end up settling here and i'm sitting down and soon you get a very cosmopolitan um sort of atmosphere in places like liverpool and liverpool even today has a strong irish feel to it but right next to the irish population which was located in the scotland road area was an italian community little italy they called it the catholic irish and the catholic italians got along like a house on fire and there is actually a story about a young lad who was given the fantastic name paddy muscatelli what a brilliant mix of irish and an italian but overall liverpool was very opposed to abolishing the slave trade it would have affected a lot of merchants who believed their money their wealth was coming from the trade um there were campaigns run to show that the slaves were you know humans you know treat them like we're treating them um it's a famous picture it's a of a chained slave on his knees with the legendary saying am i not a brother and a man and one of the liverpool abolitionists actually have this printed onto all his cutlery in his house so if anybody visited them for a meal as soon as they finished their meal they would see this this emblem underneath of this poor man in chains with you know saying am i not a brother and a man all was affected by the abolition of the slave trade but not as much as people think um the men who were running the ships in the mountains of liverpool they realized which way the wind was blowing and they were businessmen and they knew that you know soon the slave trade wouldn't be profitable anymore so they started to diversify and one of the biggest things they did verified into was cotton importing a very arguable point um and whether the money that the slave trade generated how much of it went into the built fabric of liverpool i mean there's the famous quote that every brick in the city is cemented with the blood of africa um certainly it played a major role in it and we can't ever ignore that even after the abolition of slavery in 1807 the slave trade was abolished in 1832 slavery itself in the in british colonies were abolished but we've got to remember it still continued in america until after the civil war um and a lot of the cotton that was coming into liverpool right up to that date was grown on american slave plantation there are two things that we need to say at this point this was a most precarious decade the 1840s must be the worst decade that liverpool has ever gone through the numbers of people who died 1846 1847 for instance connected with situation in ireland the famine etc would be far more than were killed say in the brits in the second world war they were just desperate times it's quite ironic really you've got these big huge civic buildings you know the palaces in all but name um and yet surrounding them are some of the poorest and most deprived people in the entire world and probably one of the most horrific sort of dwellings that you could live in for the poor were the court housing which weren't even back-to-backs they were small narrow alleyways that led into what was known as a courtyard it was a little more than a large alleyway with houses crammed in very little light getting in you'd have multiple families living in the same house sometimes even in the same rooms um and there was squalor and deprivation and in an atmosphere like that it's very hard to make anything to yourself uh lots of people were trapped in the poverty traffic victorian times and if you really did fall through the very bottom levels of society you'd end up it's somewhere like the workhouse brownlow hill which was one of the biggest in europe charles dickens famously visited there and it said that he got a lot of inspiration for his novel oliver twist from the poverty and deprivation he saw in the liverpool workhouse most brutal cities to live in if you were poor disease swept the streets through huge outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever in the 1840s and this actually led to the establishment of the first medical officer of health in the country and his name was dr duncan and he worked amongst the poorest people in liverpool and wanted to improve their living conditions to raise the health of the city and it was through him and his health committee that liverpool really started to turn the corner he was one of the first proponents of a public health system in some way it was the state's duty the government's duty the council's duty to look after the people and make sure they lived healthy lives the huge wealth that was generated in the before really meant that a lot of the merchants were becoming very very wealthy men um but they were often criticized because they may have had the money but they didn't have the class and they didn't have the culture and liverpool itself wasn't a very pretty town it was lots of warehouses and crowded narrow streets and it was around this time when these wealthy men who'd sort of made them when he started looking around themselves and thinking you know we can make this a really nice place where we are now isn't actually the original athenaeum club the first building was uh further along church street and much further out into parker street and was founded in 1797 by a number of leading lights of the town of liverpool at the time and we're talking the end of the 18th century in fact here this was established was 1797 but very particular reasons for this we've come through the 18th century and it's seen dramatic powerful political economic and social changes in liverpool not least of all with the founding of the old doc in 1715 but these people also want to give back by building libraries starting ragged schools for orphans orphanages like the one that's actually behind me now which is the blue coat hospital originally that was its name blue coat school or orphanage founded again by people who were very wealthy merchants for the benefit of of of orphan or destitute children they built the first infirmaries lying in hospitals for women normally something they wouldn't consider insane asylums museums art galleries places of cultural entertainment these are people who were in fact seeing themselves as the new aristocracy this is when liverpool became the new italy the new renaissance center as a sort of the maturing of liverpool liverpool had become rich very very quickly and sort of realize this if you're this rich you've got to put on a bit of a show you [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Music] but what they had was their monument their powerful symbol as you came out of the station you looked across the load you could see that this was a town with which you could do business a town that was going places you could see a town that had once been the european capital of the african slave trade but was now looking forward what then happened next to it we have the libraries the museum the walker art gallery the northwestern hotel this of ours attracted culture attracted civilizing elements to the town museums theaters libraries the kind of antidotes to the powerful wealth the shipping the trade the hard men the money men these buildings gave liverpool another face and helped them in their determination to gain city status which was finally gained on the 15th of may 1880. [Music] um [Music] ah foreign [Music] so [Music] white star line is only one because there was cunard as well uh of the major shipping lines who provided passenger liners but they are of course the most important and uh one at least of their ships has gone down if you pardon my choice of words in history and that's the titanic 1912 but they had the olympic the britannic and so many other ships as well that are famous in shipping history the headquarters as was the case with many world famous shipping lines was in liverpool and their original building still stands at the bottom of water street i think the mersey ferries are such a part of merseyside culture not just liverpool culture and because they have been around for so very long they just feature in the liverpool psyche and everyone but everyone has a connection with the ferries because everyone got everyone is sailing across the river mostly for pleasure to the world but i remember even as a child in the late 50s and early 60s the prince's landing stage and george's landing stage because there were two connected together were our playground built entirely of wood not just the platform itself the landing stage but cafes restaurants lavatories offices places for the sailors to go transport offices a police station a post office all there all built with wood and all floating on the river and the river can get quite rough when the river was quite rough the entire landing stage would undulate and we used to go surfing on the landing stage you'd stand at the north end of the landing stage and wait for it to catch a wave and the entire landing stage would buckle and the wave would make its way down and we would run elbowing everybody out the way seeing if we could stay on top of the wave and all those buildings were interleaved and overlapped so that they could move without damage as the landing stage undulated when kids had no money you would come down and you would watch the ships and the ferry boats coming in you'd watch the great liners sailing in and out of liverpool so the river the landing stage and the ferries are very much part of our life and that's why we celebrate them so much and they've been there literally for hundreds and hundreds of years liverpool at the beginning of the 20th century was probably its great award and apogee i mean it was a great cosmopolitan second city of empire it regarded itself as second only to london everywhere else was merely provincial so liverpool was really riding high but because it was riding high i think it was writing for a fall [Music] it is written with all sorts of of divisions and strife um historians tend to talk about the the 1911 general striker city near to revolution but that came within a very short period of terrible terrible sectarian violence i mean sort of the levels beyond anything that you would even see in in northern ireland so that liverpool has always had it were a tendency to riot to take its its politics and take its grievances out onto the street 1911 is held to be important because instead of having orange battling against green they seem to come together in a working-class solidarity so that it looked as if a red liverpool rather than one divided between orange and green is beginning to emerge um i i'm not so sure about that i can see on reflection that people could see this is a great moment of getting towards a sort of a scouse working-class solidarity but we soon revert to to sectarian divisions again that the 1911 message of a militant united working class doesn't persist at least in the short term it's a while before that that gets recovered and also if you look at 1911 there are there are there are things which really have to be deconstructed because what brings orange and green together actually is hostility to black it is worried about colored colonial labor intruding into the seafaring and docs labour market that actually brings about that unity so if we're talking about a working class unity it's a right working class which is being made [Music] the local black population were in the same position as they were after the first world war and that is they were coming back onto the job market in competition with local white difficulty there was that once again people did not know what local black people were or who they were they were they were seen not as part of the same labouring class but sort of outsiders so it was always always been this this great point of tension and although there are some people who really admire that militancy i think it's better than formal trade unionism which is forever compromising negotiating and so on you really do see you know a rebellious working class in liverpool um although i agree and i can see parts of that there you also have to remember that as well as issues like class you have to think about gender and ethnicity and that militancy i'm afraid is tinged with with racist elements we had the world's first elevated electric railway yes so i'm very careful when i say that 16 feet above the ground originally running from herculaneum dock up to seaforth at the north end rockers that have got to get to all these warehouses to handle the goods but you've got white collar staff too because you've got your insurance offices and your ship suppliers and your shipping offices and they're all moving from the north and the south the local they've got to get to work so it's a passenger railway that's needed they can't put anything on the ground because it's too congested so the idea of elevating it i was five when the overhead railway was demolished and my mum made sure i took a ride on it before it went and i can remember it very very vividly and we took a bus to the dingle underground station and i'd seen the railway because anytime you came into town and down to the pier head or the ferries or whatever there it was trundling overhead so i was used to it but i don't remember before that time ever riding it before so i was surprised when she took me to this dark deep underground station and we had to walk through this tunnel that twisted down to this underground station lit by electric lamps and there's this rickety old carriage but exotic and exciting nonetheless but in the dark mom i thought this was a you wait and see kenny you wait and see we got in the carriage which was crowded with men and the thing that i remember distinctly is the smell the smell of the men which was a mixture of perspiration capstan full full strength cigarettes and machine oil a mile along the dingle tunnel and the train sets off and it rattles and it glances and i'm sitting in short trousers and i can feel on the back of my legs even as i tell you now the slats of the highly varnished curved seats pressing against me as i'm rattling through the dark never been underground before this is wonderful and all of a sudden we shoot out of what seemed to be breakneck speed into the daylight but it's not clear daylight because we're on some sort of iron bridge but it's all trellis work so this flash flash flash flash of all these grey iron girders rocketing past the window as the whole carriage is shaking and rolling and rattling and clanking and it's wonderful vivid and exciting and then all of a sudden this bridge curve to the right and the train curve to the right see me to get ever faster and faster to my five-year-old imagination and we're leaning to the right and then all of a sudden we're dead straight no bridges nothing on either side just the railway and on the right hand side the city warehouses buildings flashing back but on the left the river and dock after dock after dock ship after ship after ship absolutely stunning and as you can tell it's a memory that lives with me very vividly and i thank my mum for taking me on the overhead railway the only reason it was demolished which was in december 1956 was because it had been severely bombed during the war by hitler as was the rest of liverpool of course and the repairs have been enough to get it going but it needed major overhaul second world war is great in the sense that just as with the first world war it improves matters dramatically in the labor market but even more than the first world war liverpool is absolutely crucial strategically to keep open the atlantic and so on but again the liverpool finds itself in the front line now it's it's more than that because by 1941 the operation against the german water u-boats is alone from liverpool western approaches in darby how is darwin square there so we are the headquarters of the war against the german navy the german u-boats submarines there was only liverpool and the clyde that's glasgow and scotland so all of a sudden liverpool finds itself in the front line again and ships are pouring in they're coming in by the london of course you know they all have to pay a fee and all of a sudden there's unemployment's gone everyone's working there's just one problem people are dying as well not so much well they are dying in the services the army and the navy but they're dying in the air aids the difference between the first and second world war is the first war is a war between armies it's a terrible war basically but it's between armies the second war is a war between peoples world war really is the thing which establishes so much of the liverpool character nowadays in the sense that liverpool quite clearly is sort of the linchpin of the entire an entire war effort it is incredibly incredibly important that you keep those those shipping lanes open in the atlantic and people the ordinary people of this town day after day went to their work whether they had no sleep or not came home spent the night in these huggable shelters or wherever they could go and they still managed to keep going and the germans never shut this port and they never stopped the ships coming into our docks they nearly did it in may 1941 it got pretty wild but they never did it of course after the war there was a real stagnation because we had bomb sites into the 60s we had areas when i was a child i was born in 52. we had areas when i was 8 or 9 or 10 which was which hadn't been touched since the war there were still bomb sites [Music] so [Music] we're always interested when when we find artifacts especially anything that comes out complete or nearly complete rather than just fragments but most of us are just interested in emptying the tunnels to find out what more there is hidden [Music] below the three where we're digging at the moment we know that those chambers are very very deep and there could be other tunnels running off left and right and straight on through the bedrock that we have no idea we don't know who he employed how many what he paid them don't know whether anybody was hurt or anybody died during the work when mr williamson died on the first of may 1840 his wife had already died before several years before and he didn't have any children so the whole thing came to a complete standstill and there was no digging after that nothing but behind him that we know of to give us any clues if there are records written down somewhere in a box in an archive under dust we'd love to see them we're not aware of anything like that you get into the late 50s and so on liverpool does begin to enjoy a bit of prosperity and that prosperity is coming from completely new things for liverpool you know it's coming from car industries it's coming from a whole range of things which are going on at kirby at aintree at speak and so on um and it's out of that prosperity i think that you get the great fluorescence of of the mercy beat which comes in in the early 1960s you know this is liverpool for once actually enjoying a bit of 20th century prosperity people who value their sanity head for cover and let the teenagers take over [Applause] the beatles find it safer to take to the water as they tour the canals through lines of cheering tracks exciting a lot of stuff was happening record producers arriving from london all that sort of thing was going on so yeah we did feel the central things and we were always amazed like when i mean when the beatles had their first number one i mean okay they were the biggest band in liverpool but they were a liverpool band and we didn't necessarily uh think that they were going to make it i mean that it's only in retrospect that they've become this international phenomenon at the time there were these four blokes who played down the cabin clumsy inevitable climax to any beetle visit their performances before sell-out audiences when the beatles get going it's a question of who puts on the better performance the quartet or the audience to say they get carried away is putting it mildly before it actually happens here fourteen of the fans painted [Music] so you keep that character there that you know if you've got money you go out you spend you have a good time um when this gets transformed by the fact that you're now getting industrial estates with plenty of jobs paying decent money and so on every week uh not just you know the occasional lucky time and so on um then really my god can you enjoy yourself and i think that that really explains the the tremendous uh efflorescence of the mersey beat very briefly in that period of prosperity from the late 50s through to the early 1960s put all that together with the fact that um you know liverpool still remains the landfall of american popular culture so all the really cool stuff which is happening across the pond it's liverpool ages before it hits somewhere else so that it's it's ahead of the game it likes spending its money it's always wanted to enjoy itself when it possibly could put that together you get the best possible popular culture you can get in the late 50s 1960s in liverpool um so we had a slightly different audience i mean we did have the pop audience we played down the cabin and did all that stuff but our real sort of um home as it were was around the liverpool eight part of liverpool um amongst students [Music] foreign [Music] or the liverpool music scene had changed completely because they're only a very small number of bands actually who gained national and international recognition if you think about it was the beatles jerry and the pacemakers foremost the searchers and apart from the searches all the others were managed by brian epstein so although it's been bigged up as a massive phenomenon and there were a lot of bands working in liverpool as a as a national and international phenomenon it had finished in liverpool uh by the middle of the night middle of 1964. uh and you see i think there is there's a theme here in terms of the decline of liverpool as a port and as a business center and so forth because in order for in order to make it the the bands which we now know were in the top 10 and have number one hits and all the rest of it they all had to go to london to do that they couldn't stay in liverpool there were no recording facilities in liverpool uh there was a sort of bubble in the mid 60s of apparent affluence in liverpool but um that wasn't really reflected throughout the rest of the population the liverpool started to go into decline because the port itself was declining it's it's it's certainly not a race riot in the sense of what we've been talking about from 1919 to 1948 which was quite clearly white on black no these are people um marginalized disadvantaged um i mean there's certainly the things are triggered by that establishment brian but i mean it's it's the right of people who've you know who's his own voices have not been heard so how else can they make themselves heard and to take to the streets 1981 riot this was described this as a race riot but it wasn't in liverpool because liverpool has never been a sort of segregated one of these isolated black communities that you hear of now it's never been like that it's always been mixed talks at the end of the liverpool lane liverpool warm districts you'll find people uh living quite happily and in 1981 riot which was sort of anti-establishment thing right you find that race did not come into it in liverpool to that extent any racial element tended to be directed towards the police and the police direction towards black people you know well i mean one of the outcomes of the 81 riots was you know the the hasseltown garden festival thing and so on now that was quite i mean that's interesting in the sense that the idea was if you tidy the place up that will attract inward investment for industries business and so on so you're still thinking in conventional ways of regeneration you do it by attracting businesses and industry um but during that time i think people begin to realize actually well if you start beautifying the environment if you start making use of of the fact that liverpool despite nefar for bombing and so on still has a rather attractive built environment then what you're attracting there's not businesses and injuries but but tourists and actually in an economy like ours that's not a bad place to be and i think liverpool begins to see that it can change itself from derelict down a hill city into the new attractive liverpool because in some respects it's got a much better starting point than elsewhere because they had suffered bomb damage during the second world war precisely because the times after the second war had been so economically disadvantaged people actually didn't have the money to demolish buildings so you don't get the architectural vandalism and planning blight that you you get in some of the other great victorian provincial cities of the north or whatever so liverpool retains really most of its build heritage and he's able to transform that transformer alas into too many blasted apartments and wine bars and contests what else but but nevertheless um makes it a an environment which is the absolutely ideal city break and what's even better of course is that liverpool is able to retain that character which means it's still a little bit edgy certainly still a little bit different that if your english to come to liverpool for a weekend break is almost to go to another country and so that's a very very attractive recipe for cultural tourism superb environment and a rather different culture i was asked recently about a child of seven or eight what was the best time to be born that's the one brilliant question that is and i started to go back and i started to think what hang on i mean you can't be born in 1900 because you've got the first and second war to get through okay so if you get born in 1945 you stay on the rations so all right let's move forward to 1956 54 when they stopped their actions are you born then yeah but i mean so when you go through all this you've got to say that now is probably the best time to have been born because they can cure a lot of diseases uh you haven't got a war to go through but we've still got loads of problems and and now there are worry intense for instance we don't make things here we never did much um the more you look at liverpool the more you realize that unlike every other northern english city we're not a manufacturing city we're not an industrial city we don't have mills we don't have natural resources in liverpool sheffield famous for steel newcastle for coal manchester for the mills um liverpool's got none of that we made our money from trade commerce and industry it was using our brains rather than using our wrong it's only really in the 1980s that we recognized that football our waterfront and the beatles were actual assets and we started to invest in those quite heavily but i say this now with great pride that liverpool's currently is the fastest growing economy in britain despite the fact that we're in a recession we aren't well yes we are of course but we're going to come out of it faster than anybody else and already we're beginning to see that now yes the service sector for the time being is enough because it's getting us through the recession at the moment but for me cultural tourism really is it's liverpool's i guess it was last best hope um but of course liverpool is nearly um shooting itself in the foot for that because i mean it was great being capital of culture in 2008 but i mean that was just i mean that's another sort of typical sort of liverpool binge you know you have a year-long party and so on great wonderful and so on helps a little bit in reassessing liverpool's image and of removing disabusing some people's misperceptions of the place and so on but that's soon forgotten but it's got world heritage site status which is acquired in 2004. well that's a real price asset but it's about to throw it away if it's not careful and should realize that that is what really matters that you've got that fantastic maritime mercantile heritage keep that don't don't ruin it by putting up bland corporate development all around it the difference between the schools in the better areas and the schools in the more difficult more depressed and deprived areas i think that's a very serious problem there's them and us well what's new except there isn't much force to do anymore so we're going to be turning out all these youngsters and we've got no kind of hands-on jobs for them so little woolly intense but you know what herodotus 400 bc probably said exactly the same thing what i've been saying the liverpool creates sort of a binge culture i mean that's that's always been there anything and you can adjust that to various things that fits into a student lifestyle quite quite well so i think it's it's a great place and it is true i know having talked at the university for 33 years or there are many many students that came there who really you know were not from liverpool but michael did not want to leave liverpool but in many many cases had to leave liverpool because there weren't the employment well graduate employment opportunities there and i don't want to be demeaning about a cultural tourism thing but the type of employment that cultural tourism tends to provide in hotel uh restaurant sector and so on is not necessarily a level which is going to encourage graduate retention lifetime and obviously relating that to my parents experience would lift you through the blitz and the devastation of the town during that that time of course we had our down period in the 80s um at the desolate period where we felt completely abandoned you know and but to but to go around the town now uh it's amazing doing the regeneration and the vibrancy that's in the town now is astonishing you know compared to what it was like in the 80s tourism of course has sort of taken a major role and was such a success on it you know we we've become the world in one city here as well you know with the with the people from all over the world that live here there's is a port and it's such an outwardly looking place it's not a blanket place it doesn't just look at itself attractive place to live and play the leisure facilities here its attractiveness the quality of life its beautiful buildings its parks because again people sort of who don't know the city assume it is all dark satanic mills it isn't it's a very green and pleasant land and we've got the wirral and and and sefton and all these other wonderful areas all within striking distance people are now bringing their businesses here they want the quality of life so let's set up business in liverpool our transportation links now also are fabulous by rail air and land as well as by sea this is growing too the sort of gentlemanly elite insistent on the term neopolitan that goes and you're either you know you're a scouser or a liverpool um but you're a scouser in the planet enjoying a demotic culture which is becoming the envy of the world because it seems that you can write better songs you can do better poetry than than everyone else if you get someone in liverpool even if it's just within five minutes attitudes change the whole image that they have they've brought with them they realize is is completely wrong um you you get to the place and you're you're captivated whether it's by its architecture by its culture by its inhabitants or whatever i mean it just it gets you which is why i'm still here after 34 years or whatever you know i can't i can't escape from it i don't want to escape from it it's it's it's it's absolutely wonderful [Music] like any city this history is always a roller coaster that ops and there are downs we've had our downs we've had our declines of shipping we've had all that sort of thing and now it's definitely on the up you only have to walk along the streets of the city center or even the suburbs to find the taxi drivers will tell you how well they're doing the shops will tell you how well they're doing where is that happening in any other part of the country all i'd like to see is it to be to make sure that it's a truly inclusive future because that future i think is going to be tremendous [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Amy Clarke

Views: 148,816

Keywords:

Id: ymWmAeK9MHs

Length: 69min 27sec (4167 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021