Hope Street, Liverpool
We’ve been working over the past three months to gather information, ideas, histories, poems, stories, photographs, and videos about Hope Street and the area sometimes called the Hope Street Quarter. Very shortly we’ll launch a separate blog called Hope Street Chronicles, a link to which will appear in the blogroll and here. Apart from its own rich historical significance, Hope Street is on our doorstep (we meet in Pilgrim Street) which makes it accessible to our work. The journalist Ed Vulliamy claimed that Hope Street is an allegory for Liverpool. And Liverpool is an allegory for Britain. This claim was in quite an angry piece we’ve discussed in which the writer complains about some aspects of ‘development’ in Hope Street and the City. Another journalist, David Bartlett, suggests that In many ways Hope Street has become a microcosm of the tensions across the city between protecting Liverpool’s heritage and developing for the future. This is a theme we’ve looked at and will continue to do on Inspidered where we’ll continue looking at broader aspects of Liverpool at the same time as being engaged on the Hope Street project.
Hope Street Chronicles gives us a chance to develop our own production skills. It also reveals in practice that there are very many ways of approaching ‘making history’, especially ones which employ imagination and unusual angles. In looking at Hope Street (and the city) we aren’t looking to find a ‘true’ picture of history, people, culture and so. Rather we hope to discover the energy of life itself, past and present, with all its celebrations, joy, contradictions, disagreements, pain.
Inspidered 