Hope Street is one of Liverpool’s most famous thoroughfares. Most people assume its name refers to Hope. The reality is more prosaic. It’s named after a merchant, William Hope, who built and lived in a house that stood where the Philharmonic Pub now stands.
Nevertheless, over the coming months we’ll be looking at Hope Street as it is today and as it was. The stories are many and fascinating – from the history of the Workhouse to the bodysnatchers who sent corpses to Scotland. Almost every brick and paving stone has a story to tell. Also the many side roads off Hope Street are part of Liverpool’s history.
Mark said he had seen in the Daily Post an article about the Masonic Hall on Hope Street opening its doors for the first time to the public. It’s a Grade II listed building. You can see a slideshow and read the article here.
Pavements, there beneath our feet. Just pavements. But nothing’s ever simple!
The pavements show the effects of time, some of them cracking up under the strain; others coming apart. What was once neat and all fitted together starts to come apart. Maybe pavements have a story to tell, a sort of parable about how time is always working against our attempts to impose order. Incidentally, the word ‘pavement’ comes from the Latin pavere which means to ‘pound down’. We try to pound down the earth to fit our own design, but nature and time have a way of reclaiming things.
Pavements carry the ghosts of feet, of people long dead, the fleeting touch of shadows or rain that reflects the world above. Footprints caught in the cement of pavements: maybe in a thousand years an excited archaeologist from Mars will find one like we found footsteps on the beach up at Formby from thousands of years ago…
Leaves, apples, litter, all there and gone in an instant. A paving flag is like a picture frame of time.
And then there are the pavements people draw or write upon. Kids chalk drawings,, ‘arty’ stencil stuff, or the drawings etched into the pavements on the new frontage of Lime Street Station done by artist Simon Faithfull to record a trip to Liverpoool in Nova Scotia, three thousand miles away.
Pavements marked a path for thousands of feet over time. Very quickly when people no longer use them, they begin to disappear. Tracks that once meant something, were important, provided a way, become overgrown.
There’ll be a few more posts on pavements soon! We’re putting the finishing touches to a short video in which a group member reads a poem called Hell’s Pavements by John Masefield. It’s about a sailor who comes into Liverpool determined not to waste his money on women and drink. It ends with him sailing back to sea owning nothing but the clothes on his back. As if !
We were looking at the brilliant BBC History web pages (probably worth more than the television part of the licence as someone said), a real goldmine of interesting stuff, beautifully presented and easy to find your way around. Then we looked at the BBC Radio Merseyside History pages, again very interesting. In particular, we looked at an audio slide show about the Lewis’s Department Store that closed earlier this year. For most of us, the shop was part of our lives. Its passing feels like a more human historical event than the major “historical events”.
Lewis’s had their own flickr site where you can see some pictures relating to the store’s history.
Is history fact or fiction, opinion and interpretation or “truth”?
Where to look for history? One place is in buildings and architecture. The building shown above was demolished during the construction of the Liverpool One development. Like many listed buildings it “got in the way”. In an article in The Times in March 2008, a writer, Tristram Hunt gave the following opinion under the headline, Liverpool, Capital of Vandalism:
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Unfairly, Liverpool has often been accused of wallowing in the past. If only it did.
Under the past ten years of control by the Liberal Democrats, some 36 listed buildings have been lost to the bulldozers. Whereas Merseyside once enjoyed a Georgian building stock comparable to Bath, what little remains is now under threat. In addition to the terraces of Seel Street, there are numerous properties in Duke Street, Dale Street and Great George Square – as well as such listed landmark churches as St Luke’s, Berry Street and St Andrew’s – equally at risk. And that is excluding the Toxteth terraces and Welsh Street houses that remain under planning blight.
The difference this time is that the threat comes as much from property developers, whose lawyers and bully-boy chicanery runs rings round council officers, as grandiose redevelopment schemes. But the results are the same as buildings slip into disrepair, night-time demolitions “happen” and inexplicable planning permissions are granted.
Tristram Hunt is author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
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The newspaper article is itself ‘history’. It’s a fairly stark example of how facts (the demolition of listed buildings) and opinions are mixed. How we see the past – and the present is part of the past – is shaped by who we are, something we discussed at our last session. What is important to one person may not be so to another. We make our own histories from what interests us.
With all that’s happening at Liverpool Football Cub – today was a High Court hearing against the owners – a good time to watch again this short training video. It is made of photographs taken on one match day and one non-match day. The sounds were recorded on an H2 ZOOM and vision was edited on iMovie, sound on Audacity (a great free downloadable sound studio).
While to many “Anfield” means the place of a football club, to many others it’s a place to live. We have a few members of the group looking to develop more on Anfield in its wider sense. This video uses simple techniques to suggest history such as putting the sound of an old fashioned projector on, and making it look like old film in places. The video also seems to be making some points by contrasting certain images.
The Dixon Scott reference at the start of the film is to the writer of a 1907 guide to Liverpool. We looked about a year ago at some of the things he said about Anfield.
It’s remarkable to think some of us in the group were kids and teenagers when this wonderful documentary was made. Made for the BBC in 1958 and transmitted in early 1959, it depicts working-class life in the back-to-backs of an unnamed northern city. Much of the shooting took place in Liverpool, but areas of Manchester, Salford and Stockport also make an appearance.
As said in previous posts, as well as the subject matter’s being fascinating, the history of documentary is important too. Here is an example which was very unusual for its time with no ‘voice over’ and the use of music and people’s own voices.
We tend to forget how close we are to the ‘olden days’. For some of us our parents or grandparents were around when the workhouses were still operating. One of the group members is working on a project looking at Walton Workhouse where his grandfather worked.
Parts of the city I have never visited. The bits I do know I know nearly nothing about. I have picked up a few things about history in South Liverpool but they’re all just bits and pieces. Where I live (Allerton) wasn’t even part of Liverpool until 1913. I have read a bit recently about Allerton and been to see the ancient Calder Stones and the thousand years old Allerton Oak. I’ve looked at a few old maps, and found out about the history of some of the buildings. What I know absolutely nothing about is what the lives of ordinary people were like. It’s as if they didn’t exist.
There are many books and so on about Liverpool, and I’ve read some of them, seen telly programmes and so on. Some of the things I’ve gone a bit deeper into but the deeper I go, the more turns up about any particular subject, and at least one thing I know for sure is that I don’t know very much at all really. Some people, amateurs and professionals, spend years of their lives researching one little aspect of one little bit of history: certainly when I read some of their stuff, especially about things that interest me like Vikings, the Slave Trade, labour history, and working class life generally, I’m grateful. But I always feel like I’m scratching the surface. (more…)
This is a landmark that greets people leaving Lime Street station when they arrive in Liverpool. It’s been referred to by so many of us for so long as Nelson’s column that it’s become Nelson’s Column!
We confessed to each other that few of us knew much about this Duke or Waterloo or the friezes that are embedded in walls near the column. Across the wa in St John’s Gardens are statues of other luminaries – Gladstone, Wilberforce, Major Lester, Rathbone. Just who are they? Does it matter? It may be a good way to start thinking about our city’s history by asking very basic questions about things we pass by many times without really ‘seeing’. That’s true, of course, of the hidden histories of forgotten people.
Eros..... possibly
Same thing arises with this statue in newly restored Sefton Park. There are some who say it’s Peter Pan! (the confusion arises because there was a statue of Peter Pan nearby). Most know it as Eros, many know it’s modelled on the one in Picadilly Circus. But the information board below informs us it’s actually Anteros, one of the Greek gods of requited love.
Anyway, because we’re out to enjoy ourselves as well as to learn, we’ve begun putting together a short comedy radio play based on such confusions as these. Watch this space.
We’ll be entering some of the following onto the blogroll but in the meantime here are some websites you’ll find interesting. Some of them you will find amazing!
“Links” also means with people, and we’re intending to network with other groups and get as many interested people as possible interested in what we’re doing.
These provide commentary, analysis, facts and images. There are many other sources on the net such as forums and Flickr for old images which are interactive and user-led. It’s interesting to see here both ‘formal’ history making, and the work of local residents determined to have their area’s history told and preserved – and also several sites which strongly challenge some of the mainstream versions of history.
http://www.scottiepress.org/ A stunning collection. You really have to go there to see how 40 years of hard work by so many people have produced such a wonderful resource visited by people from all over the world. be warned though, you may be away some time!
http://inacityliving.piczo.com/?g=1&cr=7 mainly previously unpublished and out of print images, many courtesy of the Liverpool records office archives and many contributors
http://www.liverpooltimes.net/ The Liverpool Times is a continuation of The Kirkby Times, another independent Liverpool website that set the example for local news reporting by and for working class people. http://www.kirkbytimes.co.uk/
BBC Radio Merseyside has a local history section on itse website which includes archive recordings and links to national BBC which contains iPlayer footage, e.g. of the documentary Morning in the Streets:
http://www.peterleeson.co.uk/liverpool/ Peter Leeson was in the City Planning department when the Scotland Road demolitions were underway. He left to become a photographer, artist and film maker.
http://merseyminis1.blogspot.com/ Information and axtracts from the Deborah Mulhearn compilations of writings about Liverpool throughout history and to the present.
http://streetsofliverpool.co.uk/ A superb site from a Liverpool writer and publisher who set up the Open Eye Gallery in 1977 and founded the Bluecoat Press. It’s a wealth of old pictures and written material, regularly updated and always worth looking at each week.
http://www.yoliverpool.com/ Forum for all things Liverpool. Some great history stuff. Interactive and growing as members contribute more and more.
Inspidered 