Making History: watch it happen before your eyes!

The day after Terry and Vic wandered around some of the old derelict docks, and we’d  added the last post, the government announced the area was to be an “Enterprise Zone”. Obviously, Inspidered carries more weight than we’d realised.

The area has already been approved by Wirral Council as a site for massive “redevelopment” to include skyscrapers, apartments, hotels, shops and so on. Sound familiar? Some calculations reckon the total scheme will take 40 years to complete. Then both sides of the river will be able to admire each other’s skyscrapers, shops, hotels, apartments. Also, if Liverpool wins its current tiff with Southampton over berthing cruise liners, watching floating hotels come and go all week. Whatever, it’s a change from past and it’s history unfolding before our eyes, waiting to be documented.

Perhaps the fruits of “regeneration” behind the new waterfronts could also be documented?

 

 

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History in Passing

There’s a book not long out called Edgelands written by two poets. A couple of us have read it, and found it good in parts but overall probably not the best; still worth reading though as it gives ideas for looking into things we normally only see in passing, in this case the ‘edgelands’ between the city and the countryside. These are places where a surprising amount of nature has returned to; the history of the recent past is inscribed there; sewage farms, motorway service stations, conference centres, travel lodges, kids’ dens, surreal golf ranges…..

We’re inspired to look at something a bit like edgelands but those within the town and city. The alleys, the derelict industrial sites, rows of houses awaiting demolition, and the new businesses that spring up selling cars, carpets, sheds and pallets. Our first foray was into Birkenhead’s docklands. There is a definite sense of atmosphere as you leave the main road that runs by the park, head up Duke Street then cross into the dusty remains of the past, tangled wreckage of machinery, and the signs of life springing up as if at random. Here are some of the pictures we took.

 

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Out of Time

A stroll for five minutes, a few photographs, and then a little tweaking on the computer. The past and the present are intertwined. Images produced today evoke the same scenes from a hundred years ago. Ste L, Ste O, Peter, Duncan caught Liverpool in the snow.

Falkner Square

St James Cemetry

Falkner Terraces

Georgian Facade

St James Cemetry

Saint Brides

Georgian terrace

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Time Frames

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.

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A Brief History of Pavements

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 !

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We’ll Still Meet under Dicky Lewis

A Job for Life

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.

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Demolishing History

Disappeared

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.

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Childhood Memories

Everybody has childhood memories, and most of us love hearing those of others. Our parents and grandparents fascinate us with stories of a past that seems like ‘a foreign country’. Here are a few memories of Jack Jones, the Trades Union leader who died last year at the age of 96, about growing up in Garston:

Jack Jones

Jack Jones wrote about his childhood in his autobiography, ‘Union Man” (1986):

 

My home was in York Street, Garston, in the south end of Liverpool – a long street of poor and mean terraced houses. They had two rooms up and two rooms down, generally in a decaying state. They had been built some time in the last century – obviously with the minimum of cost – to house labour for the nearby factories and docks. The houses were infested by rats, mice, cockroaches and bugs. Our rent was five shillings a week, and even that was exorbitant!

From a child’s point of view the street had one advantage: out of the maze of working-class streets it was the nearest to the Mersey river. We walked past the copper works, the tannery, Grayson’s shipyard, the bobbin works (making wooden bobbins for the textile industry), a derelict glass works and King’s ship-breaking yard and there we were on the shore, a wonderful if muddy playground when we tired of playing our games in the the street.

 

 

There was no gas or electricity, so we had a paraffin lamp downstairs, but otherwise we used candles. I was the youngest of five children and my three brothers and I slept in one of the two bedrooms – and when we were very young, we were all in one bed.

 

None of the houses in the street had an inside lavatory or a bathroom – we bathed in a tin bath once a week, and that wasn’t easy, as the water had to be heated on our single coal fire. Every morning a lad would trundle a metal barrel on wheels round the street, shouting “Lant!” – which meant urine, for use in the pickling process in the local copper works. The women would go out and empty the contents of their chamber pots into the barrel.

 

I left school, aged 14, and went to work at a general engineering firm, making components for Graysons as well as Harland and Wolff, the shipbuilding and ship-repairing firms.

 

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Plaque to Remember Merseyside Men Who Fell in Spanish Civil War

From the BBC, 16 October 2010:

A plaque with the names of those from Merseyside who lost their lives fighting in the Spanish Civil War has found a permanent home in Liverpool.

The memorial, with the names of 27 local people, has been unveiled at the Unite building in Islington.

The city’s office block has been called Jack Jones in honour of the ardent trade unionist from Garston who was badly injured in the conflict.

Unite’s regional secretary Paul Finegan said: “We feel very privileged.”

There were approximately 180 men and women who left the safety of Merseyside to defend the Spanish government against the might of General Francisco Franco’s nationalist rebels between 1936 and 1939.

Jack Jones survived the war and became the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He was heavily involved with the unions until he died aged 96 in April last year.

Local historian, Danny Payne, said that although there were 27 names on the plaque, after further research it is believed that 30 people from Merseyside died fighting.

 

Jack Jones was christened James after James Larkin. For interesting stuff on Jack Jones and Larkin click here.

 

 

 

We’ll be looking at Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom which focuses on the Merseyside Volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. It stars the Liverpool actor, Ian Hart.

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