Streets of Liverpool

Park Lane Goods Station, 1980

Apartments on the same site, 2012

Kean’s Hotel (originally Mayfair Hotel) 1980

Park Lane/Tabley Street, 1980

Comparative view taken 2012

Park Lane/Liver Street, 1976

Comparative view 2012

Park Lane is a short street, probably no more the 500 metres. I walk along it most days and always enjoy my quick walk into the centre. It has no pretensions to grandeur unlike its London counterpart but it was once a busy thoroughfare connecting Canning Place with the Dingle.
I can remember some of the buildings that once lined the street. The offices of the Park Lane station (the top photograph) were demolished in the last five years to make way for the blocks of flats shown in the second photograph. Next to the station stood that glorious folly of a pub, the Mayfair Hotel. Folly in that the brewery had jumped the gun when plans were announced to extend the railway from Edge Hill to Park Lane. Anticipating a great trade from thirsty travellers, they built an impressive gin palace, only to discover that the station was meant for goods traffic only. It was a remarkable sight and survived until the early 1980s. The next blocks were typical nineteenth century Liverpool – a mix of pubs and businesses with considerable character. My 1966 Kelly’s Directory has armature winders, flooring contractors, leather goods manufacturers, turf accountants, dried fish dealers, tailors, hairdressers and publicans amongst the trades listed. All in all, a very vibrant street.
The colour comparative photographs tell a different story. Most of the street is now vacant land. There is a new housing development walled off alongside the Swedish Church but the rest of the street is now cleared land – a soulless stretch only enlivened by sight of the Albert Dock in the distance. Why does this kind of destruction have to take place? I could understand it if the land was built on (like the new apartments in the second photograph) but to remove interesting and historical buildings for waste ground is a depressingly routine act in Liverpool. Who is to blame? Developers of the City Council? Either way, the destruction of Park Lane is a clear lesson in how not to develop an area. Like the Sailors’ Home, there is an undue haste to pull down buildings in the hope that development will become that much easier. The holes in the ground and acres of waste ground are scars the community must look at, often for decades.

Cartwright House, 1975

Prince Albert Gardens, St James Street, 1974

Kent Gardens, 1970

St Oswald’s Gardens (on left) and Hurst Gardens (on right) 1979

My last post on Liverpool’s inter-War tenements created a lot of interest, so here are a few more photographs of now-demolished blocks.
I have been referencing an interesting book Housing: A European Survey published in 1936, which included local authority housing in Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Barcelona as well as Liverpool, London, Leeds and Birmingham. The survey was of progressive schemes to improve the housing conditions of the working class and it heralds the unprecedented efforts made since the War ended in 1918 to tackle the slum housing and overcrowding prevalent in all of the cities covered.
Sir Lancelot Keay provided the information for Liverpool and it was under his guidance that the city pioneered both the tenements and what he named cottages (the council houses still standing along Queen’s Drive, in Dovecot, Speke and elsewhere), His plans were for 5,000 cottages and 16,000 flats.
The cottages were preferred by the younger generation whilst the older generation were happier being rehoused in the city centre neighbourhoods they were familiar with. The need for city centre tenements was primarily to provide proximity to the docks for workers.
It would be hard to underestimate what moving into a new flat must have been like for the fortunate tenants. For the first time, most would have running (and hot) water, an indoor toilet and bathroom, dry and spacious living areas and a kitchen fitted with a gas cooker. By the time the photographs were taken in the 1970s, they were no longer modern and needed considerable renovation to bring them up to standard. As we know, the agreed solution was to demolish them – so we are only left with a photographic record of a major housing initiative.

Byrom Street/Cartwright Place 1950s

For me, the most interesting news item over Christmas was the revelation that Geoffrey Howe had advocated the managed decline of Liverpool following the Toxteth Riots. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the ‘shock’ headlines, there had been suggestions soon after the Riots that the Government had been advocating a market forces strategy with Liverpool. What I did find intriguing is that a policy of managed decline only came into Cabinet discussions in 1981 – I thought that Liverpool’s whole post-War history had been planned to scale down the city.
Certainly the effects of wartime bombing had seriously damaged the city’s housing stock and infrastructure. Rebuilding in the immediate post-War period was frustrated by a chronic shortage of building materials and Liverpool limped through the 1950s attempting to reinstate its docks, city centre and housing. But there is more than a sneaking suspicion that the damage to the city had created a canvas that the politicians and planners could work with. Road schemes proposed in the pre-War years could become a reality and the ideas for a grandiose civic centre and new zones for shopping and business could take centre stage. (Not only in Liverpool, in Coventry the City Architect, Donald Gibson, the bombing was “a blessing in disguise. The Jerries cleared out the core of the (medieval) city, a chaotic mess, and we can start anew.”) Alderman Shennan, a practising architect and Chairman of the Planning Committee was a strong advocate of clearing out much of old Liverpool and creating a car-friendly transport system that would take out whole historic areas when implemented. In tandem, the city’s housing and industry was to be revamped by a dual policy of creating satellite towns in Kirkby, Skelmersdale, Speke, Runcorn and Northwich and by demolishing whole neighbourhoods to make way for tower block living.
This is an over-simplification but the policies led to a near halving of Liverpool’s population in less than forty years. If that wasn’t managed decline, I am not sure what is. Yet Liverpool is still officially England’s poorest city. Some management! The tragedy is that the voice of the people is never heard. It is left to a small handful of experts to impose their plans and, as has been shown time after time, they are deeply flawed in their assumptions (high rise living, new towns, importing large-scale industry which subsequently failed, destroying historic buildings for no gain). What I would like to see is a Royal Commission on the future of our cities and have a proper discussion about the future shape and function of Liverpool and its counterparts. It might take years to come to its conclusions but it would focus attention on so many pressing issues.
To illustrate one aspect of my point, the first photograph is of Byrom Street in the 1950s – a cobbled street with buildings of character, wide pavements for pedestrians and an efficient transport system. Below is an aerial view from 1964 showing a central block of buildings sandwiched between the Technical College (on the left – now part of Liverpool Museum) and the offices of Blackburn Assurance on the right. The next photograph captures this block in preparation for demolition to make way for road widening from the Mersey Tunnel. Finally, the 1978 photograph showing the end result. All character has been removed in favour of the motor car and the wide pavements reduced to a precarious sloping strip relegating the pedestrian to an afterthought. Geoffrey Howe couldn’t have done better!

Byrom Street 1964

Byrom Street 1966

Byrom Street 1978

Peacock Inn by William Gawin Herdman

In earlier blogs, I have lamented the scarcity of pre-1880 photographs of Liverpool. I have the odd image but they hardly represent a substantial body of work. However, the occasional early gem surfaces from time to time and I am grateful to Coin Weekes for allowing me to post this fascinating photograph of the Peacock Inn, which once stood on Park Road, near to High Park Street. Once thought to have been the residence of the keeper of the Ancient Park of Toxteth when it was a royal hunting park, it was probably constructed in the early seventeenth century. Judging by the top hats and also the dress worn by the girl on the right, I reckon the photograph dates to about 1870. Why the group is gathered is not clear but it is the earliest photograph of a Liverpool pub I have come across. By way of contrast, I have also reproduced an earlier painting of The Peacock by WG Herdman.
The building was of a style once common in Liverpool. The artist Brierley painted many such cottages in the 1830s but all were demolished in the town centre with the last one surviving well into the first half of the twentieth century.

I reckon that one way to double traffic to my blog is to mention Everton (well – increase numbers slightly!). I’m sorry to disappoint any football fans, though, for today’s photograph is a rather striking image of a policeman looking over his beat from the heights of Everton. Netherfield Road is below but I cannot decipher the street name on the side of the corner building.
The city he is observing is about to be dramatically changed.The closely-packed terraces are about to make way for that critically flawed high rise housing policy which destroyed well-established neighbourhoods for very little gain. The tower blocks have largely gone and now parkland rolls down the hill to Great Homer Street. Visually a huge improvement but I am sure there are many readers out there who will look at the disappeared landscape with more than a touch of regret for a lost community.

Picture Post on Liverpool available in Waterstones, WH Smith, Book Clearance Centre etc. and on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1908457058/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&qid=1321561830&sr=1-1&condition=new

Houghton Street, 1964

Daisy Day, 1965

In May last year, I included a photograph of Houghton Street looking towards Clayton Square. The photograph today shows the street from the opposite direction looking down towards Williamson Square. Within a year, the whole site was cleared to make way for the new St John’s Market.
One shop caught my eye – Madame Foner’s corsetry shop. The shop relocated to Bold Street and, last year again, rather incongruously to the front courtyard of the Bluecoat Art Centre. The last move seems to have been unsuccessful and it has been replaced by a gift shop. Small shops come and go but Madame Foner has had a long lifetime for a specialist shop.
The second photograph is of a fundraising campaign for Merseyside hospitals. I only arrived in the city in 1970 and I cannot recall Daisy Days. The small girl dressed as a nurse would appear to be helping her dad.
Two more photos (and the last for the time being) from Pat Weekes. Would anyone else like to submit their photographs of old Liverpool? Any date, any subject – this is a perfect forum for getting them seen!

Two photographs of Lime Street taken from the same elevated position on St George’s Plateau and quite probably on the same day. The day is easy to pinpoint – it is July 12th and the Dingle Orange Lodges are heading to Exchange station for their annual bash in Southport. Pat Weekes has taken his time. Having set his camera, he has also captured the fine sweep of what was once St George’s Place – a natural curve of buildings that flowed down towards Roe Street. Only for one further year because they were to make way for the angular, unsympathetic contours of the new St John’s Precinct – designed without any sympathy for the grand setting of St George’s Hall.

You know my grumbles well enough by now – so enjoy two fine photographs of the 1960s.

Liverpool’s churches come in all shapes and sizes and most of them found their way into David Lewis’s Churches of Liverpool.
Some missed the cut and the Sailors’ Church in Wellington Road was one of them. I spent a good hour trying to locate the tin church and fortunately found another photographic reference. There was another church in Wellington Road, a Free Methodist chapel at which Silas Hocking, the author of Her Benny was an early minister. The Sailors’ Church is of a different order to that once fine Italianate building and presumably drew its congregation from the ships docking in the South Docks.
Liverpool had a long tradition of sailors’ chapels and churches, using no longer seaworthy ships as well as buildings like the one above. It is not a pretty building but the photographer, Pat Weekes, has captured it for posterity (and for future inclusion in the revised Churches of Liverpool.

Following the last blog, which produced a fantastic response, I have posted another picture of boys at a gate being shooed away by an old man. This time the location can be easily identified as Liverpool Cathedral. The photograph was taken by Peter Leeson in the early 1970s. It is quite a grainy image and was not included in his book Goodbye Scottie Road – but I thought it was an interesting follow-on from the last blog, which has been fairly conclusively identified as Princes Avenue facing Parkway. The gates have gone but the row of houses on Parkway in the background still stand, unlike the row of Georgian houses which lined St James’s Road below the Cathedral. They all disappeared in the late 1970s.

The Rialto 1974

Lodge Lane 1976

Lodge Lane 1976

I was asked last week why I had not posted anything about the 30th anniversary of the Toxteth Riots. A fair point which I hope today’s blog will rectify. I thought I might have a photograph of the Racquets Club, which was unceremoniously burned down along with The Rialto, but so far nothing has turned up. I knew one of the Club’s committee members and he expressed his delight at the outcome. Members, all from the professional classes, had been reluctant to visit the Club for some time prior to the riots and a financial hole had been created. The generous compensation wiped out the financial problems and gave them fine new premises in Chapel Street (in the Hargreaves Building). The Establishment won out as always, as no doubt did Swainbank who lost his furniture repository in the Rialto. In the case of Lodge Lane, the looting of the shops dealt a devastating blow to the street, from which it still has not recovered.