Streets of Liverpool

I have tried to avoid using Liverpool City Engineer’s Department photographs because one of the main objectives of this blog is to present previously unpublished photographs. In this instance, I was prompted by Christine Legge, who emailed requesting any photographs of Princes Walk, which was off Great Howard Street. I get many requests and I am constantly looking for the appropriate images. In many cases, particularly courts and back streets, it is not possible to find any photographs – although I will continue to look.
With the slum areas, the City Engineer’s collection is the most likely source. Not many photographers wandered into such areas unless they had good reason. The function of the City Engineer’s Photography Department was to document its work including insanitary housing, road improvements, slum clearance, installation of sewers and other major works. The Department started taking photographs in 1898 and survived until 1998 before being dismantled. Its output was fairly consistent although a considerable number of photographs were taken in the 1930s to document the slum clearances (which led to the building of tenements such as Gerard Gardens, Kent Gardens and Caryl Gardens).
The photograph of Burlington is one of my favourites. It is such a poignant image. The boy is in an open doorway, obviously an occupied house in spite of the shutters and broken window. The Supper Bar has a peeling poster advertising a dance at the Grafton on September 29th at 1/6d admission. This is poverty 1930s style. It seems hard to believe but all the children could be alive and in their 80s.

Another press photograph from the 1930s to illustrate Liverpool’s slum housing. The photograph was taken from the hind leg and unnamed street looking in the direction of Queen Anne Street (Gomer Street is the next street shown). The children in the foreground could be taken from any number of similar streets – with quite a few wellington boots being worn as a cheap alternative to shoes. The Georgian style terrace is typical of much of inner-city Liverpool at that time – austere houses rapidly built to cope with the mid-nineteenth century explosion in population. The best part of a hundred years old, their lack of maintenance is evident. Internally, they must have been dreadful places – cold, damp and rotten. Sad that so many generations were blighted by such an appalling environment.

First of all, an apology. In my last but one post, I attributed Dickson Terrace to Dickson Street in the heart of docklands. Researching today’s photograph, I realised that Dickson Terrace was actually off Soho Street, a stone’s throw from Scarlet Street. I have corrected the error, which does not change the general context of my post but does significantly shift its geography.
It is clear that both the Dickson Terrace and Scarlet Street photographs were taken at approximately the same time, presumably by a photographer on a press assignment to capture the essence of Liverpool’s slums. Scarlet Street, a short terrace off Mansfield Street near to its junction with St Anne Street, is by no means as ‘desperate’ as many streets around Scotland Road and the houses look relatively well-cared for. What particularly caught my eye were the two children with very strange hats, particularly the small boy on the right who seems to have a pair of shorts on his head.

The media’s fascination with Liverpool is not a recent phenomenon. It used to really annoy me back in the 1980s when London-based newspapers continually featured pictures of Liverpool to illustrate urban deprivation in Britain. I particularly remember the Sunday Times leading with a photograph of the Pier Head shot from Birkenhead. In the foreground was a car breakage yard – the cheap headline being Liverpool on the scrapheap!.
For years, Liverpool was the target of television and newspapers features seemingly revelling in the spiral of decline the city was facing – but then, in 2008, it all started to disappear as the realisation dawned that it was no longer such a soft target. However, one interesting legacy is that future generations will have no shortage of images to illustrate those hard years. In a similar way, the city attracted press coverage in the 1930s and the photograph of Byrom Terrace was used to illustrate an article in the Daily Herald with the caption: The terrible conditions under which people live in the slum areas of Liverpool are strikingly illustrated by this picture of Byrom Terrace.
No doubt the image annoyed many people in the city – who maybe felt such photographs gave a distorted view of Liverpool (and I would have been amongst them had I been around at the time). But you cannot have it both ways – and the photograph is a valuable reflection of what life was like for a sizeable number of citizens back in the 1930s. Poverty is poverty and pretending Liverpool is just about fine buildings and great tourist attractions is no real answer.

The first reaction might be that this is another photograph of Liverpool in the 1930s but the young mother’s dress is the giveaway. The year is 1946 and the press caption on the reverse states “Tenements in Canterbury Street, Liverpool, are being demolished while they are still occupied. Mrs Rossiter, of No. 41, in the doorway of her scullery.’
Whatever happened to Mrs Rossiter and her daughter (who would now be about 65)? A decade later, Harold Macmillan announced “let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good.’ For those that were left behind, nothing much changed. Hopefully, Mrs Rossiter’s life improved as the austerity years moved into the prosperity years – now that would be an interesting story.

34 Alexandra Drive, 1891

Eldon Street, 1910

On February 26th, in one of my first blogs, I compared the extreme poverty in Liverpool with the great wealth that was very visibly present. At the turn of the twentieth century, Liverpool still had a significant number of millionaires, who had built their mansions in the suburbs – from Princes Park outwards to Woolton. Their life style could not be further from the lives of those they would have seen as they went about their daily business.
Photography might be a simplistic way of illustrating such contrasts but today’s images do give a fascinating insight into the expectations and ambitions of the wealthy and the desperate hopelessness of the poor. The photograph of the four young adults in their rather bizarre headgear was taken by ‘Society’ photographer Vanderbilt (who had studios in James Street and Church Street). Commissioned to take a photograph of the owner’s new car – obviously a special moment – the photographer has inadvertently captured the rather superior expressions on all four occupants face (or is that just my prejudice coming out). Sadly, their names and the location are not marked on the mount.
The second photograph – by London photographer Bedford Lemere & Company – is quite specific. It was taken in October 1891 at 34 Alexandra Drive, by Sefton Park. Pre-dating the first photography by a decade, it shows the over-elaborate furnishing of a well-off businessman’s home.
By total contrast, the final image is a City Engineer’s Department photograph of a slum bedroom in Eldon Street dated 1910 (two decades later – and exactly a century ago). These were the conditions which thousands of the poor had to contend with. In the 100+ years since these photographs were taken, we still talk about the poverty gap and politicians introduce yet more policies and strategies to combat it – but it still seem as wide as ever, even if materially lives have improved to some extent.

Burlington Street 1890

Temperance March c1895

There is a substantial number of contemporary accounts of life in nineteenth century Liverpool. Journalists such as Hugh Shimmin wrote extensively about slum life, usually sympathetically but invariably looking at drink as the underlying cause of poverty. Invariably, middle class response to the threat of the ‘underclass’ was to lobby for tighter controls on the sale of alcohol – with a growing number arguing for total abstinence. Signing the ‘pledge’ (not to drink) and supporting temperance organisations such as the Band of Hope attracted national support – even if, like most bandwagons, it eventually ran out of steam.

The first photograph, of Burlington Street, is one of a series taken by Liverpool photographer N. Stephen, a committed anti-drink campaigner, and used as lantern slides in temperance lectures. The second photograph, which looks as if it has been taken somewhere near Abercromby Square, shows what appears to be a well-heeled crowd about to start their procession. The distance between the two locations is only a couple of miles in distance – but light years in comfort, opportunity and life expectancy. A century on, one might ask ‘what has changed?’

Victoria Square 1954

Victoria Square (original layout)

St Anne Street 1937

Holidays over and time to get back to my blog!

One of the most fascinating aspects of Liverpool’s social history is that of public housing. Astonishingly, no comprehensive book has been written on the subject in recent years – I await one with great anticipation! – although the importance of the many initiatives undertaken is more than worthy of an in-depth study. The first major project was St Martin’s Cottages in 1869 – which survived until the 1980s. Victoria Square was the second initiative, although not until 1885. The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 (imagine calling a piece of legislation that today) resulted in a rapid expansion of local authority housing – and Liverpool took the lead, including the St Anne Street flats of 1914, which showed the imaginative design using high quality materials.
Victoria Square was an ambitious scheme, considered a pioneering venture at the time. It originally contained 270 dwellings but, following war damage in 1941, these were reduced to 215. Substantial improvements were made in the early 1950s, including installing back-boilers for hot water and wiring for electricity. Particular care was taken to maintain the external features – but, in 1961, the original four blocks were reduced to two. Even these improvements were not enough to save the Square and it was demolished to make way for the Wallasey Tunnel.

I raised the point in an earlier blog about the opportunity missed to create a museum of housing. This was mooted at the time of St Martin’s Cottages future being considered and was dismissed on cost grounds (there was a similar proposal for Duke Street Terrace). Somehow, money has been found for the new Museum of Liverpool, a building I consider one of the best modern buildings in the city. However, I have serious misgivings about its proposed content – too early to judge but the advance information suggests style over substance. The collection of the old Museum of Public Health (now in the possession of NML) would have provided a substantial element to a real museum of Liverpool life utilising the structures of buildings which had been part of the great housing initiatives (imagine had Gerrard Gardens been used for such a purpose – and within walking distance of William Brown Street). Building expensive, ‘iconic’ buildings is one thing – history is another.

Not so popular Poplar Street

Unromantic Valentine Grove

The debate over slum clearance has been well aired over the last fifty years. There are many who believe the wholesale clearance of housing across Liverpool was an unmitigated disaster and that communities would have been best served by careful renovation of run-down properties. On the other side, there is the argument
that the housing stock was in such a poor condition that only demolition and rebuild would be appropriate if living standards were to improve. The residents of Valentine Grove along with their neighbours in equally inappropriately named Venus and Cupid Streets (off Larch Lea) had already departed when the photograph was taken in 1972.(Who thinks up such street names?). In nearby Poplar Street, the inhabitants were prepared to voice their indignation in a graphic and eye-catching way.
Perhaps not the most photogenic images – but such records are an important reminder of what the city was like and the kind of conditions its citizens endured.

While researching yesterday’s post about Squeaking Jimmy, I dug out my copies of Horne and Maund’s seminal five book series Liverpool Transport. A lifetime’s work – these are often described as books for ‘anoraks’ by those with only a passing interest in transport. To me, they belong to a fine tradition of writing about Liverpool that I believe is unrivalled in any other city.
Over the last 40+ years, the number of books keeps rising, including many seminal works such as Quentin Hughes’s Seaport – which had a profound effect on all who read it – and the Pevner series, recently brilliantly revised in two volumes by Richard Pollard and Joseph Sharples. There have been many other important books – including English Heritage’s six volume series published for Capital of Culture Year. I have published approaching 200 titles as Bluecoat Press and yet I have turned down five times as many because there is a limit to what I can do. The result of all this effort is a deep awareness of the Liverpool’s rich history – quite astonishing for such a ‘young’ city. Go to Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds or any other city and you will find nothing like the same breadth or depth of titles. Sadly, I see the number of books being published rapidly slowing down – after all, there are only two major bookshops (both Waterstones) in the city centre and little else outside. The internet is obviously a superb source of information but it is difficult to replicate the structure of a physical book (although ebooks will soon take on this function).
Publishing is at an interesting crossroads and I hope my blog helps in the transition from paper to digital. Today’s photographs are a case in point – two previously unpublished images of market life in the 1890s. Both are captioned Back o’ the Market and bear close similarities to Inston’s work. This is life in the raw as hawkers try to make a few pennies from selling rags, broken crockery or whatever else can make them a few coppers.