FOR anyone growing up in Liverpool during the 1970s, terminal decline became a way of life. Unemployment and industrial action were rife, disillusion a state of being. The only answer was to get out — and hundreds of thousands did.
For exiles like myself during each successive visit home throughout the early 1980s, the atmosphere seemed ever more grim and hopeless, the telephone book significantly thinner. Rather than a great romantic voyage, the Ferry Across the Mersey seemed a miserable chug across a murky lost cause.
Visit Liverpool today and you’ll find a city buzzing with renewed energy and self-belief. It seems astonishing that a place that had plumbed the depths so comprehensively can rise up and transform itself into a boom town within a decade — but having hit rock bottom it really couldn’t sink any further, and from there the only way is up.
Even before its surprise nomination last year as European Capital of Culture for 2008, the city’s change in fortune was already under way. Its former council’s reputation for belligerence has been swept away, and in its place a new spirit of co-operation is producing dividends.
Mike Storey, leader of the City Council, has presided over the dramatic change in attitude and now finds businesses ready to work in tandem, rather than shying away from political infighting. “In the early 1980s the militant council regarded any business as the enemy,” he says. “The Heysel and Hillsborough football disasters, James Bulger. Everything seemed to go wrong and we became the butt of jokes on TV. Liverpool lost its confidence and became introspective.”
Symbolising the burgeoning optimism is the £800 million Paradise Street Development Area near the Albert Dock, due to be completed by 2007 to coincide with Liverpool’s 800th anniversary. Its six separate sections will incorporate a shopping mall, offices, apartments and a cinema complex — all financed by private investment. This project alone will create 4,400 permanent jobs — Gizzajob, indeed.
Along the city centre waterfront the value of spacious pine-and-bare-brick loft apartments on the upper floors of the once-derelict warehouses rises daily, while shoppers pack the city centre stores clutching bags from Kookaï and Jane Norman. Where there was once apathy there is now optimism and, more importantly, disposable income.
As Beatlemania and Bill Shankly’s all-conquering Liverpool FC provided the impetus for the fab years of the 1960s, so nightclubbers can take some of the credit for the modern renaissance. Attracted by the superclub Cream, young people would come into the city from miles away for the weekend and spend their money in the trendy bars that sprang up in the area.
Cream no longer runs its regular Saturday night but its legacy is a host of sharp young pretenders, notably Garlands, where attractive, well-groomed clubbers form orderly queues, a far cry from my own era, when you had to persuade two brutish bouncers at the door of Wookey Hollow to let you in for a bad cabaret and chicken-in-a-basket.
Hotels back then didn’t stretch beyond the Adelphi and Holiday Inn, but in keeping with its scrubbed-up cosmopolitan image, these days you will find all manner of swish places to stay, such as the four-star Radisson SAS on the waterfront and chic Hope Street Hotel tucked between the two cathedrals. Since the millennium, a dozen new hotels have opened, with half a dozen more in the pipeline, including a Malmaison and a Beatles-themed hotel.
Two months ago the Government approved plans for a £12 million cruise liner terminal, expected to open next year. This will open up Liverpool to another category of tourist whose potential spending power has not gone unnoticed by the marketing people now employed to raise the city’s profile still further and “rebrand” it, in the modern parlance, as a vibrant metropolis with a positive image.
As Jason Harborow, tourism director with the Liverpool Culture Company, points out: “This is one of the few ports in the world that can take a ship right into the city centre.”
Indeed, should the cruise ship scheme achieve its potential and bring in big-spending tourists from America and Japan, Liverpool will have come full circle, pulling itself out of the doldrums to reclaim its position as a mercantile heavyweight.
