Is Williamson Square Liverpool's own Times Square?

Everywhere I return to Liverpool – the city I grew up in, to which I return maybe half a dozen times a year – I’m reminded of another time, of other people and, sometimes, of another place. The fact that I’m only dipping in and out of the city that helped make me the person I am today makes those memories even more vivid.

On this particular trip I’m hosting visitors to the city at New Year, taking them for a pre-theatre dinner ‘in town’ before an evening at the Playhouse. As our taxi passes William Brown Street we catch enticing glimpses of the World Museum, the Walker Art Gallery, the Big Library (as we used to call it) and St George’s Hall: four of the grandest, most imposing neo-classical buildings in the world, beautifully lit at night. 

The visitors are impressed – swooning, even – and over-excited. “Are we close to the Cavern?” one of them asks. “Can we see a Mersey ferry from here?” says another – and, “Where does that tunnel lead to?”

But I’m on a Memory Lane tourist trip of my own, a beat away from my early-1980s stomping ground; the trifecta of Probe Records, Eric’s and Armadillo Tea Rooms, looking back on the Kardomah and the Whitechapel hairdressers from where A Flock of Seagulls took flight. I remember the first time I ever smelt fresh coffee in the Playhouse cafe, and going to buy hamster bedding in City Pets, now a Wetherspoons.

Walking the same Williamson Square pavements that I spent so many hours walking in my yellow Kickers, or my plastic sandals, or my blue snakeprint Chelsea boots, back in the days when I was finding my grown-up feet 20, 30, 40 years ago, I find that while many parts of the city have - like my footwear - evolved, Williamson Square hasn’t - much. In the Liverpool of today, packed with more officially designated Quarters than it takes to make a whole and with a jumble of Triangles, Walks and dedicated Zones thrown in for good measure, there’s something refreshing about being on the corner of a Square that’s always been called just that. 

But if you Google ‘Williamson Square regeneration plans’, you’ll be bombarded by a whole host of consultation documents past and present, full of grand statements littered with buzzwords like ‘transformation’ and ‘integration’ underpinned by ‘strategies’ and sketches of a ‘green oasis concept’ and ‘dynamic community event space’ that suggest perpetual evolution. There’s talk about the old Tower Restaurant (currently up for grabs) being turned into a ‘Michelin-starred destination dining experience’, and a petition hit my inbox the other day from a guy campaigning for a statue of Holly Johnson to be erected in the space vacated by the old water fountain. 

Getting out of our cab on the corner of Williamson Square itself, it’s easy to see why the area is apparently so ripe for a makeover. The vast open space looks a bit forlorn, lacking the focus and impact you’d expect a key public space between so many other key public spaces to have. If we were in the Paris, Berlin or Edinburgh equivalent, it’d be a bustling, celebrated plaza – but in the cold, drizzly, post-theatre light of night, it doesn’t look like there’s much to celebrate here. 

The folk scuttling across the vacant space where the water feature used to be look like characters in a Lowry painting, their heads down and coats clutched tightly around them. There’s a guy stretched out on his back on the pavement singing the Dead Kennedys’ Holiday in Cambodia while his mate vomits on a dead pigeon, and the smashed window on the LFC shop is being taped up by security guards. I hope the visitors are looking the other way – up at St John’s Beacon, perhaps? But there are welcome lights in the darkness, at street level.

The Cillo family have transformed the corner of Tarleton Street into a mini “Italian Quarter”, complete with its own cafe-bar, brunch spot and the Hey! Farina restaurant. The puffa-coat-clad people huddled around heated alfresco tables remind me of London’s Bar Italia on Frith Street, Soho. Come to be seen ordering coffee, stay to actually drink it. 

The scent of proper espresso, fags and Creed Aventus hangs in the freezing cold air creating a buzz, a vibe, a cosmopolitan energy that clashes with the sense of dispirited regret combusting from the guy storming out of Paddy Power just across the street, tearing up his betting slip as he disappears into the soft fog. Hang on; didn’t that betting shop used to be The Queen’s Arms pub? Oh-oh, here we go… I’m taking my memories for dinner.

Try as I might to encourage them, the exposed brickwork inside Hey! Farina won’t share much about its past life with me. Were those bricks once part of Hobbies, the Aladdin’s Den of toy shops, famed for model aircraft and train kits and other pocket-money treasures? They might well have been. But today the building is a treasure trove in its own right: Hey! Farina (or Pasta Lab Farina, or simply just Farina; it’s all a bit confusing) offers fresh pasta in all its variants to team with a tantalising range of sauces alongside pizzas, focacce and a rather spectacular Montepulciano.

Dear readers. I hope you're enjoying today's story as much as I did. Melissa is the writer who first made me want to write for The Post, and alongside Jeff Young I happen to think she's the best contemporary chronicler of Liverpool's memory — a kind of outsider-elegist who never quite surrenders to melancholy. If you appreciate this kind of writing, why not sign up for free today, to get The Post's weekend reads in your inbox every Saturday?

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Dear readers. I hope you're enjoying today's story as much as I did. Melissa is the writer who first made me want to write for The Post, and alongside Jeff Young I happen to think she's the best contemporary chronicler of Liverpool's memory — a kind of outsider-elegist who never quite surrenders to melancholy. If you appreciate this kind of writing alongside our investigations, explainers, op-eds, cultural features and scoops, please consider supporting us. If you join today, you can take advantage of our introductory offer and pay the equivalent of just £1 a week for the first three months. Click below to take out a subscription for premium civic journalism right here in the city region.

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Inside, two women at the table beside ours are paying more attention to the menu than Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon did on their TV road trip from Piedmont to Capri, eventually settling on croquettes, polpette and Reginette Allo Scoglio; they’re clearly serious foodies, seeking some serious foodie drama. 

Just behind us, a family – mum, dad, grown-up daughter, grown-up son – are enduring a drama of their own. The daughter is tearful, the father is fraught. The mum wears a hackneyed mask of stolid resilience that barely hides her disappointment in her frenetic, over-emotional son, who is clearly the main cause of the family’s dysfunction. 

What could be a scene from BBC One’s This City is Ours is a set piece in my own modest production: This City was Once Mine… except there weren’t any restaurants like Hey! Farina in Williamson Square back in the early 1980s, just Platters caff, a Wimpy and possibly a Reece’s, all overlooked by the revolving restaurant at the top of St John’s Beacon, where loads of my mates used to boast they’d been but never actually had.

I’m guessing that not many people who actually did have dinner in the Tower Restaurant back then did it just so they could look down on Williamson Square; they went for the panorama beyond their prawn cocktails, the sunset behind their Steak Diane, the then-prestige of saying you’d been there. 

In the streets below, the Playhouse was for grown-ups, pantomimes, and hip suburbanites taking a coffee break after shopping for hessian lightshades in the nearby Habitat. The Royal Court was for gigs (Japan, Iggy Pop and Tin Machine all spring to mind, although the less said about that last one, the better). There used to be a water feature that kids splashed in on hot days, and shopping in the area meant a trip to the Famous Army Store, a mecca for punks and new wave ravers in search of surplus combat jackets to turn into bondage trousers and gas mask bags to sling across their Crass T-shirts at a jaunty angle.

My first job, back then, was in Alice Ices on Tarleton Street: a handy snicket that led from the square to Probe Records, which is where I first set eyes on Pete Burns (as regular Liverpool Post readers already know).

My dad once had to drag me out of The Queen’s Arms after 14-year-old me had somehow managed to go on a date with a fledgling actor I’d met at the Playhouse Youth Theatre who dad deemed to be ‘unsuitable’ – I had, after all, lied about my age. 

I can’t remember how long the ensuing histrionic fit of pique against my dad raged for, but I can clearly remember the feeling of having my romantic teenage ambitions thwarted so dramatically; having found out how old (or rather, young) I actually was, the boy swiftly moved on to a more suitable paramour. Can I blame him? No. To the contrary, I thank him for the memories: the first time I’d ever met a proper, real-life actor; the first time I’d ever been bought a drink in a pub (an orange juice without the vodka I’d requested); the first of many times I would be mesmerised by a posh boy with a floppy fringe. If I hadn’t had my heart broken then, I wouldn’t have known how to use it wisely in the decades to follow.

All these years on, and I’m still collating mini-sagas in Liverpool’s mini-equivalent of New York’s Times Square. Okay, so it’s only inadvertently neon-lit by various shop fronts and a tangle of (mostly working) street lights. There isn’t a tourist office or a Naked Cowboy in sight, and I’m pretty sure nobody drops a Crystal Ball here to celebrate New Year. But does the area need to claim – or try – to be anything other than what it is?

Like the Liverpool that still thrums to its own beat in the back streets behind the glossy, Instagrammable shrine to Mammon that is Liverpool One or the living museum that is the Cavern Quarter, Williamson Square brazenly remains… Williamson Square. 

To my mind, the Cillo family have got it right in just forging ahead and establishing their own Italian Quarter: a family-run, independently-owned hubbub of good stuff on the corner of this pedestrianised crosstown junction. 

As we leave Hey! Farina to make our way over to the Playhouse, one of the coffee-drinking Creed Aventus guys who looked so expectant at the start of the night is paying his bill, his smooth, permatanned face crumpled by the indignance and rejection of, I’m guessing, a new date no-show. A squawking hen party dressed in Sgt Pepper outfits and carrying inflatable guitars are making their way towards Mathew Street, and an Uber Eats delivery guy is unshakeable in his conviction that somebody in Hey! Farina did indeed order a bucket of KFC.

Everyone I encountered that evening will have their own tales to tell; this is mine. 

As I stub out a last pre-theatre fag under the cheerful Hey! Farina awning, a guy who asked for a light then stayed for a chat shares a parting anecdote: “It’s changed a lot around here, that’s for sure,” he says. 

But it hasn’t though; not really – and I hope it never does.

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