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,   and  David Lloyd
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Liverpool thought fancy street names would save us. Turns out, they didn’t

Premature attempts at regeneration have left wastelands with names of unhinged grandeur — David Lloyd visited them

There is no evidence of electricity along my side of Electric Avenue. No water either. A fallen sign, in the process of being reclaimed into the earth, reads ‘No Fishing’, although I’m not sure whether it’s an instruction, or an observation. A small stairway descends to what looks like a wooden deck. And then the scene clicks into place. This area used to be a huge pond or, possibly, a tributary of the nearby River Alt. Now even the reeds are dead.

My reading of this less-than-electrifying place – half business park, half post-apocalyptic tundra – is confirmed as a man calls me from the pavement (by this time, I’m up to my shins in brambles).

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“Be careful there lad,” he shouts. “Gets a bit sticky.” 

“Did this used to be water?” I ask, inching back to safety.

“Years ago,” he says. “There was a pair of swans here, with four cygnets. Some local bastards killed them all.”

“That’s awful,” I say.

“That’s sport around here,” he shrugs. “I think the council gave up on managing it then.’’

“Why’s it called Electric Avenue?” I ask, looking around at the fenced-off wasteland beyond. 

“Don’t ask me pal, you can’t even take your dog for a walk down here at night, there’s no lights.”

“Maybe it was full of electric eels,” I say, but the man has loped off.

As the lyrics to Electric Avenue succinctly put it: “Oh no, oh no, oh no". Photo: David Lloyd

Why are Liverpool’s edgelands so fantastically and improbably named? (Electric Avenue, Innovation Boulevard, Europa Boulevard and Digital Way, to name a few.) Is it absurd civic humour? Is it a form of municipal manifestation? Or, in the case of Electric Avenue, is it a rogue Eddie Grant fan at the council, peppering the city map with the titles of his radio-friendly reggae-pop hits? Will I eventually brush shoulders with I Don’t Wanna Dance Cul-de-Sac if I keep walking?

I start to hum the song…

Down in the street there is violence

And a lots of work to be done

No place to hang out our washing

…and it sort of begins to make sense.

Electric Avenue is a good place to start if you want to understand Liverpool's relationship with its recent street names. There was a time when they made sense: Squares and streets took the names of wealthy merchants, impressive ships or the trades that had actually been carried out on them. Which is why Ropewalks is called Ropewalks, and not, had it been named three decades ago by Liverpool Vision, Enterprise Row. 

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