As Liverpool’s Eurovision triumph sinks in, the profiteering begins
As Liverpool’s Eurovision triumph sinks in, the profiteering begins
Are you renting out your house for £10,000?
Dear readers — welcome to our weekly briefing.
Things are moving fast since Liverpool was announced as the Eurovision host city. Cardboard cutouts of Sonia are going to spring up, last year’s winner, Kalush Orchestra, have promised a performance in Liverpool to honour their country, and local hotels are charging astronomic prices for the weekend. We take a look at what the solutions are.
In case you missed it, our weekend read by Jack Dulhanty was about Hilbre Island and the connections we find in nature, which had a great response from readers and featured some lovely passages about a day spent on the island:
We see dragonflies that just look like flying candy canes, butterflies with frescoed wings, but find no birds in the traps. We march on to the island’s southern coast, tracing our fingers through the deep striations in the rocks.
Last week we sent out two great stories to our paying members. The first was a beautifully written piece by Jack Walton about Café Laziz, a community cafe for asylum seekers in St Helens, which gives us an insight into the lives of refugees. Then, David Lloyd wrote an impassioned case for why Liverpool and Eurovision were made for each other (published just one day before the announcement). We don't take the credit for this seismic civic victory, although that's what others are saying...
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🌦 This week’s weather
The big story: The great Eurovision price hike
Top line: Some Liverpool hotels and Airbnbs have astronomically inflated their prices over the Eurovision weekend in order to capitalise on demand.
At a glance:
For the weekend of 13-15 May, Booking.com says 99% of hotels are fully booked. The cheapest result is a one bedroom apartment for £1,999 a night.
Buzz O’Neill-Maxwell, an events manager, told the Times he booked hotels in Liverpool and Glasgow when the shortlist was whittled down to two. His booking was cancelled once Liverpool was selected.
According to The Guardian, one man is renting his home for the night of the final for £15,000 — or £17,600 including service and cleaning fees. “The listing says it sleeps up to 10 people and offers amenities including a hairdryer, shampoo, shower gel, bed sheets, toilet paper and extra pillows.”
Focus: The host city shortlist has sharpened the focus on Liverpool, with one Telegraph article likening the city to a cultural backwater and others accusing local hotels of greed. It could be easy to forget the contest is being hosted on behalf of Ukraine. As our regular writer David Lloyd puts it:
This ‘we’re better than you’ refrain of city battling city to host a glittery show when, not so very far away, cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv would just like the chance to exist at all. But, to its credit, it’s a refrain that our city hasn’t been joining in with.
Perspective: It’s normal to see huge price hikes just after the Eurovision host city is announced. Prices generally start to fall from February onwards, according to one fan on Twitter who says they have attended the contest for years now.
Solutions: Harry Doyle, cabinet member for culture, says he is disappointed that some hotels are cashing in on the contest early but has assured fans the council had planned for this. Alternative arrangements, including campsites and a cruise ship, will be made. In the meantime, patience is encouraged.
Bottom line: The event is expected to be a huge boost to the local economy and help small businesses thrive. Claire McColgan CBE, director of Culture Liverpool, says the predicted impact of £30 million is an underestimate for the city. “Let's be honest, it's Liverpool — every bar, every restaurant, ever corner of the city will be celebrating Ukraine and celebrating Eurovision. It's not a city that does things quietly, is it?”
Your Post briefing
An Echo story reveals that Liverpool City Council completed a land deal with the controversial property developer Elliot Lawless after he was arrested on corruption, bribery and conspiracy to defraud charges in December 2019. Lawless denies any wrongdoing and successfully challenged the police warrants used to search his home and office. Lawless bought the site on Norfolk Street from the council for just under £1 million in March 2017. The deal completed in February 2020. The individuals working on this transaction were Tony Reeves, Mel Creighton, Pauline Ivaney and Stephen Kirk. A spokesperson for LCC says they cannot comment on ongoing legal matters.
The prosecution’s opening statements at the trial of Lucy Letby have alleged that she deliberately poisoned babies with insulin, air or too much milk within a few days of their birth. Letby, 32, was arrested after detectives launched an investigation into the deaths of 15 babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital over a period of 12 months from June 2015. She is accused of murdering five boys and two girls, and attempting to murder ten others. She denies all of the allegations. Nick Johnson, KC, prosecuting, said: “Sometimes a baby that she succeeded in killing she did not manage to kill the first time she tried, or even the second time, and in one case even the third time.”
600 dock workers are returning to the picket lines tomorrow after negotiations over better pay and working conditions with the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company broke down. The MDHC say their offer of a 8.3% pay rise and one-off payment of £750 is “very significant” and would make staff “among the best paid in the industry”. Workers argue that this pay rise is not in line with inflation and therefore constitutes a real-terms pay cut, and have also criticised the company’s failure to agree improvements to the shift rotas. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said in a statement: “The anger amongst MDHC’s staff at the greed of this hugely profitable firm and its billionaire owner John Whittaker reaches from one end of the company to the other. Our members will not back down and neither will Unite.”
Post Picks
☕️ The Good Market is back on Saturday at Penny Lane Church. It’s a great way to spend the day catching up with friends over coffee, listening to live music and browsing independent local traders. More here.
🤣 Post reader and journalism professor Kirsty Styles is hosting a comedy night at DoES Liverpool on Wednesday evening. The night is inspired by the Bright Club, an academic comedy night at UCL that focuses on intelligent comedy. Tickets here.
📚 West Kirby Bookshop is hosting a non-fiction book club tomorrow evening. They’re discussing Cold Fish Soup by Adam Farrer, a book of personal essays about growing up on the East Yorkshire coast, asking the question: what does it mean to love and be shaped by a place that is dying? Reserve a place here.
🎞 City of Spies, a dark-comedy about international relations, espionage and fake news by the Wirral-born brothers Phil and Mike Moran, debuts at FACT on Wednesday evening. It’s a blend of two expertises: Phil Moran works with the United Nations in Vienna in nuclear non-proliferation and helps monitor North Korea for nuclear test explosions, and Mike Moran is a composer whose audio production work has been featured in many films and television dramas, as well as a professorship at Hope University. Don’t miss out.
Photos of the week
Caitlin Sullivan, a local photographer, began photographing Goodison Park on match days when Everton were facing relegation. “Fans began crowding before the game to cheer the team coach into Goodison Park, as a way to let the team know the fans had their full support no matter what happens,” she remembers. “Being able to capture moments like this is always a pleasure as it shows how much of a family Evertonians are.”
This work was featured in MINT Collective, a culture collective about Everton FC and its fans. Sullivan hopes to document more celebratory moments in the future.
You can see more of Caitlin’s photography here, and find Mint Collective here.
Our favourite reads
A fascinating investigation for BBC News by the performance poet, author and historian Malik Al Nasir, who writes about his experience tracing his family connections after seeing a man named Andrew Watson in a documentary about black footballers who looked curiously similar to Malik. “At first this felt great — I was connected to an icon of black history. But through him, I was also linked to a dark chapter of Britain's colonial past and the slave trade. The discovery was bitter-sweet.”
“I first came across Tony when I saw a post in a local Facebook group asking for mourners to attend his funeral. It said he was estranged from his family, and that he died quite young. ‘If anyone has some spare time to attend his funeral service…let’s give him a good send off.’” This is a revelatory and sensitively-written long read about the unseen death of Anthony Doran in The Mill, which looks at loneliness, mental illness, journalistic ethics and the importance of connection.
We loved this story about playful cities in The Tribune, looking at research which suggests a massive contraction in how far children can roam and play in Sheffield (and presumably most other cities). It offers some great ideas from elsewhere, including Tirana in Albania, a city which had no play spaces ten years ago. Ambitiously, the city embarked on turning idle spaces into play areas. Now, there are 54. “The idea of developing ‘playful; cities has been gaining currency among urban development thinkers. At its heart is the conviction that when we design our cities, we should think first of our children, who, more than anything, want to play.”
Letters from readers
Lovely piece. What a lucky chap. There is a numinous, timeless quality to those islands. We're lucky to have them. It's just a shame they don't have a Costa. But give it time ‘The watcher of Hilbre Island’, David
Our international reach and resonance is just beyond question. As an aside, and away from Eurovision, how telling and upsetting that 47% of our income comes from tourism and that McColgan went into this feeling the underdog, ‘Open hearted and unhinged: Why Liverpool and Eurovision are made for each other’, Mark
Thank you Jack for highlighting the sad state of affairs these refugees have to tolerate. Many have escaped the worst environment you could only imagine only to end up in conditions not much better, ‘Housed in temporary hotels, St Helens’ refugees get stuck into their new community’, Carolyn Thornton