Dear members — it’s easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses. You see those “Now and Then” Facebook groups which compare areas of cities and neighbourhoods in the present and past, and the unanimous consensus always seems to be that the latter was preferable. Then trumps now, every time. In the case of Liverpool’s Scottie Road, and the surrounding Vauxhall area, that sense is entrenched. A street that once bustled with pubs and life has been stripped back, with the nearby white knight Project Jennifer development failing to deliver on much of its original promise. Is this a case where the nostalgia is very much justified?
Our Thursday edition is a members-only affair, but those on our free list will be able to read the top of the email, and should join up as members now if they want to read the rest, support our work and get all our high-quality reporting in their inbox every week. We recently passed the 600 members mark and we’re pushing hard towards 1000, when we will be financially sustainable and able to look at hiring a new staff member (lightening the load for Jack and Mollie!)
But on to your briefing, including the exciting news that Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp can now drive sheep through the city centre, if he so wishes.
Mini-briefing
Jurgen Klopp was awarded the Freedom of Liverpool at a Town Hall ceremony on Wednesday. He becomes the city’s second foreign national to receive the honour, after Nelson Mandela. It means Klopp has the right to drive sheep through the streets of the city, part of an archaic law, about which he seemed fairly confused: “I read something about sheep in the city and stuff like this, I'm not 100% sure.” Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall, who met Klopp soon after he arrived in Liverpool seven years ago, was in attendance and called him “a great manager, a great human being, a great personality and a great humanitarian.”
Sexy beast, an eight-part drama about small-time thieves who get mixed up in criminality, is being filmed by Paramount+ at Liverpool's film studio The Depot. The arrangement makes Paramount+ the first long-term tenants at The Depot, but life hasn’t always been plain sailing. Since it opened in October last year only television commercials have been shot there, whilst the plans to develop the adjacent Littlewoods building into studio space took a hit last month when Liverpool John Moores University pulled out as an anchor tenant. The stalled project has led some to question the “The Hollywood of the North” nickname used to describe the city’s plans, especially when other UK cities like Belfast have cracked ahead with larger studio projects. Nonetheless, assistant mayor Harry Doyle says “the Depot has been a real game changer and represents Liverpool's long-held ambitions to be a 24/7 film city."
Citybike out, E-bikes in: Liverpool’s Citybike initiative — which launched in 2014 but was suffering annual losses of £300,000 — has been replaced by an e-bike scheme. Swedish firm Voi have launched a new 50-strong fleet and have plans for 100 more. The scheme is expected to help Liverpool towards its goal of becoming carbon net-zero by 2030. The new bikes can be activated through Voi’s app and are available to hire for anyone over 16. Now all you need are some tight lycra shorts.
Post Picks
📽️ The Liverpool Film Festival kicked off yesterday and is running until Sunday at Odeon. The options are as broad as you could wish for; from “a slow, thoughtful and meditative animation with no spoken word by the internationally renowned sculptor Rachel Ara” to “a woman hell-bent on ending an alien invasion as she sprints through the English countryside”. Read up on the full programme here.
🕯️ Diwali — the festival of lights — is an ancient Hindu tradition that lasts for up to six days in certain regions of India. The Ruskin Sports Village in St Helens can’t offer six days of celebration, but they can offer one: a “Diwali Party” for the local community on 5 November with a three-course buffet dinner and live entertainment. £25 for adults, £15 for children.
⚽️ Aquascutum coats and striped scarves at the ready: a new exhibition at The Walker from tomorrow is looking at the art of the football terraces, and how the “casuals” phenomenon of the 70s and 80s intertwined with music and fashion. Turner Prize winners Mark Leckey and Mark Wallinger are among the contributors. More information here.
Looking for life on Scottie Road
By Jack Walton
There are certain places in Liverpool that lend themselves to an archive gallery. Those photo galleries of grainy black-and-white shots that appear on the “nostalgia” sections of local papers: kids in long white socks hanging off balconies and stony-faced drinkers crowding out pubs on a Friday night. Cilla Black stood in a doorway.
This one: ‘Incredible pictures of Liverpool's historic Scottie Road over the years’ for example. Only the pictures aren’t incredible over all of the years. They get decidedly less incredible in more recent years; when knee-high socks become large mounds of gravel during the construction of a Sainsbury’s car park.
This isn’t said to pine for the good ol’ days of poor housing and pestilence or even to be wantonly anti-development; it’s just that the Scottie Road area of Liverpool is a place where nostalgia is probably justified, and a motherland of half-baked developments. Front and centre: Project Jennifer, fronted up by Liverpool City Council and developers St Modwen, billed in 2003 as the reversal of fortunes Vauxhall was crying out for. £150 million for an area that had barely seen a penny in decades. It felt too good to be true. To many residents, it was.
The area around Scottie Road now is pretty grey. A few fly-tipped mattresses, but not much more. Peel’s flat-pack cereal-box apartments down on the waterside feel jarring, like North Liverpool’s slicker, younger twin who feels slightly embarrassed by the association. The other day, the BBC did a great piece looking at the closure of pubs around Scottie Road, which have whittled down in number from 200-odd to none. Their gutted husks still line the road.
“I’d go back to living in tenements tomorrow if I could,” says Pauline Connolly, who lives in Vauxhall, as we chat. A bold statement, but Pauline has this area in her blood. Pauline was there when the original discussions about Project Jennifer took place, after Bishop Tom Williams pooled together local community leaders to try and encourage funding for an area where life was seemingly dripping away.
The cynical take goes something like this: what started as a few community meetings in Bishop Tom’s house, hoping to put a bit of value back into the community — with a library, a doctors, a dentists all part of the plans — soon gave way to something far more exhilarating: a group of councillors meeting in a council building looking to build a Sainsbury’s.
Williams himself doesn’t see it like that. The council were involved from the get-go and Jennifer — which was named after his niece — he says, has improved the area even if the “original dream” hasn’t yet come to pass. There’s new shopping space, a new police station, and a new school. New apartment blocks too. And he’s not wrong, at least Jennifer achieved something, a long trail of ideas before it never even made it to the cement mixer.
But it’s not hard either to understand the frustrations. One of the major ones is that in order to build it all, the actual hub of the community, the Great Homer Street Market — or Greatie — was shrunk in size and hustled out to the fringes of the map, over on Dryden Street, which is the town planning equivalent of sticking your etch-a-sketch pride of place on the mantelpiece and your Picasso in the downstairs loo.
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