The Wirral has an identity crisis
Scousers are proud people. Why aren’t Woollybacks like me?
By Laurence Thompson
“Wirral is in Cheshire, NOT Merseyside, and PROUD of it!” So exclaimed the title of my best friend’s popular Facebook group circa 2006 — a good 35 years after the Local Government Act deconsecrated the “Paradise Peninsula” and Pritt-Sticked it onto a nebulous “Merseyside.” My slightly-eccentric mate lived in a Caldy palazzo capacious enough to host a Conservative party conference (she was, at the time, a card-carrying Young Tory acolyte) so I’m not suggesting her Scousephobic outrage was representative. (Or sane.) Nevertheless, her attitude divulged a deeper anxiety in the Wirralian soul, one I encountered often and even felt myself growing up there. To wit: just who are we?
Back in the day, this unease bore the bitter tang of classism. Actually, it was more than a tang. We, in the leafy sanctums of West Wirral, were fundamentally unlike the harshly-accented hubcap-thieves from over the water. When my wife’s family moved from Fairfield to Bebington in the 90s, her mother was congratulated by a new neighbour on “getting out”: “You must feel like you won the pools!” Thankfully, this deranged snobbery has somewhat abated over the subsequent decades, but I’d argue no more coherent sense of regional selfhood has resulted in its wake.
Although the issue was settled for many of the place’s petite bourgeois when our postcodes switched from “L” to “CH,” grafting back onto Cheshire was never going to fully resolve this dilemma. Best described as the home county that got lost, Cheshire never had much of an identity to begin with: there’s not even an agreed-upon word to describe someone from there, the equivalent of a Cumbrian, Northumbrian, or Lancastrian.
Speaking of Lancashire, the same 1974 government act that set Wirral adrift lopped Liverpool off its historic county, too. And make no mistake, Liverpool was once Lancastrian through and through: William Gladstone, born on Rodney Street, had a Lancashire accent, and on YouTube, there’s a 1933 clip of Everton’s Dixie Dean and Manchester City’s Sam Cowan toasting to both team’s prospects of bringing the FA Cup home to their then-shared county.
And yet, Liverpool never suffered a comparative identity crisis. By ’74, Scouseness had been well and truly forged: Irish Catholicism, native working-class Orangism, the seldom celebrated Welsh influence, and other attitudes and dialects inevitably blended together at a major seaport. This self-image was only further entrenched by the Thatcher years, inculcating the city’s residents with a siege mentality which led to the contemporary “Scouse, not English” phenomenon.
As well as occasionally envying that powerful amour-propre, I’ve often been fascinated by Liverpudlian attitudes to “Wools” like me — my own wife included. When my son was born earlier this year, she made sure the delivery took place in the Women’s Hospital, so his passport will list “Liverpool” as his birthplace instead of “Birkenhead” like mine. “I’m from Liverpool,” she says. “My mum’s from Liverpool. My family is from Liverpool. My dad’s from Glasgow, but if he was from Clydebank — no offence, but who gives a fuck? That’s like the Wirral. Liverpool and Glasgow are real cities with proper socialist heritage. When [our son] goes abroad, I don’t want him to have to say ‘I’m from near Liverpool’ — he’s from Liverpool. Sad to say, but nobody has heard of the Wirral. I live there, but I’m not from there. That’s my lineage and his lineage too.”
I did ask her whether this quote makes her sound like a knob-head. “I am a knob-head about this,” she says. “But most people from Liverpool would agree.” My other friend Clare certainly does — despite the fact she lived in Moreton for many years, “a Wool” is about the worst thing you could call her. “I’m from County Road, mate,” I’ve heard her say a dozen times with a tone of prideful venom, the Scouse accent creeping in a little stronger.
My wife’s point about nobody having heard of the Wirral does carry a sting. When I still worked in the Bruntwood building on Old Hall Street, with its perfect view of the Mersey and the Wirral beyond, a colleague asked me where I was from. I pointed out the window. “Isn’t that Wales?” he asked, wondering why I didn’t have a different accent. In all fairness, perhaps he was thinking of how Saunders Lewis — poet, critic, Medievalist, and the co-founder of Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru — was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Wallasey. (OK, probably not.)
Has Wirralianism become a kind of antimatter-ID, consisting of what we stand against rather than for — not Welsh, not from Cheshire, and certainly not Scouse? That the latter famously has a Scandinavian etymology, from the lapskaus stew imported by sailors from across the North Sea, reminds me of a study that gave Wirralians the rudiments of an ego in the 2000s. A Y-chromosome analysis revealed that around half our DNA admixture is Norse in origin. So were the place names, such as Greasby (gräf býr, or “fortified grove”), Tranmere (trani melr, or "cranebird sandbank"), and Meols (melr, or “sand dunes). There’s even supposedly a Nordic longboat buried under Meols’s Railway pub — unfortunately, despite a radar survey confirming the existence of a boat-shaped object beneath the Greene King establishment, digging permission has been thus far denied to local archaeologists. But if you’ve ever travelled to Iceland, you may have visited Þingvellir, a field where the Norse parliament once gathered in front of a massive wall of undulating rock that modulated a speaker’s voice with gravitas and authority — that’s also the linguistic origin of Wirral’s Thingwall.
As a 6’3”, blonde-bearded man with a Scots-Norse surname, who once mistook himself for a skaldic poet after an ill-advised hallucinatory DMT trip atop Thor’s Stone, I can understand the temptation to embrace the peninsula’s Scandinavian heritage — but as history, rather than identity. Standing at a safe distance from the recent Viking Festival in my home village of Upton (upp tūn, or “hill farm” in the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons — sworn enemies of the Norse invaders), I was fleetingly grateful that the small children running around Warwick Park in plastic horned helmets would not one day be expected to cross the Mersey in longships and lay siege to River Island.
In what now looks like a last-ditch attempt to divorce itself from Merseyside, Wirral Council made an audacious bid for city status in 2001 (it failed). Certain developments since have been reconciliatory, drawing the peninsula spiritually closer to its Mersey flank: formerly true-blue constituencies becoming gradually and reliably Labour; a Wirral Council campaign to boycott the Sun newspaper out of solidarity with Hillsborough victims; and the creation of the Liverpool City Region. Out of this came the idea of the Wirral as Liverpool’s “Left Bank,” presumably intended to evoke the Rive Gauche associated with that Parisian bohemians, artists, philosophers, and filmmakers of the French New Wave.
To say Wirral has a cultural history to rival Liverpool’s is not some insecure, shoulder-chipped brag. In a recent essay about the decline and potential rise of Mersey culture, I mentioned Wallasey-born Malcolm Lowry, who with Under the Volcano wrote the greatest Modernist novel of any Englishman. Seacombe’s science fiction author Olaf Stapledon, a favourite of Virginia Woolf, is an underpraised literary figure and even scientific influencer — physicist Freeman Dyson, after whom the hypothetical megastructure the Dyson sphere is named, said they should really be called Stapledon spheres after a concept in the latter’s 1937 novel Starmaker. As much as Liverpool’s Terence Davies has gone unheralded, the Wirral’s Alan Clarke is too quickly dismissed as a kitchen-sink social realist by people who haven’t seen the atmospheric and revelatory folk-horror-adjacent Play for Today Penda’s Fen. And with all due respect to The Beatles, I always preferred Half Man Half Biscuit.
In a prelude to this piece from earlier this week, I wrote that despite massive investor firms and the council’s stated aims, when it comes to the development that might foster Left Bank-ism on the “Oblong of Dreams,” reality has often failed to match Stapledonian ambition. And while there’s much to admire about the aforementioned cultural figures, their artistic peculiarities vis à vis their environment remind me of a quote by novelist Steve Aylett about having been “produced” by England: “I really hate that. No, I did it despite everything England chucked at me, and despite the fact that England was a fucking desert.”
I’ve often felt the Wirral, with its mix of dark Satanic mills and green and pleasant land, was a microcosm of the country more generally. Unfortunately, the artists from here have found the Wirral as barren as Aylett finds England. Lowry refused to be “imprisoned in a Liverpool of self” and left the North West soon as he could, never to return; Stapledon lived in West Kirby and Caldy, but you’ll search his novels in vain for much reference to either; Clarke’s most memorable works are set in a generic north or working-class London rather than on Merseyside. From these select few, only Nigel Blackwell’s Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics — which originally took surreal, satirical aim at England’s distressingly banal celebrity culture — have increasingly trained themselves on his stolid, reactionary neighbours.
Can the Wirral ever have more than this oppositional, self-satirising identity? Is a positive rootedness in place even desirable, or does this vagueness permit the possibility of a more cosmopolitan attitude to the wider world? Perhaps, if when we’re asked abroad where we’re from, we can ever bring ourselves to say anything other than “near Liverpool.” Ultimately, all localised self-images are a complex hybrid of tradition, dialect, family ties, community, food, outside influences, architecture, and myth over decades, centuries, and even millennia.
Artistic director and local post-punk legend Jayne Casey says that New Brighton’s regeneration must be driven by its art. Since we apparently can’t rely on developers or politicians to make us a true metropole, Wirralians in general better start making things ourselves. Amateur wonders are as welcome as expert masterpieces: the good encourages the great, and vice versa.
If Blackwell’s collected works constitute our Wirralian Dunciad, Ron Gittins was surely our William Blake. In his youth, Gittins had been a student of Birkenhead’s Laird School of Art – the alma mater, incidentally, of abstract painter Henry Mundy, stained-glass artist Trena Cox, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark alumni Martin Cooper — but by the time of his death in 2019, if Gittins was known at all, it was as a local eccentric living in a rented Oxton flat. It then transpired that he had been spending the 33 years he’d lived there alchemising the rental into a one-man art gallery, adorned with idiosyncratic papier-mâché reimaginings of Egyptian, Classical, and Medieval frescos, sculpture, and relief-work.
After the landlord put the flat up for auction, the campaign to preserve these works — supported by, among others, pop star Jarvis Cocker — touted it as a genuine and rare example of outsider art. If you have the chance to visit, prepare for a dazzling kaleidoscope of personal vision — a six-foot Minotaur bust grimacing from the wall, a lion’s head fireplace painstakingly carved from wet concrete, a corridor partially redolent of the great tomb of Nefertari — flouting both conventional taste and advisable proportion. Whether that’s beautiful to you or not, the fact “Ron’s Place” was saved and granted Grade-II listing is something to celebrate — as are the works of Lowry, Stapledon, Clarke, Blackwell, Casey and others, regardless of how close they felt to the place or the recognition they receive in their own lifetimes.
Wallasey resident Ramsey Campbell recently told me how his novel The Creature of the Pool was an attempt to build an uncanny history of Liverpool, and how he’s yet to write his great Wirral book that will do the same. Wherever they’re from or wherever they live now, the best poets, novelists, painters, filmmakers and musicians instinctively know that art is a kind of real magic, one that can imbue its environment with uncanny meaning, in tandem with the everyday doings of everyday people. Going to work, sharing laughter over a Friday afternoon pint, walking home across the green vistas or bussing past the post-industrial spaces, even drawing your curtains and going to bed minutes before the aurora (as I stupidly did two nights ago) and waking to discover an Instagram collage of shimmering mauves and iridescent greens above the commonplace roof slates of your neighbouring village — these are all the unconscious ways we create our habitat as much as it creates us. The Wirral isn’t Cheshire and it’s not Liverpool, but as much as I love the growing sense of cross-Mersey kinship, I also look forward to seeing how we can make it its own thing entirely.
Another engaging article - thanks again Laurence!
I’m so glad to see that references to the Wirral include the definite article. “In Wirral” makes me flinch!
You often see Sunday supplement type articles about holiday destinations which are “the best kept secret” where “you’ll hardly see another soul” - so go there and ruin the place, along with countless other tourists. It strikes me that the Wirral is a secret best kept, as there are still some wonderful, quiet and beautiful locations (not saying where!!) on the Wirral; although I believe Thurstaston is a lot busier than it was when I was a kid.
I’m proud to have Wirralian heritage. I’m not really bothered about whether our lovely peninsula is included in Cheshire or Merseyside - it’s the Wirral, init??
Excellent article. I really enjoyed that and leaned a lot about my homeland. As a Wallasey (the Isle of the Welsh/slaves) born and bred Wirralian with no identifiable (or at least recent) Scouse heritage, I've always felt 'Wirral first' rather than a 'quasi Liverpudlian'. And as an archaeologist who dug up sites on the Wirral, I've always been interested in and aware of the peninsula's quirky ways, history and prehistory. I live far away from the Oblong of Dreams now in Spain and only have one relative still living on the Wirral but harbour a deep love of the place, that strange liminal almost island. I too am married to a Scouser of L8-DNA but who grew up in Whiston. As proud as I am of being a Wirralian, I can't help that point out that Wallasey is much closer to Pier Head than Prescot is. She doesn't have much truck with that argument, maintaining that I'm still 'a Wool'. And my Scouse/Plazzy hybrid teenage sons, born in Halifax and Hebden Bridge and raised in Catalonia, feel their Liverpool heritage more keenly than anything else. I really need to deepen their Wirral knowledge, connection and appreciation. I'll forward them your article Laurence.