Liverpool Daily Report

Fri. 07-11-2008: Garston
Due to an incident in Garston, some pictures and videos have been removed.

Meet up with Matthew Finnegan
This morning we are supposed to do an interview at 11:00 with Matthew Finnegan, an inspiring contact of David Parrish. We are not sure what business Matthew is into (we only had short contact over the phone), but the first webpage we see when googling his name looks promising. It seems he has one or two things to say about the whole concept of Liverpool being the Capital of Culture.

Unfortunately, Matthew can’t make the appointment due to a full agenda. He proposes to do an interview per email. The ten questions we’ve sent him hopefully triggers him to send us fierce, maybe even controversial answers in return. As soon as we receive his email, we will post it here.

Visiting the Bluecoat, a few Biennial projects in town and the harbour
Because of the cancelled interview, whe had a gap in our schedule to fill. We visited the a small exhibition at the Bluecoat.

And after that, we took a walk to the amazing rotating window, one of Liverpools eye catchers.

For the last 15 minutes of our gap, we get a glance of the Mersey, basis for a lot of things in Liverpool (’pride of the Mersey side’, Mercy Design, etc.).

Meet up with Mike Carney in Garston
A ten minute drive with a taxi takes us to Garston, a village within Liverpool, one of the many. Garston has its own community, its own centre and its own shops. That is one of the reasons, why a lot of people in these areas don’t have much reason to come to the centre of Liverpool very often.
In Garston we meet up with Mike Carney, a designer raised and working for several years in Garston itself.

After visiting his house, drink a cup of tea and trying some tunes on MIke’s DJ gear (besides a graphic designer Mike is also a musician, DJ and what not), we take a walk through the neighborhood.
It’s striking how inviting the community of Garston actually is: Mike knows a lot of people from around - young and old - and everybody is friendly and curious about us. In contradiction to what we expected (severe crime, kids shooting each other, etc) everybody is very open and positive.

As we were walking around, Mike tells us about a Biennial project that has found its way to Garston. It’s called The Garston Embassy. It is here that the public and artists come together and produce products that inspire the neighborhood. We will come back to that later on. As we walked through Garston, we saw these small portraits of local people that were placed there by an Polish artist. You really have to search for them, but after a while you start seeing them everywhere. Mike also showed a couple of neon artworks that are part of the Biennial.

So at first sight we thought that this area is totally forgotten by the Capital of Culture concept, but slowly we are starting to see some nice little jewels emerging. But there are also less pleasant things in Garston. For instance: a lot of the shops are run down and closed. The city council decided to build a new shopping mall nearby, and ever since, the original shopkeepers lost almost all of their customers.

Mike also showed us the separation point in Garston: under the bridge. That’s where the neighborhood gets divided. Here is what he had to say on the subject:

After the bridge the road leads to the old docks. New apartments are being built here as we’re standing there, but only a few yards ahead, on the other side of the road, there will rise a huge recycle platform, which will lead to hundreds ‘lorries’ (trucks with stinking litter) passing by all day every day.

Once, this was a flourishing area of Liverpool back in the days.

The Garston Embassy
The Garston Embassy is an old building in the middle of Garston and headquarters of the creative entrepreneurs of Garston (among them, of course, Mike). The garden around it is one big fantasy work of art, containing a rocket launcher, a labyrinth and moving character dolls of inhabitants of Garston (including the butcher, who we are gonna interview in real life in a while).

Inside there are three floors, some spaces are used for creative workshops. Children’s paintings and a lot of broken down furniture fill up the rooms.

The whole atmosphere is creative, yet deprived at the same time… Mike tells us he and his colleagues need to send in a report to convince the city council of Liverpool the Garston Embassy is useful and important. If the council doesn’t buy it, the Embassy is done for in 2009 and they lose the house.

Talking to the local butcher
We decided we wanted to hear from a local entrepreneur what he has to say on the subject. So Mike arranged an interview for us with the local butcher.

Hanging around in the pub, having an interview with Ian
After the interview we wanted to visit a local pub and find out what the opinion is of the average Joe in Garston. We first sat a while in the pub before we gathered the courage to step up to Ian, a 61 year old retired train driver from Garston. It was good to hear from Ian how his experiences are with the Capital of Culture, because up to this point, we have mostly spoken to the younger audience. This is what Ian had to say:

---

Thoughts on suburbs, pride and identity

Today was the day to hear stories from the Liverpool outskirts, represented in our case by Garston. Garston is a small suburb situated in the southeast of Liverpool (it’s actually near the airport, we passed it on our first day, but couldn’t see any of it because massive billboards were covering it up). This part of Liverpool used to be full of activity as the harbour and docks were situated nearby. Most people here are working class and have or had their business in the (harbour) industries. Since the harbour activity decreased, Garston turned into a deprived area more and more.

In the last few days we have heard several negative stories about how places like Garston are excluded from the Capital of Culture activities. We heard the real action only takes place in the centre of Liverpool, and that it’s ridiculous a new shopping mall is being built while there are still degenerated buildings and unemployment in the outskirts. Surely the people living in these deprived areas would agree with this criticism, or wouldn’t they? (See a real critical movie on it here.)

To be honest we were quite eager to find at least a few negative opinions on the Capital of Culture in Garston. After a score of 10 positive to 1 negative (the green and red ball-poll last Wednesday at Liverpool One), we figured it to be a geographical issue: people in the centre benefiting from all the investments are content, while people outside of the centre are not. But after today, we might conclude the opposite is true: from within Garston we hear outspoken positive voices about the Capital of Culture!

Referring to David Parrish, the responsibility of a Capital of Culture is not to regenerate. It is really sad to see an area, full of deprivation, unemployment and run down buildings. But should one blame the Capital of Culture organization for that? No, that’s another issue.

We think one of the main responsibilities for a Capital of Culture organization, is to involve the complete population of the city. In the past days, we thought the answer to this question, is a geographical one: make sure every area is involved and every area will benefit from the Capital of Culture activities. But maybe the answer is: make sure the programme makes your inhabitants proud of the city, make sure that the people can identify themselves with the programme.

A thing that stood out yesterday was something that has to do with the collective memory of a city. During the workshop with the students, Sam mentioned the gigantic Spider (Liverpool’s great opening act): maybe the kids who saw this spider, will remember it for years and years, maybe even start doubting whether it wasn’t just a shared fantasy… Either way it will be a memory linked to their city.

Referring to Mike’s reaction - Liverpool Gone, the new shopping mall which could be in any city - our advice for now is: invest time, money and effort in projects people can identify themselves with and which are unique projects on which they can say: this was in my city and it could only be there, not in just any city.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under 07/11/08. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.