This week we went to Liverpool. Nothing strange in that fact but I left Liverpool in 1976 having been born and raised there. Of course I’ve been back over the years but mostly for work purposes and never for recreation. This time it was different, very, very different. Some aspects of Liverpool will never change, namely diversity. Being the great sea port it used to be I grew up in a mix of cultural, racial, business, artistic, musical and sexual diversity. There is something about the energy of a trading port and the flow of a powerful river that nurtures such diversity. Glasgow is another place very similar in my view.
This was the first time in 35 years that we planned a visit to take in the cultural aspects of the city I grew up in. First stop was the Walker Art Gallery. It always seemed bigger to me as a child and as a callow youth I would often find myself wandering around on damp weekends. Having a resource like that and the Maritime museum on the doorstep was something I took for granted. The attraction on this visit though was Grayson Perry’s ‘Vanity of small differences’ and we were not disappointed. No TV program or book or photograph can convey the richness and detail of such work. I watched the series on TV and my wife had this on her bucket list. Photography was barred in this gallery alone whilst everything else was fair game so no pictures in this blog I’m afraid. The modern art collection was equally stunning.
Moving on from the Walker there was the Tate Liverpool with a Mondrian exhibition that could only take place because the risk of displaying all the works was underwritten by the British Council and HM Government. This exhibition shows a recreation of Mondrian’s Paris studio. He really did live in his art. I can recommend this exhibition to anyone. Pity we were early for the Liverpool Biennial – Press only day when we visited but the other floor was good. First time I have seen a real Pollack – quite something.
An on to the Liverpool Museum, on the Pier Head. How that place has changed. I can remember the days working a night shift and one of us would leave the car to queue up for pies at the Pier Head adjacent to the police station at 0200hrs . Nothing like that now with all the redevelopment done as part of the City of Culture stuff from a few years ago. April Ashley’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was on and was it good. I can remember her story breaking back in 1968 and wondering at the time why it had anything to do with anyone else that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery, and why such torrid headlines and stories were run about her. Given the topical nature of recent court trials involving press intrusion, this was and still is an early example of such an invasion of privacy. Was it the People or The News of the World? I cannot rightly recall. I know it was not in a paper we took at home but a fellow school chum showed it to me on the bus going to school the following morning. The photography was everything in this exhibition and the recreation of the Carousel Club where a short film showing photographs narrated by April Ashley provided the context that is often missing without the knowledge of the stories behind the images. One of the exhibits was her letter to Blair stating that she had held a passport as a woman for over twenty years yet still could not be regarded as such by the Government as a whole. Thankfully this situation has been corrected.
And on to Crosby beach to see Gormley’s ‘Another Place’. How that promenade has changed. I’m sure it used to be a longer car park.
A couple of visits followed to places I used to live and a visit to see the carbuncle of a building that replaced the old man’s office in Moorfields, two Cathedrals, an attempt to photograph the Royal Liverpool teaching hospital as I did in 1972, a surreal visit to Coburg Dock to try and visually reconstruct the place I last worked at in Liverpool before heading South and East, a visit to my old primary school, now a home to someone and I realised that I might have hailed from there but now I live in Ipswich and that is where I call home.
Why have we not been back over all these years? Possibly a 12 hour return journey by car. I have a great deal to thank Liverpool for but it is a very different place to the still bustling port that I left. It seems to be catering for a different demographic these day – a consumerist one at that. It always had the artistic heritage but somehow the heart of the city and the docks has been expunged. Change is inevitable. It was a good break. We might be back.