SUSO

Culturally capable capital?

Liverpool’s Look of the City scheme asks if the city is in danger of losing its identity.

W / Daisy Bell

Liverpool is a controversial Capital of Culture in 2008. To the average southerner, the impression is of scallies, crime and industrial smoke. But there's a TATE now, of course, a brand new shopping centre, and an influx of new clubs and restaurants. So has the UK's cultural capital successfully concealed traditional stereotypes? Or should it seek to conceal them at all?

Edge Lane, one of the main routes into Liverpool, is host to the highest number of boarded up houses in the city. In the council's Look of the City scheme (an attempt to stop tourists being put off by local dereliction), the houses have been revamped in a simple, cheap yet innovative way. The boards covering the windows and doors have been brightly painted with images famously associated with Liverpool. John Lennons, Liver birds and odes to Everton or Liverpool FC have been painted in green, purple, blue and red, turning the city's most poverty stricken streets into the brightest in town. A bad situation has become a celebration of Merseyside pride.

Unfortunately, the Look of the City scheme on Edge Lane is temporary. With a new £350 million budget, the council is going ahead with the Edge Lane Project, an expansion of this three mile route into the city centre. The painted houses, each a witness to Liverpool's recent history, will be bulldozed down. So despite the short term improvement there, the long-term 'solution' is one of modernity, space and, most likely, boredom.

In its efforts to sweep away Liverpool's stereotypical features, is the council inadvertently ridding the city of its heritage, its true culture? Perhaps the principal aim of the Capital of Culture is in fact to create a rigid Sim-like city, but they'll destroy - in part - a heritage which so many great people have contributed to in the past.

So if you haven't already, if you're an outsider, take a drive down Edge Road to get the full Liverpool cultural experience. Savour the congestion and soak up the boarded-up fronts before the city is modernised and its cultural evidence ripped apart. Perhaps Edge Lane can't remain an outdoor art show for years on end, but at least it shows us that a little bit of creative action can change the whole perspective of a space. The Look of the City scheme is not all or nothing. It's a happy medium, an uplifting picture on a declining canvas. But take away the canvas, and the pictures won't look so happy.

Tate Liverpool

Categories Culture Tags Liverpool Architecture

By on 2/12/08