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Dixon Scott

LIVERPOOL
CHAPTER I
THE RIVER

§ 1.

That fine fellow (a Scotchman, I understand) who so handsomely acknowledged the thoughtfulness displayed by Providence in “constraining the great rivers of England to run in such convenient proximity to the great towns” would have found in Liverpool-on-the-Mersey an altogether exceptional opportunity for thanksgiving. For it is upon her River, with a very singular completeness, that the existence of this great, complex, modern organism unanimously depends. Rob her of her duties as port and harbour, and she becomes impossible. Other duties, of course, she has: among the labyrinths of effort which her million people have created all about them, you will find tobacco-factories, corn-mills, soap-works, breweries, sugar-refineries, and a dozen other quite flourishing industrial exploits; but these, even if they were not in large measure directly derived from the River itself—the voice of the River, so to say, announcing itself in other dialects—are never really fundamental. They could be plucked away, as her famous Potteries were plucked away at the opening of the nineteenth century, as her Chemical Works were plucked away some decades later, without producing anything but the mildest and most parochial of disturbances. Certainly, there would be no crisis: the great machine would still throb equably, the procession of her continually advancing life would still move magnificently on. But if you rob her of her river-born attributes, you leave her utterly dismantled. Let the river-estuary silt up, as river-estuaries have been known to do, as this one is constantly endeavouring to do, and the whole elaborate structure instantly crumbles and subsides. In London there are a score of Londons, in Glasgow a dozen Glasgows; but here there is only one Liverpool—Liverpool-on-the-Mersey.

That is the great fact of her life. And its significance is chief, not merely because Liverpool owes her actual existence to the River, but also because the whole quality, the “virtue,” of that existence has been determined by the completeness of the dependency. It is not simply that it is upon this broadly curving estuary, as upon some broadly curving scimitar, that Liverpool has had wholly to rely in slashing her way to the position she now maintains; it is also (and, from our present point of view, chiefly) that her fidelity to that weapon has induced certain habits of poise, of outlook, of ideal, which are now her most essential characteristics. The influence is disclosed, as we shall see, in all manner of ways. It drenches the local atmospheres, private, social, civic, with a distinctive colour. It is revealed in the nature of the men in her streets, and in the nature of the streets about the men. It is the deciding element in that inherent spirit of the place which those men and those streets at once prefigure and evoke, and which it is the main purpose of this book, with the aid of those men and streets, to attempt in some measure to enclose. Some of the channels of the influence are direct and obvious enough, others are indirect and secret; and one of the more obvious and one of the most secret are connected with the fashion in which that dependence has affected her history in the past.

CHAPTER II
THE DOCKS

§ 1.

THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK.

As Liverpool lies deployed upon the South Lancashire landscape, she falls into the shape of an all but fully unfurled fan. The root bone-work of that fan, its unwebbed handle-part, is formed by the commercial apparatus of the place, the municipal apparatus, and—pleasantly conjoined to these hard masculine concerns—the more feminine region of the great shops, the flowers, the carriages, the shopping women. All this has been compactly tugged down towards its central wharves by that inevitable arbiter the River; it forms the area, busy but uninhabited, which the traveller enters the moment he steps ashore. In it are the streets of offices, the banks, the various Exchanges—Cotton, Corn, Produce, Stock—and occasional dense masses of warehouses; all about these—a pattern of dull jewels, say, on the grey essential framework—there lie the great official buildings—the Town Hall, the Municipal Offices, St. George’s Hall, the Art Gallery, and so forth—with here and there, more vigorously flashing, the glassy bulbs that tip the railways; and there, finally—a series of decorative flourishes—curve the bright ways of the emporia. Next, to right and left of this clean-picked fabric, appear, like two swart brush-strokes, the twin quags of the slums—their position, too, explicitly defined by the River; and beyond these, again, drooping down V-wise towards the handle in the centre, but for the rest holding consistently aloof, spread the vast, indeterminate plumes of the suburbs, curving round from the river-side at Seaforth, away through the open country, and so back to the river-side at Garston.

Thus, the whole congeries splits up, it will be seen, rather more automatically than is usual, into just those four great divisions which every modern city is theoretically supposed to display. Here and there, of course, a divergency appears: over at Linacre, for instance, a group of industrial exploits—match-works, dye-works, a tannery—have lunged out towards the open, have tended to create out there their own special circle of suburb, their own little patch of slum. Over at Garston, again, there is a somewhat similar happening; and across the River, on the shores of the Wirral Peninsula, Birkenhead, with its Town Hall and its Docks, makes an attempt to complete that tangential impulse which the River has interrupted. But, for the most part, the two main facts in Liverpool’s career—the precipitancy of her uprising and the singleness of her purpose—have served to make her adherence to that basic plan a singularly faithful one;[2] and I propose, therefore, to take advantage of it in this book, dealing in the third chapter with that central region of shops and offices and civic architecture, the formal van of the army; in the fourth chapter with the plumes of the fan, the skirmishing sweep of the suburbs; and in the fifth with those dusky smears of the underworld.

[2]

It is interesting to observe that in this, as in so many other matters (the strength of her civic spirit, for instance; the nature of her municipal exploits; the conspicuous attention she is giving to the specifically urban problem of the Housing of the Poor; her constant devotion to the specifically urban business of locomotion), the abnormal circumstances of Liverpool’s growth have made her an unusually faithful embodiment of certain of the most essential of modern urban impulses. She is, as I have said, boldly different; and it is of the body of that difference that she should be thus clearly representative: there being nothing, in actuality, quite so exceptional as the typical. On the one hand, that is to say, she is exceptional because she is typical; on the other, she is typical because she is exceptional.

But before I approach even the first of these, there remains yet another region, perhaps more memorable, certainly more remarkable, than them all: that queer specialized region of the Docks, the most extensive thing of its kind in the world, which runs all along the littoral, from Dingle in the south to Seaforth in the north, sustaining, both pictorially and essentially, practically the whole of that great fan of masonry, making a kind of long entrenchment, behind which the army of the City is drawn up: the elaborately forged handle, really, which Liverpool has constructed in order that she may grip her weapon more effectively.

CHAPTER III
THE CITY

§ 1.

How to set about conveying the sense of this great mass of minutely reticulated architecture without instantly growing too pedantic on the one hand or too vaguely general on the other—that is the problem—always, in this business of civic portraiture, a very present one—that now begins to grow especially insistent. For the Docks, after all, in spite of their unhuman magnitude, do resolve themselves, as we have seen, into a fairly compact cycle of recurrences; and the Suburbs, again, unfolding themselves in their order, do provide a clear and vital method of attack; and the Slums, unhappily, cling loyally throughout to one dolorous code. But here, in this imposing van of the civic army, there is neither loyalty to sole effect nor specific rotation of several effects. Each building is more or less deeply individualized; every street has its especial quality; and about the bases of all these fretted cliffs, down all these changeful ravines, the mutable tides of the traffic charge and ebb unceasingly.... How is the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a pitiful couple of thousand words?...

One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. One would like to contrast it with one of the ways that branch out from it—with North John Street, for instance, bleak-faced and sombre, constantly resonant with heavy traffic from the Docks, but made suddenly magnificent by the rocketting cream and gold of the foreshortened Royal Insurance building at its head; or with Whitechapel, again—a street, for all its proximity, of so profoundly different a quality: a street that seems always to be attempting to override, by dint of cheap cafés, clothiers, boot-shops, and the like, the coarse utilitarian note that insists on lumbrously emerging from Crosshall Street, from Stanley Street, from the neighbouring clangorous Goods depots: a country tripper of a street, shamefacedly endeavouring to conceal the presence of its obviously autochthonous companions.

And one would like, again, to speak of Stanley Street itself, chief of those autochthonous companions, a narrow and difficult ravine, mostly sunless, always noisy, whose bed is encumbered from end to end with floats and lorries and waiting carters, and whose walls are provision offices, provision warehouses, and the sheer grey flanks of the G.P.O. From a gash in those grey flanks a blood-red stream of post-office vans and motors is jerked out intermittently. The air is thick with swinging boxes and heavy or keen with the most astounding range of odours: with slab cheesy odours and searching fruity ones; with exotic odours that one sniffs uncertainly, for which one can find no closer definition than nice or nasty; and, supereminently, running through them all, the wild decivilizing smell of wet deal cases—a smell that always arouses a certain unemotional cotton-broker of one’s acquaintance to an inconvenient but rather touching hunger for some particular place of dim forest silences.

BOLD STREET.

And then one would like to appraise the elusive atmosphere of Bold Street—that intimate, elegant avenue of rare fabrics and shopping women and the ripe, drumming ripple of automobiles—the Bond Street of Liverpool, whose wood pavements make a sudden chosen silence in the midst of the clatter, which is held beautifully inviolate from electric cars and sandwichmen, and at the head of whose discreet vista the tower of St. Luke’s rises gravely up, faintly remindful of the manner in which the towers of Sainte Gudule survey that other road of women and priceless elegancies in Brussels. And with this so purely feminine apartment one would proceed to contrast, properly enough, some such exclusively male possession as Brunswick Street. It, too, is highly chosen and conserved, and the sober, archaic front of the old Heywood’s Bank at the upper end of it prepares one at the outset for exactly the unostentatious sobriety of the lower, where it passes under the influence of the Corn Exchange. It seems to reflect, and the brokers one meets there seem exceptionally to reflect as well, something of the spirit of that fine race of merchants who wore leathern watchguards but stocked a most excellent port, whose word was good for thousands and who lunched at the little tavern which still stands there, like an old-fashioned waiter, with so engaging an air of homely dignity.

And it would be impossible, of course, to avoid comparing Brunswick Street with that other exclusively masculine quarter, Victoria Street, which passes, in spite of its consistent virility, through three successive phases. In the first, where it lies between North John Street and the Post Office, it has an almost Stanley Street-like aspect—a wider and less viscid Stanley Street, with the red stream of mail-vans exchanged for a black swarm of clerks and merchants, hiving about the Produce Exchange. In the second it grows aridly official, the fidgety pomp of the Post Office towering away on the right, the Revenue Offices marching with much cold grey dignity on the left. And, finally, in its third phase, it grows positively dramatic and unintentionally spectacular: the offices of the town’s protagonistic newspapers, the Post and the Courier, confront one another threatfully—silent at sunset, but romantically vociferous towards dawn, and, from close beside them, one gets (especially on a morning of sunshine) the most delightful glimpse of the entirely noble sweep of architecture that rises up—dreaming, reduced, subtile—beyond the quick, green flash that sings out from among the statuary of St. John’s Gardens.

And so one could go on, disengaging the essential spirit of street after street, hoping that all the readings, taken together, would build up into the gross effect of the whole thing, would cleanly spell out the essential spirit of the City. As, indeed, they no doubt would. But in the way of the adoption of that course there lies one rather serious objection. To make its final result veracious, it would have to be followed with uncompromising thoroughness; and if it were followed with uncompromising thoroughness this chapter would never end.

CHAPTER IV
THE SUBURBS

§ 1.

If one wanted very badly to indulge a passion for historical retrospect, this chapter, of course, would provide the great opportunity. For although it is customary to regard them as mere upstarts, the Suburbs of Liverpool, like the suburbs of so many great towns, are really much more venerable than the City itself. West Derby, for instance, was a place of power and dignity when Liverpool was a mere huddle of patched cabins on the marshes away below; and Bootle, Litherland, Crosby, Walton, Kirkdale, Smithdown, Wavertree, and Toxteth, unlike the place that now looks down upon them patronizingly, are all distinguished by references in Doomsday Book. But in spite of this, and although, as we shall see, some faint odour of antiquity still here and there survives, yet to make anything more than the barest mention of their fine old memories and traditions would be to create a very false impression of the aspect they present to-day. It would be quite possible, I imagine, to wander through Kirkdale for a lifetime (an inspiring pilgrimage) without once suspecting that it owed anything to any other era than excessively mid-Victorian; and to tell over the far-off things that made Smithdown and Toxteth names of terror or magnificence in old days would be to give about as fair an idea of the expression now worn by those sober neighbourhoods as a description of the old tithe-barn that once stood there would give of that cautious ante-room in Tithebarn Street. The Suburbs are certainly older than the City, but the City has infected them with her youthfulness. They do, in cold fact, grow younger every day.

THE HORNBY LIBRARY.

This double process of suburb-subordination and suburb-rejuvenescence has always, of course, been dependent upon the progress of the arts of locomotion; and its latest and swiftest phase was undoubtedly heralded by the clangour of the gong on the first electric car. It is her cars, as we have seen, that perfect Liverpool’s most characteristic beauty. It is her cars, again, that have helped to perfect her characteristic homogeneity and compactness, that have helped to bind the whole sprawling mass, City and Suburb and all, more and more tightly together, both physically and sentimentally, into one unigenous organism. The London suburb, save in such districts as are tapped by the Tube and its companions, is a fairly self-contained community; it has its own shops, interests, concerts, society; and even in many of our smaller towns and cities the general effect is that of a number of self-interested colonies pouncing upon the central spaces for the mere means of life, and then returning to their own private recesses to dispose of them. But in Liverpool the Suburbs tend more and more to part with their independence, to “pool” their interests and enjoyments, to form themselves into a kind of family party ranged round the brightly burning grate of the City. And they grow more like a family party, not only because of this absorption in a common atmosphere, but also because of the increasing freedom which marks their intercourse one with another. That division of the residential semicircle into specific social faubourgs—Scotch engineers in Bootle, for instance, Welsh builders in Everton, merchants in Sefton Park—which subsisted very definitely until quite recently, is now in large measure being broken down. Interfusion of social states goes on with constantly increasing rapidity. Families who now migrate with the utmost nonchalance from, say, Kirkdale to Aigburth, confident of finding somewhere there precisely the strata to which they have been accustomed, would have looked on such a flight only last generation as being almost as impossible, almost as profoundly charged with social significations, as a transfer from Poplar to Park Lane; and were content, as I well know, to live and die and inherit without stirring, without dreaming of forsaking an equally static coterie of friends. Well, the chief agent in breaking down these social divisions was also that art of locomotion to the encouragement of which Liverpool, as I have said, has so peculiarly devoted herself, and the latest, the most democratic, and the most mobile of the creations of that art, the electric car, has inevitably increased that fluidity in a very remarkable degree.[4] The overhead wires that bring every suburb into vital connexion with the centre are like the radiating nerves of the organism, flushing all the extremities with one sympathetic life.

[4]

It is impossible to doubt that Liverpool’s conspicuous devotion to the business of locomotion—a devotion that is briefly evidenced by the significant association of her name with the first railway, the first canal, one of the first sub-river underground railways, the first electric overhead railway, the first sustained application of electricity to long-distance railway traction, and now with these electric road cars—owed its first impulse to that comparative isolation of her early situation to which I referred in the first Chapter, and that the eager continuance of that devotion was largely due to the function of universal carrier which was afterwards imposed upon her. It is equally impossible to doubt that it was that early isolation which helped, at the outset, to foster her spirit of independent and concerted effort. And it is, therefore (to me, at any rate), rather a pleasant reflection, and not perhaps a wholly useless one, that the circumstance which primarily and directly induced that essential solidarity was also the circumstance which created the tools for riveting it; and that the creation of those tools was considerably aided by the apparition of precisely those forces which seemed to threaten her with a disrupting cosmopolitanism.

CHAPTER V
THE SLUMS

§ 1.

She couches there like a vast Presence, seaward-facing but inly brooding, and, indeed, it is profoundly true that the remote adventures she surveys draw much of their range and splendour from the darkness of her private dreams. For in a manner much more direct and unescapable than those dumb grey regions in the east, these black abysses of her underworld are intimately bound up with the chief sources of her efficiency and power. It is their main purpose to provide the human fulcrum demanded by those monstrous levers at the Docks, and the strange motions of those engines are of a nature that inevitably leave the flesh hideously excoriated and crushed. The bedraggled humans whom we saw running hither and thither among the unhuman silences and uproars are drawn almost wholly from the Slums, and it is, quite undisguisedly, the incalculable necessities of those silences and uproars that have condemned them to the slums and kept them prisoned there.

THE ALBERT DOCK.

For it is not that the wage of a dock-labourer is insufficient to grant life its decencies. It would, on the contrary, be quite possible for a dock-labourer, constantly employed, to live in one of the suburbs—out, say, at Seaforth—and come to the wharves each day by electric car. But the majority of these men are not constantly employed, and much of that inconstancy would seem to be inevitable. Ships come, ships go, and the tide of labour waxes and wanes as ceaselessly as the tides about it, and vastly more capriciously. And thus not more than twenty-five per cent. of these workers receive a full and constant wage; quite fifty per cent. average less than one-half; and fully a quarter are fortunate if they are permitted to work a couple of days a week. For the greater number of these ministers to Liverpool’s efficiency, then, the Slums, obviously, are inevitable. Equally inevitably, the Slums form a topographical annexe to the Docks, a hinterland behind its gates. Out of the bodies of the battered and congested people who crowd there Liverpool contrives a suave unguent, more dreadful than adipocere, which enables the great ships to slide so smoothly to their berths.