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Transcriber’s note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).
Words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE.
The page numbers in the “List of Illustrations” refer to
the original positions of the plates in the book.
LIVERPOOL
* * * * * *
IN THE SAME SERIES
EACH CONTAINING 24 FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
EACH =6s.= NET
DEVON--NORTH
DEVON--SOUTH
IRELAND
JAMAICA
THE UPPER ENGADINE
NORWEGIAN FJORDS
PARIS
PUBLISHED BY
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
* * * * * *
[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL.]
LIVERPOOL
Painted by
J. HAMILTON HAY
Described by
DIXON SCOTT
With 25 Full Page Illustrations in Colour
[Illustration: Publisher’s monogram, A&CB]
London
Adam and Charles Black
1907
Published August, 1907
TO MY NEPHEW OR NIECE
WRITER’S NOTE
Neither guide-book nor history nor commercial estimate, this Book
merely attempts the much less laborious task of handing on the instant
effect produced by that active, tangible quantity, the Liverpool of the
present day; and its Writer has therefore been forced to rely, almost
as completely as its Illustrator, upon the private reports of his own
senses rather than upon the books and testimonies of other people. None
the less he has managed to incur a little sheaf of debts, and these,
although he is unable to repay, he is anxious at least to acknowledge.
By far the greatest measure of his gratitude is due, not for the first
time, to his friend Mr. John Macleay--lacking whose suggestion the
Book would never have been begun--lacking whose counsel it would,
when finished, have been even less adequate than it now remains; but
he desires as well to offer his especial thanks to Professor Ramsay
Muir, who generously permitted him to read certain chapters of the
recently published “History of Liverpool” in proof; to Dr. E. W.
Hope, Liverpool’s Medical Officer of Health, for courteous responses
to various inquiries; to Mr. G. T. Shaw (of the Liverpool Athenæum),
Mr. A. Chandler (of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board), Mr. H. Lee
Jones, Mr. T. Alwyn Lloyd, and Mr. William Postlethwaite, all of whom
have provisioned him with much more information than he has found it
possible to use. To them, and to all those other creditors whose names
have not been mentioned but who may be equally inclined to deplore the
waste of good material, he would protest that their assistance might
have had a more commensurate practical result if only they could have
persuaded those implacable niggards, space and time, to imitate their
eager liberality.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE RIVER
PAGE
Its dominion over the City--The historical result--Liverpool
and the nineteenth century--Youth and age--Liverpool’s dual
paradox--The River as reconciler--Its physical influence--Its
psychological--As a maker of pageants--The traveller’s report 1
CHAPTER II
THE DOCKS
Liverpool’s distribution--The great fan--Ramparts--The
seven-mile sequence--Unhuman romance--Loot of
cities--Labyrinthine effort--Efficiency--The key to the
labyrinth--A relic--Brown and blue--The new drama--A river
progress--Advents--The Landing-Stage--Arrivals and
departures--The bridges from New York to London 22
CHAPTER III
THE CITY
The problem--A bunch of street portraits--Lord Street, North
John Street, Whitechapel, Stanley Street--Bold Street,
Brunswick Street, Victoria Street--The four vestibules--Lime
Street, Church Street, Tithebarn Street, the River-side
terrace--Episodes and intermediaries--The general
interpretation--The stage manager--Typical
actresses--And actors--The Sunday quietude--Bank holiday
incursions--The City at night 43
CHAPTER IV
THE SUBURBS
Rejuvenation--Car influences--Sociabilities and
processes--Seaforth to Southport--Bootle’s
independence--The universal trend--Damocles and
Litherland--Walton’s tragedy--The Grand
National--Everton--Squeezed Dye-wood--From Anfield to the
South--The two spinsters--Liverpool’s Bloomsbury--The outer
curve--Cabbage Hall to Mossley Hill--Sefton
Park--Garston to the centre--Dingle and melodrama--The
cross-river cubicles--Bidston Hill 93
CHAPTER V
THE SLUMS
The black dream--A fulcrum--The docks and their
levers--The people of the abyss--Dialect, priests and a
postulate--Esther--The suburban attitude--A matter of
technique--Marooned--Ameliorations--The official
tides--Free-lance efforts--The approach of the
change--Portents--The Liverpool of the future 141
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE TOWN HALL _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER 8
THE LANDING-STAGE, SOUTH END 16
THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK 22
DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE ALBERT DOCK 28
CUSTOM HOUSE FROM THE SALTHOUSE DOCK 32
THE “LUCANIA” 40
BOLD STREET 46
LIME STREET STATION 50
LIME STREET WITH WELLINGTON MONUMENT 54
ELECTRIC CAR TERMINUS, PIER-HEAD 56
LITTLE SHOP, MOUNT PLEASANT 60
THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL 62
ST. JOHN’S MARKET 68
ST. NICHOLAS’ CHURCH AND THE LAST OF TOWER BUILDINGS 70
ST. PETER’S CHURCH 76
EVENING AT NEW BRIGHTON 82
THE WALKER ART GALLERY: INTERIOR 86
OVERHEAD RAILWAY FROM JAMES STREET 92
THE HORNBY LIBRARY 96
OLD HAYMARKET 106
CALDERSTONES PARK 128
HERCULANEUM DOCK 136
BIDSTON HILL 138
ALBERT DOCK: TWILIGHT 142
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.
§ 2.
The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s
emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of
supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for
its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as
I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered
together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and
sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a
constantly increasing forcefulness.[1] But it was not until the later
decades of the eighteenth century that the real opportunity arrived.
It was among the alarums and excursions of the amazing period which
then began, among its endless industrial sallies and revolutions, its
fabulous commercial conquests, that the weapon was for the first time
granted the scope it needed to swing with full effect. And therefore it
was within a space of extraordinary brevity--within the leaping years
of a single century, indeed--that the City achieved its greatness, and
assumed the aspect which it wears to-day.
[1] The details of these activities have been set out more perfectly
than ever before, and with a union of concision and lucidity which it
is impossible to praise too highly, in Professor Ramsay Muir’s recent
“History of Liverpool.”
The direct consequences of that are obvious enough. Liverpool becomes,
quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a
place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus.
Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together
from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its
houses are houses, not merely of recent birth, but pioneer houses,
planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed
meadow-land and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in
large measure, a city without ancestors.
That is sufficiently manifest. But what is not so manifest, and
what robs these sept-centenary celebrations, these pageants and
retrospective ardours, of any too great tincture of incongruity, is
the fact that the River which has washed these interior traditions and
memorials away has also restored them in another place and form. It has
established, at the gates of the City, a far more perdurable monument
to antiquity than any that architecture could contrive. For, whilst
they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of
the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of
land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with
one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain
of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours
their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched
its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire
something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful
quantities. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, they inevitably pass
into vital touch with the earlier wielders of the weapon: with the
dim fisher-folk who were its eldest users; with the cluster of serfs
who received their first “charter” of privileges seven hundred years
ago; with the Irish traders of the seventeenth century; with the
slave-traders of the eighteenth; with the merchants who watched the
dawn of the day of the last great onset. The River becomes in this way
a kind of Cathedral, a place heavy with traditions, full of the sense
of old passions.
This is clearly not the sort of influence that one can measure with a
foot-rule or sum up in a syllogism; but in this nuance of endeavour
and in that, in characteristics which it would be impossible briefly
to define, but which may perhaps appear in the pages which follow,
the effect, I feel, is made faintly, delightfully apparent. The sheer
youth of the place has been granted something of the dignity of age.
The audacities and vigours of the century which gave it birth have
been tinged with a certain gravity and largeness. The very force
which has made the place so superbly youthful and athletic, so
finely unhampered by the rags of outworn modes, has also granted it
that intimate sense of history, that heartening and annealing influence
of ancient ardours vitally and romantically recalled, without which a
city, as a nation, is but an army without music and banners.
§ 3.
[Illustration: BIRKENHEAD FROM THE RIVER]
And it is this complete dependence of City upon River, too, which
helps largely to explain what are certainly the two main paradoxes of
her daily life: the fact that she is of all cities at once the most
heterogeneous in composition, and in exposition the most homogeneous;
and the fact, again, that her commercial interests are extravagantly
world-wide, and her civic interests extraordinarily local. They are
characteristics, these two, which never fail to attract the observer
extremely--perhaps, even, extremely to puzzle him. He remarks the
cosmopolitan population, the nomadic life so many of them lead, the
disturbing flux and bustle of the traveller-strewn pavements; and in
face of these things he discovers, to his huge surprise, that the civic
spirit of this variegated and distracted junction is more puissant
and concerted than that of any other city in the kingdom. He knows
that she is, in effect, little more than a great gateway between West
and East; he knows that her merchants are chiefly middlemen, that the
prime function of the place is to fetch and carry, to bring from hither
and forward there; and yet he finds the whole affair looming up into
a stubborn Rodinesque independence, achieving this and that original
thing with an unexpected air of finality, and maintaining always an
aloofness, a clear and unmistakable individuality, that seems utterly
incongruous in the midst of the involved world-movements swaying so
frantically about her.
Of the accuracy of his observation, at all events, there is room for
little question. At every turn of the City’s social and municipal
life those two salient antithetical characteristics are vividly
displayed. Liverpool is boldly different. She possesses, it seems, a
singular faculty for moulding and co-ordinating. The peoples of the
world pour through her streets, but they never interrupt her energetic
introspectiveness. Fragments of this and that exotic race remain; they
settle down, they breed, they pour their alien habits, their alien
modes of thought, speech, religion, into the communal veins; but there
is no perceptible change. The same emphatic lines of activity sweep on;
the same special type is faithfully reproduced.... Liverpool, it seems
to me, is astonishingly self-absorbed. It is her own problems that
chiefly interest her, and she has a habit of solving these problems for
herself on self-invented lines. She has striven to work out--she is, as
we shall see, still intently striving to work out--in ways of her own
devising, the salvation of her proletariate. She has created a society
that is quite untinged by the colours of the county. She has bred her
local school of painters. Her politics are a strange sort of democratic
conservatism. She is more civic than national, and the newspapers of
this most cosmopolitan of English towns tend to reflect the movements
of the City rather than the movements of the nation. And yet, she is
not provincial. Manchester, her nearest neighbour, has her finely
national _Guardian_, and touches the actual life of the metropolis with
a far greater intimacy and frequency; and yet, of the two, Manchester
is clearly the more provincial. For provinciality, after all, is but a
subordination to the metropolis, a reflection, half deliberate, half
unconscious, of the life that goes on spontaneously at the centre.
Well, Liverpool would be spontaneous, too. She will imitate no one,
not even London. She will be her own metropolis. And those who have
marked the clear efficiency of her designs, the unique mingling of
American alertness and Lowland caution which colours the spirit that
lives behind her very positive efforts, will admit that she has come
bewilderingly near success.
§ 4.
Much of this unexpected loyalty to certain salient attributes,
unvarying and individual, is due, no doubt, to the brevity of the
period in which her final growth took place: the pressure and intensity
of the moment begot, of necessity, a kind of concentrated civism. And
much of it, too, is due to a certain physical peculiarity which it
is perhaps worth while remarking. The City and the River, of course,
have now become a roaring avenue between the hemispheres; but none
the less, Liverpool, in a certain narrow, internal sense, cannot be
regarded as other than side-tracked. Unlike Manchester, she lies some
distance away from the great highways that link north with south,
and even to-day the tradition of London’s remoteness still to some
extent adheres. This isolation--an isolation that was felt very keenly
in the early days of her growth--must have helped, in some measure,
to breed that spirit of independence and self-reliance. She had to
fight for herself. Her River made her too strong to be crushed by
the disadvantage, and gave her more than all the power she needed to
transform that initial weakness into a positive stimulus to especially
emphatic effort.
So the River reappears; and I like to think that it is, in the end,
to the influence of that superbly dominating presence, even more than
to the influence of these factors of concentrated growth and isolated
station, that the City’s paradoxically assonant announcements are to
be attributed. It is, as we have seen, the City’s _raison d’être_,
the chief orderer and distributer of her people’s vocations; and in
that way alone it interweaves class with class, provides merchant,
clerk, seaman, and dock-labourer with a common unifying interest.
But with this dictation of tasks, with this provision of a tangible
_leit motiv_ that runs through and conjoins the efforts of several
hundred thousand workers, the co-ordinating influence of the River can
scarcely be believed to end. As a controller of physique, for instance,
slowly reconciling disparities, its effect must be incalculably
potent. It is a reservoir of tonic airs; it renews and revivifies the
common atmosphere; it sets a crisp brine-tang in the heart of every
inhalation. Some kind of mental and physical conformity, not easily
to be defined, but still remarkable, that democratic sting quite
conceivably creates; and some kind of subtle solidarity, too, must
certainly result from the constant, unforgettable presence of a piece
of outer Nature possessing so large a share of unremitting loveliness.
From the fierce beauty of the River, indeed, there is no possibility
of escape: its scale is so vast; it thrusts itself so exultantly upon
one. It is not only the strange powers that belong to moving waters
that it exercises; it trails with it as well, into the very core of the
City, a great attendant sweep of unsullied and inviolable skyscape, and
burns great sunsets, evening after evening, within full gaze of the
town. The imaginative effect of all this insistent pageantry cannot,
indeed, be easily overestimated. And I certainly believe that it is one
of the great forces that weld this diverse city-full into so curious a
unanimity.
§ 5.
[Illustration: THE LANDING STAGE--SOUTH END.]
In view of all this vital domination of the City by its River, there is
something singularly appropriate in the nature of the first impression
created by Liverpool on the traveller who approaches her from the
sea. That first impression is, quite inevitably, an impression of a
great river with a city vaguely and ineffectively attached. He has
left New York, let us say, a week before, and New York remains on his
memory as an intricate, high-piled monument of stone and iron, crowding
upon and overshadowing the waters of the Upper Bay. No such effect
of dominating human interests salutes him as he steams up the river
towards New Brighton from the Bar. The south-swinging curve of the
coast hides the City for a while, and for a while he sees nothing but
a long, low line of bourgeois villas, sitting comfortably among the
sandhills on his left, and the great sky-snipping lattice of the New
Brighton Tower rising, not inelegantly, ahead. The houses on his left
increase; Waterloo and Seaforth shine pleasantly in the sun; and from
the base of the Tower, behind the domed and glittering pier that swims
delicately out into the water from its root, more bourgeois villas
and a great plenitude of white sea-promenades, stretching away up the
coast to Egremont, up, beyond sight, to Seacombe, carry out the note
of mild watering-place delights. It is all very charming, thinks the
visitor, but it doesn’t particularly suggest any furious commercial
maelstrom.... The town swings into foreshortened vision, flat and
docile beyond the racing tide: a mild, smoke-softened, wavering of
roofs, a sporadic spire or so, a dozen and a half of chimney-stalks,
and the dun cloud overhead--the constant cloud that ought certainly
to speak impressively of industry, but that seems, somehow, on the
contrary, to mitigate all the efforts (none of them very energetic)
that the City makes in the direction of mass and lordliness. With the
steep uprising of the Seaforth battery comes the first of the dumb
grey miles of granite that stretch up-river to the Stage. They testify
nothing to man’s sovereignty, these great dock-walls; they seem--if,
indeed, they seem of human origin at all--no more than an enforced
defence-work; and the quiet rigging discernible behind them, and the
funnels of a hidden liner, carry on that idea of the River’s superior
strength--a strength sufficient to pass the grey barriers and create a
second kingdom in the plains beyond. A couple of little towers, perched
on the wall, make pseudo-romantic notes--absent, archaic, meaningless.
A great warehouse, four-square and stolid, with blind eyes, is set
heavily down like a dull box--a box that may be full or empty, but that
is undoubtedly shut and locked, whose key has undoubtedly been mislaid.
More warehouses, all equally immobile, sullenly succeed it; and then
the Landing-stage itself, low and level and a trifle dingy, begins
to run humbly alongside, spirting out at intervals a little squeal
of advertisement-begotten colour. And still there is no resounding
manifestation from the City. The fretted tower of St. Nicholas makes a
neatly punctured patch upon the sky; the Town Hall Dome shows vaguely;
there is an unexplained glitter from the baseless crest of the Royal
Insurance Office. But the solitary building within sight that swerves
up with any unmistakable authority is the building of the Mersey Docks
and Harbour Board.
And beneath, or beside, all this flatness and domesticity, the Mersey
itself reels and swaggers splendidly. It is turgid and tumultuous; its
bustling highways interlace alarmingly; there is a constant shouting
and hooting and dancing of eager craft. Higher up-stream, the vast salt
lake of the Sloyne holds a brace of liners, each, as it would seem,
more massive than the town; and a tall imperturbable frigate sways
graciously out towards the sea, bursting into white sail-bloom as she
goes....
Nor, when he steps ashore, and climbs up Water Street to the City’s
hub, does that effect of the River’s supremacy utterly forsake him.
Salt airs from the sea pursue him; strange tongues salute his ears;
far-brought merchandise is plucked hither and thither about him as he
goes. And even when he passes through the heart of the City and into
the suburbs beyond, and through the belt of these into the open country
that stretches towards the east, the sting of the brine will from time
to time assault him, and he will hear the endless crying of sea-birds,
and he will watch the grey, innumerable gulls as they rise and fall
above the red wake of the plough.