Proud of a city that has never stood still (Aug 28 2007 Liverpool Echo)
HAPPY 800th birthday, Liverpool! Which means happy birthday to each and every person who is proud to call themselves a Scouser – or proud to live in or around such a remarkable place.
The greeting is not just to those in our midst on this momentous day, but also for those joining us in their thoughts across oceans and continents in tribute to the most global and well-travelled of British communities: one which needs no passport to gain recognition anywhere on earth.
A lot can happen over eight centuries – and it has. Enough to provide a tale of two cities enjoying and enduring both the best and worst of times.
Between 1807 and 1907 Liverpool – per capita of population – was the most influential business centre in the world: the oft-acknowleged second city of the British Empire (with all its imperialistic excesses).
The port handled more than 50% of UK overseas trade. The procession of merchant princes, tireless entrepreneurs, inventors, adventurers, discoverers and innovators who lived, worked or played here, provided the most impressive list of “firsts” ever conjured in a single location.
When the ECHO presented the Capital of Culture judges with a supplement containing a mere 100 reasons why Liverpool should take the 2008 European title on behalf of the nation, chairman Sir Jeremy Isaacs now famously noted: “And, yes, you are the only place that could instantly produce another hundred.”
The more cause and effect there is to life, the more chaos, then the more energy is produced.
We are the city that has never stood still – even during the darkest days of war, or, even later, when a heady cocktail of changing trade practices and political turmoil conspired, during the three decades from 1960 to 1990, to produce the most meteoric plunge imaginable in economic fortunes.
Not even the heyday of The Beatles could fend off the oncoming cloud of record unemployment and industrial unrest.
It was Harold Wilson, MP for Huyton, who won four general elections as Labour leader during those often chaotic years, who said that the greatest qualification for any prime minister was a sense of history.
So it must be in assessing Liverpool’s roller-coaster ride down the centuries.
And the biggest lesson to be learned – whether fighting off invaders, plague or pestilence, or doing battle with zero-economics, bad housing, high unemployment or unjust criticism – is that Liverpudlians always, always fought back.
More to the point, they fought back and won.
And our greatest asset in all of this? The people.
We are chancers: Witness Meccano inventor Frank Hornby, one-time butcher’s assistant, becoming millionaire inventor and businessman.
We are rebels: Witness Robert Morris, son of a tobacco merchant, born in Dale Street, who financed the American civil war, personally giving George Washington a £10,000 loan.
We are comedians: Not for nothing did Ken Dodd break the world non-stop joke- telling record.
And what, as examples, do those three things together tell the world at large?
That we are no-nonsense go-getters who have got where we are today aided by the humour of survival.
The steady river – the greatest single force in the fortunes and lives of Liverpudlians ever since the days when monks founded ye first ferry across ye Mersey – is a physical and inspirational metaphor for Liverpudlian fortitude.
Its tides have been the pulse of Liverpool life; its waters, first clear, then muddied, and now restored, demonstrate like nothing else the cycle of the city’s transition, and its rightful claim to once more be the trans-Atlantic gateway to Britain.
For more than four centuries – half of the time since the original township charter was granted – Liverpool was the place of departure for those seeking a new life in the New World.
Now it is also a city of arrival, a multicultural place of destination.
If our great architecture, including the world’s finest neo-classical civic hall and largest Anglican cathedral, helps form the stage on which we live our lives, it is Liverpudlians themselves who continue to drive the plot.
That has always been the case, as with the pioneering canal, rail and shipping links which were the catalysts to our internationalism and cultural expansion.
In all this, adversity has often been transformed to advantage. Although the docks of old (the first lock-regulated enclosed sea docks in the world), have long emptied of their fleets of many-masted cargo ships, the present freeport containerisation at the Seaforth terminal actually handles more freight than ever before.
There are other positive trends in light industrial and service industries, and a new celebration of the city’s green assets – its parks and gardens and waterfront facilities.
The population decline has been reversed.
Regeneration has provided a renaissance for once-blighted places.
The future generally looks brighter, but, as ever, life is never going to be easy. It wasn't designed to be that way.
Liverpool, now at the epicentre of the second-biggest economic region of the UK, needs to continue to rekindle all those skills which brought about its original prominence.
There is a need to remember and learn from the mistakes as well as the triumphs of the past.
But our 800th birthday should be enjoyed purely in its own right.
A time of thanks, a time to remember our forebears, and a time to ponder and prepare an enduring legacy for our children.
The ECHO remains proud to be at the heart of Liverpool life.
Which is why we sign off our editorial on this most special of days with heartfelt good wishes to all our readers, their families and friends, wherever they may be.
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