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Monday 8 September 2008

City revival

Mark Glazebrook on Liverpool, the European City of Culture

The Bluecoat Art Centre, Britain’s oldest, so they say, reopened in March after a major multimillion-pound refit. It is a charming, large, long-popular early-18th-century building in the heart of Liverpool and essential to visit even if Yoko Ono’s current video of a fly tickling a woman’s nipple is not to everyone’s taste. An easy walk from the Bluecoat is FACT, an imaginative modern building which specialises in film and video. I wish such a place existed in London.

Add to the above-mentioned institutions, the international Liverpool Biennial, directed by Lewis Biggs, the John Moores contemporary painting prize and the nearby Lady Lever Art Gallery, for example, and Liverpool swims into focus as England’s Second City of the Visual Arts. Such status is an appropriate successor, perhaps, to Second City of Empire.

There’s no space here to do justice to theatre, literature, public sculpture, conservation, the art of football or the massive building projects in Liverpool — some of them running late. Suffice it to say that the European Capital of Culture programme is mind-bogglingly full of enterprising, carefully conceived events.

It has to be admitted that Liverpool has long scored low in surveys of good local governance. On the other hand, the atmosphere on the street is delightfully stimulating, especially in the area between the Bluecoat and FACT. I’ve learnt that the Liverpudlian accent has been described as a mixture of Welsh, Irish and catarrh — but I definitely detect some Lancashire and Cheshire in there, too. Incidentally, the words ‘Yasser Arafat’ (previously mentioned and no offence meant) are good to practise the Liverpudlian dialect on, especially the catarrh bit. I’ve also learnt that the genteel word for Liverpudlian is Liverpolitan. Not in the Shorter OED, it’s used by Alderman Braddock in the preface to a history of the city. The alderman was married to the pulchritudinally challenged Bessie Braddock MP, who famously accused Winston Churchill of being drunk and got the reply she deserved. Poor Alderman Braddock! When Roger Hilton was behaving wildly and making rather a drunken noise in accepting his John Moores Painting Prize in the Sixties, Braddock keeled over with a stroke or a heart attack — and never recovered. The event sounds symbolic of the possible relationship between the arts and the corporation in those days. If so, things are almost certainly looking up now.

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