After last weekend’s exciting Heritage Open Days, there’s been a bit of a lull in history-related things this week. However, in traditional web log style, here are a couple of links you’ll find interesting:
Capital or Culture: you decide – “A new documentary is being shot in the city – and city creatives are invited to take part. The question: what did the Capital of Culture ever do for you?” (from the wonderful Seven Streets blog);
Liverpool Adverts: a couple of adverts you may or may not have noticed were filmed in Liverpool. My biggest surprise – that class Coca Cola ad was filmed in St. George’s Hall! (also from Severn Streest, with contributions).
Memorial garden marks burial site of Williamson Tunnels creator – a memorial garden for the Mole of Edge Hill has been completed. (From the Liverpool Echo.)
Well, that’s all folks for now. See you next week!
It’s been a little while since I posted. Just because the previous post was the 100th (you have been counting, right?) doesn’t mean I’m quite finished with Liverpool Landscapes. I’m currently drafting the second Liverpool Maps post, and also preparing for a rather important personal event coming in the next few weeks. So I hope to get that post to you very soon, and then there’ll be another short gap before you hear from me again (say, late April).
But before I go, here’s a couple of snippets for you to enjoy.
Capital of Culture a success
Impacts 08, as regular readers will know, is a study being carried out by the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University to study Liverpool in the wake of 2008′s Capital of Culture.
They’ve already published a couple of reports, but the latest one gives details about the overall experience of the CoC title. A few choice stats (taken from the Guardian report):
34% increase in tourists (to 9.7m);
85% of Liverpool residents said it was a better place to live;
97% of visitors said they felt welcome.
This is a positive reaction, as there were many detractors in the years leading up the event. I felt, as the Guardian reports, that there were many who worried what would actually happen. There were forever the cynics who’d already decided we’d cock it up.
I remember one Pythonesque encounter on Radio Merseyside:
“One revolutionary pop band does not make a Capital of Culture.”
“What about the football teams?”
“Well, yeah, but two world class football teams and one revolutionary pop band do not make a capital of culture.”
“And the architecture?”
“OK. 2,500 listed buildings, two world class football teams, one revolutionary pop band…”
“And two of the greatest cathedrals-”
“…and two of the greatest cathedrals in the world do not make…”
And so it went on. I paraphrase, of course, but that was the gist of the thing.
I’ve pointed out Pete Carr’s photography before, but that’s no reason not to mention another. Here’s a great one of the town hall. Pete admits it’s hard to get a shot of the hall without Martin’s Bank in the background, but the bank’s such a great building that it serves as a classy backdrop to this tight shot.
Claire McColgan, Liverpool Council’s culture director, has spoken to the Echo about her hopes for 2010, and how Liverpool should build on the successes of ’08. She mentions the new Central Library, which should open in the next year or so, and the forthcoming Museum of Liverpool, which is very close to completion. It’s great that so many things came out of ’08 (as McColgan points out) but let’s hope Liverpool can see beyond its recent successes and truly stand on its own merits, of which there are plenty.
Frenson’s Buildings at Risk
The Whitehouse Pub, complete with Banksy artwork, by Vinnn via Flickr
Frenson Ltd, developers, may soon be served with a repairs order for two historic buildings they own in Liverpool, as the Echo reports. Both the Watchmaker’s building, in Seel Street, and the legendary Whitehouse pub, in Berry Street are gradually falling apart, and the city council have promised to compulsorily purchase the buildings, or force the owners to repair them, unless action is taken soon.
Finally, as the snow closes in on Merseyside, don’t let your appetite for museum stuff fade! On the National Museums Liverpool website you can now explore their Winter Online Exhibition, with bits and bobs from all corners of the museum group on view. There are stuffed animals, painted snow scenes and Inuit cultural objects to look through, each with its own description.
The University of Liverpool and John Moores University are assessing the impact of the 2008 Capital of Culture year in a project called Impacts 08. Research has gone on since 2005, and is now at the stage of judging the effects the year had on the city of Liverpool.
Already a whole load of reports are available divided into themes of economics, taking part, culture and the arts, as well as others. My eye was naturally drawn to Liverpool 08 – Centre of the Online Universe, which covers the web and social media (unfortunately my own sites don’t get a mention ).
I was going to pick and choose a couple of read, but to be honest, these all look like interesting stuff! Let me know what you think of these in the comments section below. Do they reflect your experience? Did they miss anything out?
Trading Places: A History of Liverpool Docks
Trading Places: A history of Liverpool docks
This looks like a fairly old corner of the Liverpool Museums site, but Trading Places is a simple and informative interactive map of Liverpool’s dock system and its history. The left-hand menu highlights the docks involved in trade with different parts of the world, as well as the docks’ names and the very reason for the dock systems construction. There’s also a timeline of significant dates along the bottom.
This is a great little tool, and its slightly old-fashioned look and pop-up windows just reflects the simplicity of getting the information across. I’ve been playing around with interactive web maps for a good few years now, so it’s great to see what can be achieved very simply. There’s even an accessible version (click on “begin the voyage”)!
Kudos to Laura Davis’ blog on the Daily Post website, whose advent calendar pointed me to this site, and which has been an lovely little source of historic websites over the last week! Trading Places is the destination behind door 11.
As you might gather, it’s all about the awards this week – bidding and winning.
First up, it’s the brilliant International Slavery Museum, which gained an honourable mention at the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence, awarded every two years. The museum achieved this through its ongoing work to commemorate the lives and deaths of millions of enslaved Africans, and also the legacies of slavery (racism, injustice, exploitation). François Houtart (Belgium) and Abdul Sattar Edhi (Pakistan), from Belgium and Pakistan respectively, shared the $100,000 prize itself this time.
The Black-E (formerly the Blackie) arts centre in the Great George Street Congregational Church has been awarded £50,000 of Heritage Lottery Funding to preserve its archive. The archive consists of 57,000 photos and slides and 22 filing cabinets of documents, and the project will take three years to complete. Of most interest to me, and I should think to you, is that at least some of these images and documents will end up online. As Wendy Harpe, a founding member of the team, puts it: “we’re not preserving this stuff just for the sake of it”. In addition, parts of it will be put on CD or DVD, although the article doesn’t say whether these will be available outside the Black-E itself. The physical archive will remain at the Black-E or somewhere else in the city. What’s notable is that the current Black-E website has a holding page for a ‘Museum’ section, which would be the natural place for the archive. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this!
The final award goes to the PR campaign which kept the phrase ‘Capital of Culture‘ ringing in your ears all last year. The campaign, a co-operation between Liverpool City Council and the Liverpool Culture Company, was awarded the Best Public Sector Communications Campaign at the How Do awards this week. I think it’s clear to everybody just how much coverage the event got, locally and nationally, and it’s even been hailed the most successful Capital of Culture programme ever by the European Commission! More facts and figures about how great it was on the ArtInLiverpool blog linked to above.
Liverpool is now bidding to become the first English UNESCO City of Music. Only four other cities can lay claim to the title, including Glasgow, Bologna and Seville. Councillor Warren Bradley pinned down the importance of music to Liverpool: “Music is in Liverpool’s blood… from the days of sea shanties and Merseybeat to classical and dance.” Not sure when the ‘days of sea shanties and Merseybeat’ were, but you get his point. The most exciting thing for me is that a four month long mapping exercise will show where music is being made and played, and submitted in support of the bid. To be honest, they could do worse than to have a look at the Popular Musicscapes project funded by the AHRC and mentioned in one of my own posts a couple of years ago. Hopefully they visited the excellent Beat Goes On exhibition at World Museum Liverpool.
Well, that’s quite a long post! Any other awards we should go for?
This site, the sister site to Historic Liverpool, covers the continuing history of Liverpool, including building developments, museum events, old maps and other historic websites.
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