Liverpool: From Gateway to Empire to European Renaissance City? - Richard Meegan European Institute for Urban Affairs Liverpool John Moores University
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Liverpool: From Gateway to
Empire to European
Renaissance City?
Richard Meegan
European Institute for Urban
Affairs
Liverpool John Moores University
Population growth and decline
Understanding Liverpool’s
changing economic fortunes
• spatial divisions of labour
• layering of rounds of investment over
time
• evolutionary approach
• ‘path dependency’
• not just structure also agency – from
‘government’ to ‘governance’ &
institutional searching
From St George’s Hall to the
Liverpool Echo Arena
St. George’s Hall, 1854
“…this magnificent edifice will be a perennial
monument of the energy and public spirit…of the
people of Liverpool; a place which, of all the cities
and towns in the British Empire is surpassed only by
the metropolis in magnititude, wealth and
importance; and in which, in the quick yet solid
growth of its commercial greatness, surpasses even
the metropolis itself”.
Illustrated London News Vol. XXV No. 703, 23 September, 1854. Cited in
Knowles (1988)
Liverpool Echo Arena (Source: Liverpool Vision)
Kings Waterfront
“Kings Waterfront is the single largest development site
in Liverpool City Centre. A partnership of Liverpool
Vision, English Partnerships, Northwest Regional
Development Agency and Liverpool City Council is
jointly promoting its development.
“The development of the Arena & Convention Centre is a
decisive step in transforming Liverpool's national
and international status"
Sir Joe Dwyer
Chair Liverpool Vision
Liverpool’s current political
vision and aspiration to:
“… create an inclusive European Renaissance
City by 2010”
Liverpool First. Prospectus of Liverpool Partnership Group, 2002
“…be a premier European City by developing a
more competitive economy, building healthier,
safer and more inclusive communities and
enhancing life chances.”
Cllr Warren Bradley
Liverpool Local Area Agreement "Foreword: Liverpool First and Foremost"
p. 2 (2006)
Three Graces (Source: Liverpool Vision)
Liverpool waterfront in 1907 (Courtesy of Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo)
Liverpool in the ‘old international
division of labour’
• key role in the ‘Atlantic’ economy
• hub linking English industrial regions to
international economy
• gateway port
• port-related industries & services
• distinct occupational structure
• social-spatial differencesTurning point – inter-war period
• shut-down and reorientation of world
economy
• changing national spatial division of labour
– new waves of investment in new
industries in Midlands and South East
• ‘North-South’ divide (re-)emergingA false ‘renaissance’ – the ‘Golden
Age’ of the 1950s and 1960s
• new rounds of investment in
manufacturing
• foothold in emerging new international
division of labour
• population dispersal
• ‘city turned inside out’Recession and conflict – 1970s and
1980s
• late 1970s recession – ‘deindustrialisation’
• global restructuring – city on the receiving
end
• massive job loss, ‘jobless growth’ & ‘jobs
gap’ widening
• population collapse
• out-migration and ‘middle class flight’
• no longer a magnet for economic
migration40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
GB
1973
1974
Liverpool
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
SIC Changes
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1960s
1989
1990 Change to AES & SIC changes
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997 Change to ABI & TTWA
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002 SIC Changes
2003
2004
2005
Employment change from the mid-Liverpool - some social and economic distinctions, 1991
[Source: Gordon and Forrest, 1995]
Measure Rank %
Men ‘on the scrap heap’ 4 28.5
Young unemployed 8 67.5
Young people on government schemes 7 87.2
Multiple earner households 354 39.4
Working parents with dependent children 319 16.8
Non-manual 315 0.7
Informational 258 41.1
‘Highly educated’ 274 4.6
Working Class 41 73.0
Middle Class 327 26.0
‘The poor’ 7 31.8
‘Poor children’ 7 37.1
‘The wealthy’ 358 (Index) -6.1Social and political responses: from
conflict to ‘partnership’ - 1
• trades unions fighting redundancy
and factory closures –
demonstrations, sit-ins
• trades union unemployment centres
• 1981 riots
• ‘Militant’ and political confrontation
with central governmentSocial and political responses: from
conflict to ‘partnership’ - 2
State intervention:
• National: Merseyside Development
Corporation, City Challenge, Single
Regeneration Budget
• European: EU Structural Funds –
MIDO (1989-1993) & Objective 1
(1994-2007)Social and political responses: from
conflict to ‘partnership’ - 3
Local ‘institutional searching’:
• Liverpool Partnership Group/ Liverpool
First
• Mersey Partnership
• Speke Garston & Liverpool Land
Development Companies; Liverpool Vision
• Liverpool Capital of Culture CompanyAnother turning point? A ‘European
renaissance city’? Mid1990s on:
• significant new layers of investment
• dramatic remaking of economic landscape
- ‘Strategic Investment Areas’
• job growth
• population decline slowed
• cultural resurgence
• new global ‘connectivity’ – ‘JLA’
• Liverpool a European ‘transformation
pole’?Renaissance but: • hard to shake off legacy of old economic structure - low skills & qualifications • some of new waves of investment in ‘low productivity’ sectors • other European cities also being ‘transformed’ – ‘closing gap’ difficult • some citizens remain excluded from growth – ‘employment paradox’ • deep-rooted geography of exclusion
Employment by SOC categories (%), Liverpool LAD and UK, April 2004-
March 2005 [Source: IPPR (2006) The Sand Timer: Skills and employment in the North Wes]
Occupational categories Liverpool UK %age
point
diff’ce
1.Managers & senior officials 10.7 14.8 -4.1
2.Professional 9.9 12.6 -2.7
3.Associate prof’l and technical 12.7 13.9 -1.2
4. Admin & secretarial 15.7 12.6 +3.1
5. Skilled trades 9.0 11.3 -2.3
6. Personal service 8.4 7.7 +0.7
7. Sales & customer service 10.6 7.8 +2.8
8. Process, plant & machine 9.2 7.5 +1.7
operatives
9. Elementary 13.9 11.5 +2.4
Higher (1-3) 33.3 41.3 -8.0
Middle (4-5) 24.7 23.9 +0.8
Lower (6-9) 42.1 34.5 +7.6Working age employment rates by qualification, 2005 [Source: IPPR (2006) The Sand Timer: Skills and employment in the North West] Qualificat- Liverpool England %age points ions difference Overall 61.9 74.8 -12.9 levels Level 4 79.6 86.9 -7.3 Level 3 73.4 78.3 -4.9 Level 2 67.8 75.7 -7.9 Below 64.0 73.1 -9.1 Level 2 No quals 37.2 50.1 -12.9
Qualified to degree level, 2005
GDP per Capita, 2004
Liverpool from Gateway to Empire to European
Renaissance City?
Richard Meegan
Presentation to “Liverpool - A Sense of Time and Place” Conference
organised by the University of Liverpool in association with Liverpool John
Moores University, Liverpool Hope University, National Museums Liverpool
and the Culture Company, Liverpool as part of the ‘Big History Show’
celebrating Liverpool's 800th birthday. St. George’s Hall, Liverpool 14
September 2007.
SLIDE 1 – THE TITLE
1. Why the title?
It’s trying to capture the last 150 years of the city’s history and its changing
economic role and fortunes: from a crucial cog in a global – Atlantic based –
economy in which England/ Great Britain was very powerful to the city’s
current efforts to redefine itself as a European city in a very different
globalised economy in which Britain’s role is much less prominent and clearly
defined. Hopefully all in 30 minutes!
SLIDE 2 – POPULATION GRAPH
The Figure traces the historical trajectory of the city’s population. It's a real
"big dipper" of a figure. Population peaked at around 870,000 just before the
start of the Second World War. The decline thereafter has been relentless,
only slowing down in the last five years.
The 2001 Census shows that there were some 440,000 people living in the
city, very nearly half of the peak in the late 1930s. A couple of weeks ago I
thought I could report that, according to the Mid Year Population estimates,
population in the city has increased (by about 4,000 people) since then.
Unfortunately the Estimates have just been recalculated and they now show a
continuing, albeit much slower decline of 1% (or some 4,000 people) between
2002 and 2006.
And, unfortunately for Liverpool, the new methodology does not appear to
have affected other English ‘core cities’ in the same way. 1 Population has
1
Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Bristol. Leeds, Newcastle,
Liverpool
1increased in the four year period in all of them, albeit at different rates. So
Liverpool once again appears to be out on limb.
SLIDE 3 - THE APPROACH
2. Approach
I find it helpful to understand the changes in the city's economic fortunes using
the historical-geographical notion of spatial divisions of labour; the idea that
places are constructed through successive waves or rounds of investment
that replace and are interwoven with previous rounds. The impact can
generally be seen in the built environment - in the "economic furniture” of
factories and offices and workplaces and in the civic buildings that reflect the
economic and political power of places' and their civic aspirations.
The rounds of investment also create local economies with particular
employment and occupational structures.
It's an evolutionary perspective that stresses the long-term historical
trajectories of urban economies, which as James Simmie, argues in the
Competitive Economic Performance of English Cities (part of the recent State
of English Cities Report, "…have arrived where they are today as a result of
the long-term interactions between their particular combinations of
specialisation and the external forces that have impacted on those activities.
This shows not only that history matters for how long it takes to develop along
a particular path but also the need for similarly long-term perspectives and
policies in order to develop changes in those paths. There are no inexpensive
or quick fixes that will turn around lagging city economies.”
(The Competitive Economic Performance of English Cities, p.17)
The evolutionary perspective stresses the 'path dependent’ nature of local
economic development. Again, to quote James Simmie:
"To say that the urban economy is a path-dependent process is to
recognise that the current state of a city’s economy is dependent
on the historical path taken to it, and that in turn the present form
of that city’s economy will shape its future development."
(The Competitive Economic Performance of English Cities, p.17)
It also not just about economic structures and processes but also the role of
the state and the agency of national, regional and local governments and of
local institutions in attempting to influence local economic trajectories.
In the past 150 years the city has seen massive changes in the way it is
governed – both by central government and locally – from a relatively laissez
faire central state and a merchant-dominated local government to a much
more interventionist national state – drawing more recently on European
assistance – and a growing “institutional searching” at regional and city levels
for forms of local governance that can help shape local economic
2development. Multi-level local governance clearly rubbing up against local
government.
3. From St George’s Hall to the ‘Liverpool Echo Arena’
I thought one way I could attempt to capture what I'm arguing is to highlight
the historical transition between where we’re gathered now, St George's Hall,
to its rather less grand twenty-first century counterpart, the new Arena and
Convention Centre - the Liverpool Echo Arena - that has just been built in
Kings Dock.
From St George’s Hall to the ‘Liverpool Echo Arena’ in nearly
160 years…
It’s fitting that I’m speaking in St George’s Hall this rather intimidating
expression of the global power of the city in the mid-nineteenth century…and,
to some extent, of its subsequent decline and renaissance
The idea for the Hall initially was to make up for the city's lack of a concert hall
– and money was raised by public subscription for this by a group of wealthy
Liverpool citizens. The architectural competition, as we know, was won by
Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (from London).
While all this was going on Liverpool Corporation had decided to build a new
Assize Courts on the same site and Elmes entered and won the design
competition for that too. A pretty impressive performance.
Meanwhile, the committee responsible for the concert hall building were
having some difficulties over the amounts being raised by public subscription
so they approached the Corporation and suggested that the two buildings
should be joined together and Elmes came up with a design that was
accepted. The Corporation also took on the costs of building and running the
new building. Quite a coup by the concert hall committee; they’d costed the
concert hall at something like £35,000. The cost at the time of the combined
building came in at over £300,000. Controversy and cost overruns on iconic
buildings – like the late, and perhaps not too publically lamented ‘Fourth
Grace’ - are clearly nothing new.
Here it is a stunning symbol of city power and Imperial splendour…
SLIDE 4 – ST GEORGE’S HALL
As an aside, the city’s colonial links were revealed by events when the
architect’s health suffered as he supervised the building works (a regular
seven and half hour train journey from London to Liverpool didn’t help).
3After trying out the Isle of Wight for convalescence he decided to try the
decidedly warmer Kingston in Jamaica, where he sadly died from
consumption – seven years before the building was completed.
The buildings more recent history also shows, to some extent, the city’s
decline and…renaissance? From the mid-1980s (accelerated by the
departure of the Law Courts in 1984) it was closed and unused. Renovation
work started in the early 1990s saw the Great Hall opened for some public
use but it has only been very recently brought back into full use with a
combination of Heritage Lottery, EU and national and local government
funding – note the partnership funding in that restoration.
Here’s its twenty-first century counterpart – at least as a concert venue if not
as law courts - the Liverpool Echo Arena.
SLIDE 5 – THE ARENA
SLIDE 6 – THE ARENA QUOTE
The Arena is a central element in the current regeneration of Kings
Waterfront and, as the quote emphasises, central to the city's international
aspirations. It latter has its own symbolism – even if it is arguably not as
architecturally grand or iconic as St George’s Hall:
• it's a reflection of the city’s new service sector and visitor–based
orientation;
• it's built on an area of former docklands that, apart from the outlying
Garston docks, has now retreated to the mouth of the river – involving,
again symbolically, the dock company leaving its headquarters in the
Port of Liverpool building;
• its building has been orchestrated by Liverpool’s own Urban
Regeneration Company, Liverpool Vision and has been paid for by a
combination of international (EU) national (EP) and regional (NWDA)
regeneration funding – a true product of the new city centre
governance;
• it is intended to help reposition the city internationally and, as such, is
part of the political reorientation of the city globally, and specifically in
relation to Europe – the political vision of the city now locates it very
firmly in a European context….
Liverpool’s relationship to Europe has undergone a rapid and profound
transformation in the space of just two decades. In the 1980s, it had a
political administration that was implacably opposed to European integration.
In 2008, it is to be European Capital of Culture reflecting the shared vision of
the City Council and the city’s Local Strategic Partnership for an urban
renaissance that is explicitly European.
4SLIDE 7 – LIVERPOOL’S NEW
POLITICAL VISION
4. Historical rounds of investment and disinvestment in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries
But let's go back a bit and trace some of the rounds of investment and
disinvestment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I’ll focus on five key
periods:
• Liverpool’s heyday in the old international division of labour;
• the turning point of the inter-war years;
• the 1950s and 1960s;
• the recession of the 1970s and 1980s; and
• what’s being heralded as a renaissance - from the late 1990s.
First - Liverpool's heyday – a key hub in the old international division of
labour
The city was probably at the peak of its economic power at the turn of the
twentieth century, a power perhaps best symbolised in the bricks and mortar of
the three world-famous waterfront buildings at the Pier Head - the “Three
Graces”).
SLIDE 8 – THREE GRACES
These, of course, occupy a good chunk of the World Heritage site that John
Hinchcliffe will be talking about in Session 1 this morning. Started in 1906 and
finished in 1917 the three buildings - . the Liver, Cunard and Port of Liverpool
Buildings - respectively sum up key elements of the city’s global economic
strengths in the ‘Age of Empire’: insurance, shipping and the docks.
Manufacturing was predominantly – if not totally – docks related (primary and
secondary import processing – sugar and foodstuffs, tobacco and so on) with
companies like Tate and Lyle and Ogdens growing rapidly. Docks expansion
had seen shipbuilding - Cammell Lairds – pushed ‘over the water’ onto the
Wirral peninsula.
I really like the next slide - a painting of Liverpool’s Waterfront a hundred
years ago (courtesy of the Liverpool Daily Post).
SLIDE 9 – WATERFRONT 1907
5It’s all happening – with the docks a hive of activity and the non-
environmentally friendly smoke pouring out from the factories to the north and
east. Of course, there’s only Two Graces – the gap in the teeth (the Cunard
Building) has still to be filled in.
SLIDE 10 – LIVERPOOL IN THE OLD
INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF
LABOUR
The buildings are a powerful expression of the crucial role that Liverpool had
played in the ‘Atlantic’ economy and old international division of labour, a hub
linking the English industrial regions to international markets and materials
supplies.
It was a genuine gateway port with port-related industries and services and a
corresponding occupational structure (manual, relatively low-skilled operatives
and a large clerical workforce).
It also had then marked social-spatial differences with the poverty of the
‘North End’ of the city contrasting with the more prosperous ‘South End’.
With hindsight, it is clear, however, that at the time the Three Graces were
being built that the world was changing and the inter-war years saw a key
turning point in the economic history of the city.
SLIDE 11 – THE INTER-WAR YEARS
In the inter-war years, as global trade (and the old international division of labour)
closed down, the city was pushed into recession as its trading links both globally
and intra-nationally were threatened.
At the same time, developments in the national spatial division of labour - pulling
the locus of economic activity away from the north and north west towards the
midlands and south east where new rounds of investment in new industries
were taking place - were working inexorably against the city.
While the city rode the early 30s recession comparatively well – it missed out
on the government’s first stab at regional policy (with the Special Areas Act of
1934) - the writing was on the wall for local politicians and it became the first
local authority in Britain to seek legal power to undertake local economic
development – in the shape of the Liverpool Corporation Act (1936).
6The Act gave the Council the necessary powers to buy up land on its outskirts
for industrial development. The aim was to try to create new employment
opportunities to compensate for the already apparent decline of port and port-
related activity. What we now call ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ got off to a very
early start in Liverpool. Even if the the council’s efforts in this direction were
overtaken by preparation for what became the Second World War, which
steered development towards military-related production.
The Merseyside Plan, drawn up just before the end of the war confirmed the
move to base future development (it wasn’t referred to then as ‘regeneration’)
of the city on the decentralisation of both population and industry from the
core of the city-region (effectively north Liverpool) to the outskirts.
The problems of overcrowding and slum housing, exacerbated by wartime
bomb damage, had put housing firmly on the local political agenda, where it
has remained, albeit with differing emphases, pretty resolutely ever since.
Shifting people to new homes in municipal housing estates on the city’s
outskirts and nearby New Towns was seen as a key remedy to the housing
problem, although its now clear that it produced new problems of
geographical and social dislocation for the families that moved.
A false renaissance - the 1950s and 1960s
SLIDE 12 – THE 1950s and 1960s
A key element of this decentralisation of people and economic activity was
central state regional policy.
It helped the city-region to receive more than its share of so-called ‘mobile
industry’. In the six years after the War, for example, regional policy helped to
steer some two-thirds of the employment generated by relocating industry
(some 24,000 jobs). More came in a second wave in the 1960s.
These new waves of investment represented a new form of external
orientation for the city-region and saw it being assimilated in a new way into
the newly evolving international division of labour that underpinned the
‘Golden Age’ of development in the Advanced Capitalist Countries in the
1950s and 1960s.
The city’s dwindling colonial role in the global economy was being replaced by
integration through the operations of national and overseas-owned multi-
national corporations. Some features of the previous localised social
structure were reinforced (the semi-skilled nature of the labour processes)
while others were changed (with provision, for the first time, of substantial
numbers of full time jobs for women in the new food processing plants).
7But it turned out to be a fairly tenuous connection as was revealed in the
restructuring that followed the abrupt ending of the ‘Golden Age’ in the early
1970s and the transformation from what has been characterised as ‘Fordism’
and/or ‘organised capitalism’ to, respectively, ‘post-Fordism’ and ‘disorganised
capitalism’ became apparent.
While Britain’s economic growth had been historically relatively strong during
the 1960s and early 1970s, it was still markedly lower than that of other ‘late
starters’. And just as Liverpool had both contributed to and benefited from
Britain’s (and England’s before it) cycles of world leadership in the
international economy, so it suffered as Britain lost its economic and political
power.
SLIDE 13 – RECESSION AND
CONFLICT (THE 1970S AND 1980s)
The regional and urban policy initiatives of the 1960s and early 1970s were
swamped in their effects by the severity of global economic recession in the
late 1970s and its local impact.
While regional policy had helped to attract new industry to the city-region, it had
increasingly mixed success in keeping it there as conditions in the global
economy worsened.
Multinationals closed and shifted operations abroad, contributing to the
formation of the new international division of labour that characterises the era of
‘disorganised capitalism’.
Liverpool and its city-region were the losers in this global restructuring of
production. To make matters worse for the local workforce, the pressures of
restructuring encouraged labour-saving production changes in the factories that
remained. Not all of the multinationals left the city-region. Some have remained
and continued to invest in their production facilities but the operations of this
remaining ‘modern core’ of multinational manufacturing (like Vauxhall and
Ford/Jaguar in motor vehicles or the American pharmaceutical companies) have
increasingly been characterised by ‘jobless growth’ and the periodic injection of
state regional development funding into this core has increasingly been
concerned with job retention rather than job creation.
As the manufacturing branch plants either closed or shed labour to retain
competitiveness, the docks began to feel the consequences of the declining
relative economic importance of its hinterland (as deindustrialisation cut
through the northern manufacturing regions) and the re-ordering of Britain’s
trade patterns around new geo-political interests in Europe.
The closure in 1984 of the Tate and Lyle sugar factory in inner Liverpool was
particularly symbolic of this shift. Membership of the EEC meant adoption of
8its policy towards the encouragement of sugar production using sugar beet at
the expense of sugar cane. This shift favoured the southern and eastern
sugar-beet growing areas of the country and meant, of course, that the
industry was not only turning its back on Liverpool as a manufacturing site but
also on the West Indies as a materials provider. The closure in 1990 of the
British American Tobacco factory (the name says it all) in the same area as
Tate and Lyle provided yet another sign, if one was needed by then, of the
demise of the city's previous global role.
The ‘Golden Age’ had seen employment in the city-region peak in the mid
1960s. It collapsed thereafter.
Between 1966 and 1978, employment in the city fell by some 20 percent
(compared with national, regional and city-regional declines, respectively of 5,
12 and 15 percent).
The acceleration post-1978, however, is particularly marked. In just three
years, 1978-1981, employment in the city fell by a further 18 percent. Over
the longer period, 1978-1991, 37 percent of jobs disappeared (a loss of just
under 9,000 jobs a year).
The local economy was devastated. Unemployment soared and outmigration
accelerated – including large numbers of the higher skilled and middle class.
SLIDE 14 – JOB LOSS SINCE THE
1960s
There’s no overstating of the traumatic impact of this period on the city. In
chaos theory there is a notion of a climacteric – a shock to the system that
has profound and lasting effects. This is surely what the 1970s and 1980s
were for Liverpool. As the slide shows, it is only in the period since the late
1990s that employment has started to grow again.
The city also no longer acted as a magnet for economic migration – notably
during the late 1960s to the 1980s when the migration from the former Empire
and New Commonwealth were so important for other cities.
This partly explains why Liverpool has the lowest proportion of black and
minority ethnic communities in relation to other English ‘core cities’.
The 2001 Census shows the city having just under 6% of it population from
these communities compared with, for example, figures of 15% in Nottingham,
19% in Manchester and just under 30% in Birmingham. The city is far from
being a ‘plural city’ and the slogan ‘the world in one city’ has far more
historical than contemporary resonance.
9Some of the socio-economic impact of the traumatic decline of the period is
indicated in the Table on the following slide based on an analysis by David
Gordon and Ray Forrest at the University of Bristol.
SLIDE 15 – SOCIAL AND
ECONOMIC DISTINCTIONS
It’s based mainly on the 1991 Census and ranks Liverpool in the various
categories in relation to other English LADs – all 366 of them.
It makes for depressing reading. In terms of employment, for example, it
shows how high the city ranked for “men on the scrap heap” (men aged
between 55 and retirement age who were unemployed, on a government
scheme or otherwise inactive but not retired) – 4th. Particularly disconcerting
is the ranking for young unemployed – 8th – and for young people on
government schemes – 7th.
The city was very low on multiple earner households and on working parents
with dependent children.
Occupationally – ‘the spatial division of labour’ – it was ranked low on non-
manual and informational jobs. The occupational structure – and middle class
flight - reinforced its high ranking in terms of working class composition. In
terms of wealth, it ranked high for the ‘poor’ in general and ‘poor children in
particular and was way down in relation to the ‘wealthy’.
Social and political responses - from conflict to 'partnership'
SLIDE 16 – SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
RESPONSES - FROM CONFLICT
TO 'PARTNERSHIP’ 1
There were, of course responses, to this situation – some more successful
than others. Trades unions fought redundancy and factory closures through
industrial action including some high profile sit-ins (including, as Ken Brown
might mention, Meccano when its closure was announced in 1979). The
unions also sponsored the establishment of a network of unemployed centres
that set a pattern for other areas of the country.
There was also the nadir of the inner-city rioting that the city experienced in
1981 in ‘Liverpool 8’ with the despair and anger of the rioting flagging up the
extent of deprivation in the inner city.
10The ‘Militant’-led city council between 1983 and 1987 also offered a political
response with a municipal housing-based Urban Regeneration Strategy and
an emphasis on municipal employment - but this was defeated principally by
central government.
SLIDE 17 – SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
RESPONSES - FROM CONFLICT
TO 'PARTNERSHIP’ 2
The national state intervened in its own way. The Conservative government
of the eighties and nineties through the creation of a Minister for Merseyside
and its version of urban policy - an inner-city Task Force and City Action Team
and notably the Merseyside Development Corporation. Thee ‘top-down’
interventions largely bypassing local government were gradually supplemented
by more ‘partnership based’ interventions like City Challenge and Single
Regeneration Budget programmes.
The MDC (1981-1997) was an important intervention arguably preparing the
ground (literally in the case of its land reclamation activities) for the
subsequent city-centre redevelopment that we are now seeing. Renovation of
the Albert Docks was its landmark project but it also encouraged inner-city
residential development – in social housing through assistance to the
Eldonian housing cooperative in the north end of the city and in private
developments in the ‘Garden Festival’ site area in the south of the city and
waterfront apartments.
It also helped to re-start the commercial property market in its territory (e.g. in
the former Brunswick dock warehouses).
International intervention was perhaps even more important - in the shape of
Objective One designation. Building on earlier EU interventions the Objective
One programme Rounds 1 and 2: 1994-2007) has been important not only for
its funding (some £2.8 billion in public sector contributions alone) but also for
the boost that it gave to governance of the city-region.
SLIDE 18 – SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
RESPONSES - FROM CONFLICT
TO 'PARTNERSHIP’ 3
11And there’s been an intense period of ‘institutional searching’ at local level to
find effective institutional arrangements for delivering regeneration – all on a
partnership model as indicated on the slide: LPG, the Mersey Partnership, the
Speke-Garston and Liverpool Land Development Companies and Liverpool
Vision. Even, dare I say it at this moment in time, the Capital of Culture
Company?
Another turning point? Liverpool as a European renaissance
city?
SLIDE 19 – RENAISSANCE?
The last decade has seen a gradual relayering of investment – principally in
five clearly defined ‘Strategic Investment Areas’ across the city.
Each of these areas has its own particular history of economic activity and
rounds of investment:
• Speke-Garston/ Halewood (with its motor vehicle and pharmaceutical
factories);
• “Eastern Approaches” (based around the Edge Lane approach to the
city with its electrical engineering factories and Littlewoods former art
deco headquarters office building);
• “Atlantic Gateway” – a fitting name for the small industry and offices
lining the north dockland approach to the city;
• the industrial estates on “Approach 580”, the A580 road; and
• the City Centre with its dock-related and office employment.
It’s in these SIAs where the remaking of the economic landscape –
increasingly orchestrated by new economic development agencies - can be
most dramatically seen.
Thus, for example, the Speke-Garston Development Company in its seven
years of operation between 1996 and 2003 claimed to have brought in £230
million in private and £100 million in public sector investment into the Speke-
Garston area of the city. And you can see the visible impact of this layering of
investment in the cluster of automotive suppliers around the Jaguar factory
and in activities around the nearby pharmaceutical companies – still hanging
on from the 1960s and 1970s waves of investment.
New office developments have been started and a large out-of-town retail
facility set up not far from where the old BL plant operated (itself also now a
retail site).
12The Liverpool Land Development Company has taken over where the Speke
Garston Development Company left off and has continued to manage the
transformation of the area. A particularly dramatic symbol of this reinvestment
is the transformation of the former Bryant and May match factory into Urban
Splash’s ‘Matchworks’ - a combination of housing, offices and light industry.
The old Liverpool Airport aerodrome has been converted into offices and light
industry building around investment in the airport by Peel Holdings, a
Manchester-based company that also owns Liverpool’s port and Cammell
Lairds.
Peel also owns the Manchester Ship Canal and given the political
shenanigans between Liverpool and Manchester over the building of ship
canal in the nineteenth century, the fact that a Manchester-based company
now completely own the city’s major sea and air transport facilities
infrastructure has what can only be described as having a high degree of
historical irony…if not revenge.
Perhaps the most dramatic visual record of the layering of investment can be
seen in the City Centre where the Urban Regeneration Company, Liverpool
Vision, is orchestrating a £3 billion pounds regeneration programme including
what is claimed to be biggest retail development of its kind in Europe - the
£920 million Paradise Project/ ‘Liverpool One’ by Grosvenor Estates and the
Kings Waterfront that houses the Arena that I mentioned at the start of the talk.
Other major investments include offices and a hotel in Prices Dock and
refurbished offices in the old commercial centre, the museum adjacent to the
Three Graces site, filling in for the originally proposed ‘Fourth Grace’ (and
provoking Stuart Maconie’s comment in his recent homage to the North of
England that Liverpool is a “city that thinks you can never have too many
museums”).
All this investment adds up to new jobs. The statistics show that there was a
net increase in jobs between 1998 and 2005 – some 48,400 and the growth was
faster in the Liverpool TTWA than nationally (up 13% compared with 9%
nationally). This was the case for both men and, particularly, women (jobs filled
by men increased 9.7% compared with 8% nationally while jobs filled by women
increased by 16.4% compared with 9.7% nationally).
Women took nearly two thirds (65%) of the net new jobs (31,500 compared with
male jobs of 16,900) reinforcing the city’s distinctive gender employment
balance. Women now account for 54% of total jobs, compared with the national
figure of 50%.
For both males and females the majority of net new jobs were full-time and
again especially for jobs filled by women (60% males and 74% females)
In terms of the sectoral distribution of employment change – the continuing
decline of manufacturing stands out – by 25% in the Liverpool TTWA (28%
nationally). A loss of 12,000 jobs, mainly (89%) full-time - reinforcing again just
13how tenuous the city-region’s grip on manufacturing had been in the 1960s and
1970s and the ‘jobless growth’ of the companies that remain.
There were job losses right across the board including in the sectors that are
still seen as important development clusters: motor vehicles (Jensen came and
went in the period); ICT (further job losses at Marconi) - and
pharmaceuticals/biosciences (notably through the closure of Glaxo Smith Kline’s
factory in 2004).
The recent growth in jobs has come from services and notably:
• in banking, finance and insurance (an extra 21,000 jobs; an increase
of 41% nearly double the national increase (22%) providing in total
nearly 74,000 jobs – principally in non-life insurance and financial
intermediation (2,500 jobs), architectural and engineering activities (2,400
jobs), labour recruitment (3,000 jobs), legal activities (1,800) and security
(1,600)
• in public administration, education and health (an increase of 31%
compared with 24% nationally) providing in total just over 158,000 jobs -
principally from hospitals (8,700 jobs) and other health activities (6,800),
secondary education (4,400), HE (3,800) adult and other education
(3,300), general pubic services (3,500)
There was a slight drop overall in jobs in distribution, hotels and restaurants
(a 3% fall compared with a national growth of 9%) providing in total around
89,000 jobs. The overall net loss of just over 2,000 jobs was made up of a
combination of employment decline in (surprisingly perhaps) bars (2,500), retail
sales in non-specialised stores (1,900), mail order (1,700, Littlewoods) and
offsetting job growth in retail sales in non-specialised stores (food predominantly,
4,600), retail sale of clothing (2,300) and restaurants (2,100)
The retailing growth suggests that the city might well be recapturing its city-
regional and sub-regional shopping centre role that it has seen eroded by places
like Chester and Greater Manchester in recent years.
The period also saw the growth of a tourist industry that didn’t really exist 10
years ago.
Population decline
Population decline, as already noted, has slowed at city level and actually
increased in the town centre.
Cultural renaissance
Not unrelated to the growth in city-centre living has been a growth in personal
services and cultural activities in the city centre in the shape of new
restaurants, cafes and bars. There’s been an increase in visits to museums,
14the Tate and performing arts venues. Anyone who comes to the city can
discern a ‘buzz’ that was missing ten or fifteen tears ago.
Global connectivity
Again not unrelated to this increase in visitors is the increase in global
connectivity provided by John Lennon Airport, which in recent years has
become one of the fastest growing airports in Europe.
In 1996 it handled 500,000 passengers, it is currently hovering around the 5
million mark with flights to some 62 destinations in Europe and beyond,
including Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Warsaw. Highly dependent on
low-cost carriers (notably Easyjet, Flybe and Ryanair) and potentially
vulnerable to the impact of any environmental regulation of short-haul flights.
It has also just seen the loss of its only link to London (VLM airlines flight to
London City Airport), perhaps a reflection of the spatial division of labour and
the relatively low proportion of headquarters functions?
A ‘Transformation Pole’?
There’s a lot going on and it is interesting that the European Commission's
State of European Cities Report this year - using data for the period 1996-
2001 for the 258 cities in its Urban Audit covering the extended EU -
categorises Liverpool in its typology of European cities as a "specialised pole”
and within this as a "transformation pole", what it defines as "cities with a
strong industrial past but well on their way to reinventing themselves,
managing change and developing new economic activities" putting it along
with cities like Bremen, Dortmund, Lille and in the UK, Belfast, Glasgow and
Manchester.
Its decision not to categorise it as a "gateway", which it defines as "larger
cities with dedicated (port) infrastructure handling large flows of international
goods and passengers" such as Antwerp, Santander, Marseilles or Rotterdam
is revealing.
It is not to argue that Liverpool is not still an important Gateway port for the
UK - it certainly is, especially for foodstuffs and the old transatlantic trades
(it’s got the UK’s largest grain terminal and is still the number one British port
for North American trade) - but its direct impact on the city economy has
unquestionably lessened. It's now more a city with a port than a port with a
city.
SLIDE 20 – RENAISSANCE BUT…
It is important, however, to not get too carried away with some of these signs
of renaissance.
15First, it has been hard for the city to shake off its legacy of low skills and
qualifications – good old ‘path dependency’. Much of the expansion has been
in low-skilled (and paying) sectors. There hasn’t been a particularly significant
increase in the high-tech ‘knowledge sectors’ that are much vaunted in the
regeneration literature.
Linked to this, some of the new investments have been in sectors with
relatively low-productivity with implications for overall wealth generation.
Liverpool is also clearly starting from a comparatively low base and, at a time,
when other comparator cities in the UK and Europe are also growing –
making ‘closing the gap’ with them a challenge.
Importantly, it is also the case that some Liverpool citizens remain cut off from
the new labour markets and excluded from the wealth that’s being generated
– a feature common too European cities in general and what the European
Commission refers to as the "employment paradox". Cities are the main
generators of jobs but a substantial proportion of their citizens appear to find
these jobs inaccessible and city-wide economic activity rates are constrained
accordingly.
And, as the government’s Index of Multiple Disadvantage (2004) shows - the
city remains poor. It’s ranked first in the league table of all local authority
districts. Finer geographical analyses (at the level of Super Output Areas) of
the Index show pronounced concentrations of disadvantage and the socially
and geographically uneven impact of renaissance.
While there have been some important policy interventions to tackle this
geography – like the city’s pioneering Jobs, Education and Training Centres
and the Objective One Pathways to Integration programme – the experience
of the interventions to date shows how deep-rooted the problem is. Thus, for
example, while analysis of the outcomes to date of the Pathways to
Integration programme shows some positive absolute increases in welfare in
the ‘Pathways Areas’, these absolute increases have not been sufficient to
change their position relative to their non-targeted counterparts.
SLIDES 21-24
Final slides:
• occupational structure is still biased towards middle and lower-level
skills (Slide 21);
• low economic activity overall and particularly for those with low level
skills or no qualifications (Slide 22);
• compares relatively unfavourably with a range of other national and
European cities in relation to people qualified to degree level (Slide 23);
16• its productivity levels also remain comparatively low in similar
comparisons (Slide 24);
• a marked geography of disadvantage (Slide 25).
17You can also read
