It was summer and there were strikes and rumblings of discontent. I was sent to Liverpool, a young journalist, to see whether predictions in the left-wing papers that there was going to be a riot in Liverpool, as there had been in Brixton and Bristol, could be right. Not sure who to ask, I rang up a contact, who took me to the exclusive Racquet Club in Upper Parliament Street, a place shortly to be reduced to cinders by the riots of that summer, 1981.
There began my long relationship with the city. So when my train pulled into Lime Street station last week, I headed away from the city centre, which has a greater sense of wealth and buzz than at any time I remember, and drove into Toxteth, up Princes Avenue — all nicely done up — and into the Granby triangle, where the riots began, determined to find out what the 30th anniversary of the riots meant to people who had been there on the night of July 3, 1981.
Anyone who does this is in for a bit of a shock, for the streets of Granby are still in a state. Back in 1981, four nights of rioting and six weeks of aftershocks — described vividly in a new book, Liverpool 81: Remembering the Riots — left 781 police officers injured and a disabled man dead. After the inevitable inquiry, the mark on the national consciousness faded. But if you go there today it is as if the area is unforgiven. The majority of homes are boarded up and there are patches of grass where, as recently as last year, buildings have been torn down.
Dorothy Kuya, who still lives off Granby Street, prefers to call the riots of 1981 an uprising. As a black Liverpudlian from a family that had lived there for generations, she had sympathies with the rioters, not all of whom were black, because of the aggression and racial insensitivity routinely shown by the police. Her nephew Paul remembers being stopped on the way back from the city centre with his new football boots and being asked where they had been nicked. As the riots flickered, his parents made sure he stayed in. Why not rebrand historic Victorian terraces as heritage homes and sell them off cheap.
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In the past 30 years, Dorothy says, real efforts have been made by the police. Race relations in what was always a mixed community are transformed. Dorothy leaves open the front door of her late-Victorian house, lined with books on black history, as if to prove her point that this is a low-crime area. What concerns her today is the state of her neighbourhood, which has been under threat of demolition since 1994. A refurbishment scheme, which has been years in coming, will involve what locals see as some unnecessary demolition, and it is not clear that owner occupiers will be able to stay. It is typical behaviour by a council that continues to call its Victorian suburbs “obsolete”.
The remarkable thing, though, is what the Granby owners did in the face of such indifference. They grew flowers and and set up a street market. Dorothy’s fellow Streets in Bloom campaigner, Eleanor in the next street, has a display of clematis outside her house that would put a country cottage to shame. Residents have painted curtains in the windows of a bricked-up terrace. It is a gentle uprising against wanton destruction.
It is frankly staggering that Britain, let alone Liverpool, has allowed such a symbolic place to remain unrestored for so long, while millions were spent in the city. Michael Heseltine did up the docks and the Georgian suburbs in the 1980s but never got to the Victorian suburbs. John Prescott’s Pathfinder redevelopment scheme spent £300m in the city, bizarrely buying up houses for demolition. These include the terraces of the so-called Welsh streets where Ringo Starr was born, just across Princes Avenue, which the council still wants torn down as it says there is no demand for the houses — despite the opposition of taxi drivers who make a living out of taking visitors there on Beatles tours.
But there is an uprising of a quiet kind going on there, too.
The last house in private ownership has been acquired by the conservation charity Save Britain’s Heritage. It found a young couple to live in it in a matter of days — giving the lie to the myth of low demand for such homes, especially among young people.
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What will Liverpool’s councillors do now the cash has gone? The Labour deputy leader, Paul Brant, a barrister, told me there was “universal horror” that Pathfinder had been closed down, blaming the coalition for the council’s own failures. Like Richard Kemp, another of Liverpool’s elite councillors, he also chairs one of Liverpool’s housing associations. Such people have traditionally had a fondness for big development projects, a reluctance to sell off Liverpool’s vast numbers of state-owned homes and, ironically, a distrust of the people. But now there is no money, why not? Kemp argues that houses in the Victorian suburbs won’t sell. I suspect it is simply a matter of price.
Why not rebrand historic Victorian terraces as heritage homes and sell them off cheap on the strict condition that people do them up and live in them for five years? You could start with Ringo Starr’s birthplace in Madryn Street. I gather just such an idea worked in Rotterdam, where it brought private capital into the housing market. Now the money has run out, it is up to Liverpool’s latest generation of leaders to break with the past. If not, people might start asking whether they have a vested interest in keeping homes empty or knocking them down.