Loyd on Liverpool

It didn’t get the Olympics, but the North-west of England is seeing plenty of action. Manchester has won the supercasino and a large chunk of the BBC is set to relocate to Salford. Cumbria’s tourist industry is getting a boost from the Beatrix Potter effect following the release of the movie Miss Potter in January. And Liverpool has 2008 European Capital of Culture coming up, and more than £2bn is being pumped into its economy through development projects, including Grosvenor Estates’ £900m mega-project Liverpool One.

Culture is playing a strong part in Liverpool’s renaissance, but controversy has dogged some of the more dramatic proposals for change. There has been much debate about what should be built on the city’s most sensitive site at Mann Island alongside Liverpool’s Three Graces, while the demolition of Ringo Starr’s house in the down-at-heel Welsh Streets area of the city to help regenerate the local housing market became something of a cause célèbre for those fighting housing demolition.

These issues are meat and drink to Loyd Grossman, the man whose trademark bookish glasses and transatlantic drawl are familiar to anyone who remembers television cookery programme Masterchef. Grossman is as knowledgable and enthusiastic talking about culture-led regeneration as he is about his brand of pasta sauce. Leaning forward in his chair and gesticulating to add emphasis to his words, Grossman describes his work in culture-led regeneration as a hobby. His body language, and the list of posts he holds in the region, suggest otherwise.

Grossman is chair of Culture Northwest, the body promoting culture across the region. He is on the board of Liverpool Culture Company, the organisation launched by the city council to spearhead 2008 European Capital of Culture. In the same city, Grossman is chairman of the trustees of National Museums Liverpool (NML), the only national museum group based outside of London, which has two major development projects of its own.

NML is developing two museums in the city: the slavery museum and the new Museum of Liverpool. The first will open in August, making the city a focus for slavery history. The second has been through a battle to win funding but work is set to begin soon.

When the Museum of Liverpool is built, its exhibits are likely to include Ringo Starr’s childhood home. The house is being demolished to make way for new homes under the housing market renewal programme being carried out by pathfinder organisation New Heartlands. Conservationists are unhappy, but Grossman points out that Liverpool is fortunate to have its rich heritage and its considerable stock of listed buildings. Its cultural capital was one of the reasons the city won its bid to be European City of Culture in 2008, he says.

Grossman’s own interest in heritage came from his upbringing in the historic environment of Boston, and he has continued to pursue that interest through his career, working as an architectural journalist, most notably for Harpers and Queen. His alliance with the North-west came about purely by chance some 10 years ago, although he made his first forays to Liverpool in the 1970s as a student. Now he is helping to shape both the city and the region’s cultural future. Here’s how.

Q&A

What role has culture played in Liverpool’s renaissance?

Liverpool’s historic environment was threatened until relatively recently. It was only just over 30 years ago that there were plans to demolish the Albert Dock. One of the greatest examples of culture-led regeneration was the Merseyside Maritime Museum which proved that the dock could have a future as a visitor attraction. The New Museum of Liverpool is another example of cultural redevelopment that will encourage mixed-use development along the waterfront.

What is the thinking behind the design for the new Museum of Liverpool?

Liverpool is a muscular and dramatic city. Bits of it are like Chicago. But it does not have many examples of outstanding contemporary architecture, so when we were conceiving the museum we decided it should be contemporary and not pastiche. Because the Liverpool waterfront is iconic, we wanted not an iconic building but a great building that would be seen as a great part of the Liverpool waterfront.

Is the regeneration of Liverpool revealing a tension between conservation and development?

The South-east thinks the North-west all looks like a Lowry painting

Because of its swift and catastrophic decline, Liverpool still has many of its historic buildings. There is always going to be some tension between regeneration and conservation. But it is a lot less now than it ever used to be. A big stock of historical environment is capital for regeneration. People no longer believe that there is a contradiction between regeneration and development.

How do you get culture-led regeneration right?

When you talk about cultural-led regeneration, people think of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, although, incidentally, the Merseyside Maritime Museum was built long before that. The Guggenheim is an iconic building. You cannot take a trophy building and put it in the middle of nowhere. There has to be a demonstrable benefit to the audience and it has to have a demand. It has to be something that the local community supports as well as visitors. And it has got to be supportable over a long period of time.

Liverpool has one of the oldest cultural quarters on William Brown Street. It is a classic 19th century quarter. Cities need such quarters, but they have to be able to develop an audience demand and they need to have a product that will make demand sustainable. To develop audience demand you have to do something people want – even if people can’t articulate that they want it until they see it – and it has to be excellent. You don’t have to have a gallery of Rembrandts to be outstanding. At NML my view has been that if we cannot do something very well, then we shouldn’t do it.

What do you want Liverpool to gain from the 2008 European Year of Culture?

What I have always been keen on is what the city is going to be like in 2010. Let’s make sure that it is permanently transformed and that there is a legacy. One of the legacies, I hope, will be that more people living in the city centre will become engaged with culture. A lot of the city’s change will be physical, but it will change spiritually and socially as people engage with culture.

Liverpool has an unbelievable amount of cultural capital. One legacy will be to make its cultural institutions more robust. National Museums Liverpool has a strong regional agenda and to me it is vital that the good effects should be felt throughout the regions.

And what of the North-west regional picture?

One of the country’s biggest problems is the fact that regional economic inequalities are a drag on the whole of society. Growth of our regional cities is vital. In US cities you have a tremendous pride in your city. I was surprised when I came over here that that many Londoners did not go to Manchester or Leeds. It’s important that we have strong, proud regional centres.

Reinventing the industrial economies is difficult. Northern cities have significant cultural legacies: tremendous town halls, fantastic cultural buildings and very good universities as part of that civic pride, so they have a cultural and intellectual legacy that is incredibly valuable. But the big difficulty is transport links.

There is a lot of activity in the North-west, a lot of co-operation. There are big development issues around Cumbria. There is a debate to be had about how to make the third city, Preston, work. There is also the question of what happens to Blackpool [following the DCMS decision not to award it a supercasino] and the Lancastrian coast. People are now talking across the region – there is a lot of good cross-sectoral discussion that is being promoted by Culture Northwest and the North West Development Agency. The North-west is beginning to discover how to define its regional distinctiveness in a way it can contribute in future.

The North-west has had an image problem in the South-east. People think it all looks like a Lowry painting. Yet Liverpool was one of the first modern cities and a lot of things happened in the North-west that changed the world.