A strange talk show, where our main guests were unemployed people that spend their day at the Bluecoat gallery – just a way to pass the time, they say.
They have absolutely nothing to do the whole day, “it is better than to go to bars and drink” – they insisted so much on that one might think they had considered that possibility more than often.
The architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott has not only designed the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, but also the Battersea Power Station and the Bankside Power Station, now known as London’s Tate Modern. Next to this, he designed the red telephone boxes.
Both the Tate Modern and the Anglican Cathedral are in the midst of redefining and rethinking their position towards how to be a public space for people.
In one of our interviews, Bishop of Warrington Richard Blackburn states that the Cathedral now needs to be a place of hospitality; where people, when they are interested, or awakened, in spiritual issues, should be able to look for answers in the Cathedral.
See here: Church is still a place to pray …and party!
Gene Sharp wrote his From Dictatorship to Democracy in 1993 on how to challenge power, more particularly dictators. He ended his preface with “Nor should this analysis be interpreted to mean that when a specific dictatorship is ended, all other problems will also disappear.” Continue reading
In spite of Nick Clegg’s pledge to oppose all university tuition fee rises, new students are now to pay a maximum of £9000. A rise of £6000 a year. And it seems this rise has not only consequences for the students in Liverpool. Cab drivers, restaurants and pubs seem to suffer some income loss as the students are more carefull spending their money. Continue reading
As a community, we got together this. Because it matters, community matters. And it matters way before Cameron said it matters. And the riots, that is what brought about the decay of this area (Toxteth area), the riots were not about people being anarchist, it was about a scream of pain from a society that it was being treated as shit. By anybody with power. And what happened to this area after that was punishment for the riots. A collective mythology that smells of racism. And you know, this whole hing about racism it does not belong to the police, it belongs to the whole of society, to the part of society that is got power. One of the things that came out of this area following the riots is the Toxteth loan in the city of Liverpool as a place that welcomes and embraces everybody. We are not tolerant, because who the hell wants to be tolerant and I don’t want to belong to the British society that tolerates… because I don’t want to be tolerated, I want to be welcome, I want to be part of society. And that is what this area is and it always has been. Continue reading
It was July 1981 when the Liverpool 8 Uprising – or ‘Toxteth Riots’ as it became known – began. Following the typically aggressive and heavy-handed arrest of Leroy Cooper on Friday 3 July, anger erupted on the streets of one of Liverpool’s most deprived areas in one of the most voracious displays of collective rage seen in the 1980s. Such was the force of the insurrection that the Conservative Government at the time was forced to seriously rethink both their policing and urban planning strategies. But what were the wider undercurrents that lead to these nine nights of rebellion? And to what extent have the ‘new’ policing and urban planning strategies come to mirror their predecessors? Continue reading
All riots and urban insurgencies have far deeper roots than newspaper headlines afford them, and those in Liverpool 8 stretch further into history (and geography) than most. There is first the singular history of Liverpool itself, and what the city’s leading historian, John Belchem‚ pro-vice chancellor of the university, calls the “exceptionalism” that marks Liverpool out from the rest of Britain, stitching its narrative to the Atlantic Ocean more than that of the land on which Liverpool turns its back. This identity is precious to the sage of Liverpool and most immediately recognisable voice of the city’s people, Jimmy McGovern, known for his work on Brookside, Cracker, Hillsborough, The Street and the rest. “When you are a port city,” says McGovern, “you look out, not back inland over your shoulder. Only when you are at sea are you looking towards the land, as my own family did when they came here from County Fermanagh; probably heading for America but presumably alighting with a certain fecklessness: ‘This’ll do.’ And in Toxteth, you have the Harlem of Europe. When we had the capital of culture here in 2008, the slogan was ‘The World In One City’, but that was only really true of Liverpool 8: black people called Riley and Williams, Irish women bearing children to West African sailors, and all of them, in some way, children of the sea.”
There is some ambiguity as to the origin of the name. One theory is that the etymology is “Toki’s landing-place”. However, Toxteth is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, and at this time, it appears as “Stochestede”, i.e. ”the stockaded or enclosed place”, from the Anglo-Saxon stocc ”stake” and Anglo-Saxon stede ”place” (found in many English placenames, usually spelled stead).
