When You Walk Through A Storm.

All of my life I have waited for Liverpool’s Renaissance.

From that slum town I was born, surrounded by the ravages of the blitz, I have been waiting for us to get back on centre stage.
Nobody wanted the regeneration of Liverpool more than I.
I have watched false dawns with irksome regularity, I know Peter and Paul so many times I have watched them rob each other.
I have heard it all.
The anthem You’ll never walk alone really means something to me not just for football or because I grew up in the shadows of the ground, but for my sense of character and the symbol of the troubles we as a city have endured, those words touch my heart.
Always, I have believed that at the end of our storm there is a golden sky…until now.
I have watched patiently from the cultural sector while we as a city have been knocked from pillar to post by the national press, I have sold 20th century art and design through the bad times, through thick and thin, never given in.
Every city wants to be the new Bilbao….. Yes, if it was that easy.
Then, we get the chance to crawl up the greasy pole back to centre stage where this city belongs…we get some investment coming in and 950 million pounds of European Objective One funding.
And we make all the same mistakes of the 1960s creating slums of the future with buildings already out of date before built with little or no architectural merit, that erode the values of what our predecessors left for us, because they had the finesse to build them well.
The Oligarchs with their marketing budgets promise us world-class architecture and what do we get, instead a Trafford park in the city and thousands of empty apartments, hurray!!
As a city we descended into a feeding frenzy that produced hardly any jobs and a flock of carbuncles.

With the degeneration of our best assets…Our, world heritage site, Our Pier head, Our Icons, then alongside those beauties they stick a trashy tart …behind it 3 monstrous granite carbuncles and steal from us, our sense of pride, that kept us going through all those lean years, taking away my right to own heritage and culture and relieve me of the pride that I share with all who are lucky enough to be able to enjoy those majestic visions of the early 20th century.
These were free. You don’t fix it if its not broken.
We have made irreversible mistakes with our culture, we have lost the very essence of what the soul of this city is, of what our history means to us, and become bland, homoginised.
In order to be cultured to afford that status, you have to understand where you have been, in order to know where you are going.

They, the spivs, have undermined the very foundations of our world heritage site; it’s not theirs to give away.
A good conservationist knows the true value of what his forebears left us. What a shame for Liverpool that those in power did not.