Making the most of Merseyside

With its historic skyline, musical pedigree and two premier league football teams, not to mention its recent stint as European Capital of Culture the city of Liverpool and region of Merseyside has plenty to shout about. Michelle McKenna takes a look at the history of the area and how the events of the past have shaped the area today

The city itself has a rich heritage, celebrating its 800th birthday in 2007, but there is so much more to Merseyside than Liverpool city centre.

Liverpool, which was historically part of Lancashire, was founded as a borough in 1207 and granted city status in 1880. Today, alongside Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral it is one of the five metropolitan boroughs that combine to make up the Metropolitan County of Merseyside.

Merseyside County Council has long since disbanded but the geographic boundaries of the region remain and services such as police and fire and rescue service continue to be run at a county level.

Knowsley comprises the towns of Kirkby, Prescot, Huyton, Whiston, Halewood and Cronton, the St Helens Borough covers roughly 30 km2 including the large town of the same name and Sefton, bounded by Liverpool, Knowsley and West Lancashire, extends from Bootle in the south, to Southport in the north and inland to Maghull in the south-east. The Wirral peninsula is bounded by the River Dee and River Mersey and while the northern part of the borough is in Merseyside the southern part lies in Cheshire West and Chester.

While Liverpool is often seen as the hub of the region the boroughs are all unitary authorities and fiercely proud of their heritage.

Merseyside’s physical and economic growth has much to do with Liverpool’s status as a major port, which allowed it to trade with the West Indies, Ireland and mainland Europe. Wirral’s history is also connected to the sea and has been influenced by its proximity to the port of Chester, which from the 14th Century traded with Ireland, Spain and Germany. As the Dee started to silt up harbouring facilities were developed at various points in Wirral.

Its success as a port also led to one of the more sinister periods in Liverpool’s history – its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Ships and merchants from the city dominated the trade in the second half of the 18th Century bringing great wealth to the city at a terrible human cost.

By the start of the 19th Century 40 per cent of the world’s trade was passing through Liverpool and its wealth continued to grow resulting in the construction of many major buildings and in 1830 an intercity rail link with Manchester.

The 1820s saw the birth of the ship building tradition in Birkenhead when John Laird opened his shipyard and the town’s first docks opened in 1847.

Merseyside’s maritime history again came into play in the Second World War, where the port provided a vital supply route, allowing the region to play an important role in the country’s war efforts.

As a result Liverpool, Bootle and Wirral were the most heavily bombed areas outside of London and more than 4,000 people were killed in the air raids, which also destroyed 10,000 homes and made 70,000 people homeless.

The 1960s were a brighter time for the region, seeing it develop as a centre for music with the arrival of the Merseybeat scene. Bands such as the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers shot to fame and put Liverpool on the map so to speak. And it is Merseyside’s musical legacy that attracts thousands of tourists today.

Times were tougher in the 1970s and 1980s with the decline of the city’s docks and traditional manufacturing leading to high unemployment rates.

It was during this period, 1981 in fact, when Liverpool became the focus of the country’s media attention for all of the wrong reasons. The Toxteth riots broke out leading to pitched battles between police and youths, which lasted for nine days.

But what about the real heart of the city – the communities and the homes where Merseyside’s residents live? Their history is just as rich as that of the region.

Social housing in Merseyside dates back to the alms houses, later being provided by organisations such as Joseph Rowntree for philanthropic reasons.

North West law firm Brabners Chaffe Street has a long history of working with housing associations in Merseyside. Alistair Fletcher heads up the social housing team and says that the face of social housing started to change at the end of the 19th Century with the birth of industrial and provident societies, which comprise benefit for the community organisations and self help organisations such as the co-operatives, many of which are still going today.

The Housing Act 1919 resulted in mass council house building across Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s and thousands of families were re-housed from the inner city to suburban housing estates.

This continued after the Second World War along with a significant rebuilding programme to replace homes destroyed by aerial bombing. Around 3,000 pre-fabricated homes were built in the area during this time with well over 1,000 in Belle Vale.

The properties had a lifespan of 10 years but were not demolished until 1969, when residents were decanted to the newly constructed estates of Lee Park, Belle Vale and Childwall Valley, which were built on rural land. Some residents moved as far afield as Hough Green in Halton and Skelmersdale.

The benefit for the community organisations formed the basis of modern housing associations and continued successfully until the 1960s when the Government started changing provision of social housing from local authorities to the private sector.

“The main reason for that wasn’t any sort of desire to do something good,” says Fletcher. “It was a desire to have greater control over what was going on because obviously council housing was delivered by local authorities whereas housing associations were delivered through Central Government.”

A large number of the Merseyside housing associations came into being in the 1960s and 1970s such as Rodney Housing, Venture Housing Association and Pierhead Housing Association.

It was during this period that high rise flats were constructed in Netherley. Connected by walkways the buildings later became a target for anti-social behaviour and were demolished and replaced with houses about 15 years later.

The 1980s saw the next great period of change for social housing in Merseyside when the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced the Right to Buy giving tenants the chance to buy their own homes. The move has been heavily criticised in recent years as being a major factor for the affordable housing shortage we now face.

She also put more money for social housing through housing associations rather than through local authorities keeping her hands firmly on the purse strings.

The stock transfer movement that started in the late 1980s has been significant in the geography of Liverpool.

The Liverpool Housing Action Trust was one of only a handful of HATs set up across the country and involved the transfer of multi-storeys to a separate organisation set up by the Government.

“The HAT was given a very generous dowry and it changed the landscape really because it had a lot of money,” says Fletcher. Under the scheme flats in Sefton Park were upgraded and transferred onto housing associations, and major demolition works, were carried out in areas such as Childwall.

Later South Liverpool Housing took over stock in Speke and parts of Garston and Riverside took over a number of estates previously owned by Liverpool City Council, including Lee Valley and Childwall Park in 2003.

With that people got new windows, bathrooms, kitchens etc in their homes and there are lots of green spaces now as well,” says Pat Wheatley, community investment assistant for Riverside. “Demand is so high it is now very difficult to get a property in this area.”

Communal areas such as play parks have also been revamped and areas of wasteland transformed into community gardens and allotments while unpopular one-bedroom flats have been demolished and replaced with bungalows.

More recently Liverpool Mutual Homes took over the management of over 15,000 homes in the city.

Over time a number of housing organisations have come into being that reflect the modern multi-cultural society of today’s Liverpool, working with both long-standing neighbourhoods and the new communities that are developing within the region.

Pine Court Housing Association was set up in 1985 when a group of mainly Chinese professionals were struck by the almost total absence of Chinese people from the social rented housing sector.

Its founders decided to develop a unique delivery vehicle with its entire front line staff bilingual in at least Cantonese and English making the services and facilities that had always been available to the dominant community accessible to Chinese speakers.

The Steve Biko Housing Association, which started 20 years ago has been a leading light in providing housing and advocacy services to Liverpool’s BME communities.

Predominantly based in Liverpool 8 it was launched in response to discrimination in mainstream housing allocations policies at that time and provides a range of services and support on housing, regeneration and neighbourhood issues to Liverpool’s BME communities.

For example it employs a Somali and Arabic speaking housing advice worker, to run a community surgery aimed at the wider BME area irrespective of landlord and has worked with the Somali community, acting as an advocate for people residing in hostels and temporary accommodation.

The landscape of Merseyside has continued to evolve and perhaps one of the most significant events in the changing face of the region in recent history is the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme.

New Heartlands is one of the government’s nine HMR pathfinders and is responsible for the regeneration of vast areas of Liverpool, Sefton and Wirral. The mixed tenure areas, which are the focus of the programme, have been falling into decline for a number of different reasons and had vacancy rates of up to 30 per cent in some of the neighbourhoods.

The programme was launched to “repopulate and to address the obvious failings of the market,” as managing director of New Heartlands Brendan Nevin explains: “The area probably experienced the largest population loss of any inner urban area in England up from the period of 1950 to 2000. Something like half the population of Liverpool left over that period so there was a large issue about abandonment, dereliction and vacant land. In some areas of the Pathfinder there hadn’t been a private home built for nearly 100 years, the market had simply evaporated. Prices were down as low as £20,000 when the programme started and the vacancy rate was very high.”

Like any major programme it has not been without controversy. For example compulsory purchase orders for properties along the Edge Lane corridor in Liverpool were challenged in the courts, leading to a four-year legal battle.

Nevin says that the objections were not representative of the community as a whole. He said: “There has been a small number of very well publicised objections to CPOs. They have been on quite a small scale but have generated publicity that goes way beyond their actual community base. It probably delayed the scheme for four years, which has a really big impact on all of the residents who wanted to leave and wanted the scheme to go forward.”

While scores of properties have been demolished across Pathfinder areas New Heartlands has refurbished and renovated many more homes than it has knocked down. Nevin says the scheme is not about clearing neighbourhoods but encouraging people to stay.

“One of our real objectives is to prevent people from leaving an area,” he says. “It isn’t the case that we somehow want to gentrify the area.” He said that in many areas people tended to move away once they started to become successful and make money but if they could be encouraged to stay through better housing and environments the communities will get stronger over time.

Nevin says there have been three times as many renovations carried out as demolitions, adding: “For example Liverpool has now got 1,500 more dwellings than when we started. So despite the negative publicity that has sometimes been associated with the scheme we have actually renovated more than we have cleared and put more back in than we have taken out.”

The past couple of years have not just been a time of growth where housing is concerned and the ambitious Paradise Project, has seen 42 acres in the heart of the city regenerated.

The Liverpool ONE shopping centre, located where the first wet dock in the world was constructed in 1715, is a £1 billion development linking the existing shopping district with the waterfront.

Another new addition to the Liverpool skyline is the £164 million arena and convention centre (ACC) at Kings Dock, which opened its doors in 2008.

Financed by Liverpool City Council, English Partnerships (now the Homes and Communities Agency), the Northwest Regional Development Agency and European (ERDF) funding it made an economic contribution of more than £200 million in its first year of trading.

Both schemes tied in with Liverpool being appointed as the 2008 European Capital of Culture alongside Stavanger in Norway. The announcement saw the world’s attention turn to Merseyside for all of the right reasons, giving the area a massive boost.

Nevin acknowledges the role that becoming capital of culture has played in boosting Liverpool’s profile but points out that there is still work to be done. “The area has without a doubt changed dramatically and if you come into the centre of Liverpool now you see a new shopping centre and cultural facilities and you just don’t see the dereliction you saw in the 1980s,” he says. “The real task is connecting local disadvantaged communities to that and that is a really long-term process.”

Nevin said that while there have been some gains around worklessness, there are still real ongoing problems with deprivation and unemployment. “I wouldn’t want to underestimate those because if you come and visit Liverpool you can see that there is a significant community and regeneration social programme that is still needed,” he says. “It still needs serious support to make improvements.”

Merseyside has come a long way over the years, through good times and bad. The region is on the up and is building on its proud heritage and rich history to secure a bright future for its residents. And while much has already been achieved, there is still so much more to come.