Museum Without Walls by Jonathan Meades

Author:Jonathan Meades
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: AMX - History of Architecture, Collection
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2012-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

the curse of bilbao

Groinwich! Potentialising potential. Scrofcastle! Going Places. Smeltbury! Enabling inspiration. Dundee! City of discovery. Bubochester! A runway to creativity. Griminster! We’re an energy pathway. Swarfield! Trailblazing connectivity. Newport! City of reinvention. Scurviedale! A town in a hurry. Oxterton! Networking receptivity. Scrapieburn! An opportunity compass. Southampton! Cruise capital of the UK. Longut! Incentivising incentive. Festerford! Meeting tomorrow’s challenge yesterday. Felchinborough! A world café. Newcafard-on-Sea! Regenerating regeneration.

The night of 29 May 1985 I was at Palavas les Flots near Montpellier. The hotel room telly was broadcasting herringbone tweed. I hurried along the street, then another. Café after bar was telly-free. I kept looking at my watch. Then, at last, a glimmer through a salted window. I entered the bar – which any other night might not have been the bar from hell – and, before even looking at the cantilevered telly, asked the barman if there was any score. He fixed me with a rheumy, possibly alcoholic, certainly psychopathic eye and replied menacingly: ‘Yeh. Thirty-five dead.’

This was when I realised that the European Cup Final at Heysel had not even begun. It didn’t get better. The house Alsatian, sprawled across the floor like a crocodile, had its master’s mien. The half-dozen or so punters were mutterers: ‘Angliches??? ’ooli-gans??? salopards??? meurtriers.’ Etc. There was no question of making an exit. The game began. It ought not to have been played. The accusatory stares continued.

Eventually an atypically conciliatory drinker suggested to his chums that I was not to blame. He addressed me and asked, what is it with the English, what is it with Liverpool? I pointed out that Liverpool was no more typical of England than Marseille, then the European race-hate capital. But, he insisted, they’re doing something about Marseille. (Whatever the something was hadn’t been apparent in that graffitied war zone a couple of days previously.) What are they doing about Liverpool? Well, some people would like to give it to Dublin, but Dublin doesn’t want it. And then, of course, they’ve got the Garden Festival. That is what they’re doing. My interrogator’s incredulity was no greater than my own when I realised what I had said. We laughed.

Football apart, Liverpool in the early ’80s was notable for strikes, Militant, riots and the loss of 20 per cent of available jobs and 10 per cent of its population. The then Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, sprung into action. He was a square peg in Margaret Thatcher’s second administration – whose motto was sauve qui peut. Heseltine, on the other hand, was a closet welfarist, he believed in statist noblesse oblige. He had the bright idea of solving all of Liverpool’s ills with a ‘Five Month Pageant of Horticultural Excellence and Spectacular Entertainment’. It proved to be the start of a new industry, the greatest of contemporary gravy trains. The Regeneration Industry.

Describe what was known, circa 1958 to 1973, as comprehensive redevelopment as Regeneration and it is stripped of its deserved connotations: crassly ill-conceived motorways through the centre

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