Response to Dave Ward's Guardian article.
By Liz Lacey - Director of Liverpool Centre for Arts Development www.lcad.org.uk

On reading “City of Tattered Dreams” I cannot help but reflect that Liverpool can never quite get it right in the eyes of the media.
On the one hand we are, as the lazy cartoon images have it, a city full of maudlin, self-dramatising, squabbling, n’er -do wells. We have basket-case politics and enjoy tribal feuds, in the intervals of taking to the streets in order to riot and shoplift. Secure in our role of eternal victim, we loll bout helplessly on benefits while our children top all known polls for premature pregnancies and drug-fuelled ASB-ism. And that’s just the view from the Daily Mail.
It is unarguable that the European Capital of Culture title offers the best chance, certainly in my lifetime, to help Liverpool to change these perceptions, as Glasgow started to do in1990. No one expects it to be a cure for all the well-documented evils that Liverpool has endured. No one sensible in Glasgow did either. But as Christine Hamilton Director of the Glasgow Centre for Cultural Policy Research says;
“It was important to assess the original expectations when looking at achievements of 1990. The European City of Culture status had been one solitary year, and had never been expected to change the world, or indeed, solve all Glasgow’s considerable social and economic problems.”
What it did do was to measurably, visibly and tangibly accelerate the process of urban regeneration.
New venues and spaces for cultural activities were founded; community projects were kick-started, and more Glaswegians discovered the cultural life of their own city than ever before.

If you spend some time asking people in Liverpool what they think about the current state of play respecting the Capital of Culture, you will get as many different answers as you could wish for. Undeniably there are issues regarding the way in which the Culture Company has chosen to communicate with the city thus far. . David Fleming Director of National Museums Liverpool demonstrates his grasp of the local character when he says, “In a city such as Liverpool, if people are asking questions, you have to answer them.”
Liverpool people abhor an information vacuum, and a lack of substantial events that excite them will not go unremarked - upon. In fact, it has become something of a fashionable pastime for arty folk in the city’s cooler bars to meet and draw up “Fantasy Football League” style programmes for 2008.

The Henshaw –Storey business will be mostly forgotten by 2008; how many people outside a city find internal conflict between Council leaders compelling? Unless of course, Robyn Archer has plans to dramatise it as a part of the European cabaret tradition of political satire, her area of expertise? .
Liverpool now has a new leader of the council, Warren Bradley, a man who has gathered much goodwill in his short tenure, and Mike Storey is still on board in a Special Initiatives post. He will have responsibility for the city’s Capital of Culture and 800th birthday celebrations. This could be seen as an indication of a more harmonious relationship, ensuring continuity and stability. But that would not be very interesting news.
There is also a lively campaign to have an elected mayor. Whatever else is said about politics in Liverpool, apathy does not seem to be a matter for criticism.
David Ward refers to the “sad flags and failed ambitions; inauspicious signs” with reference to the cancelled Cloud, Will Alsop’s might -have –been- iconic building, and to the abandonment of the tram project. However, it is advisable to put this in context. In regeneration and revival, a high percentage of projects are not realised. The important thing is that the environment for new projects and ideas to continue to blossom is established, and Liverpool now has that climate. Not in all corners of the city, but enough to make the difference which brought about opening of the sophisticated Met Quarter to open yesterday, and will bring the multi-million Governor Project and the new Arts and Design Academy, into being. Whether one’s perception of culture is a high-art highbrow year of justifiably obscure opera and impenetrable visual art or a populist phantasmagoria with a face-painter stationed at every street corner, and compulsory drum –majoretting in all schools, the clear intention to be diverse will only encourage a natural tendency in Liverpool to demonstrate its many facets. It is a complex and curious place, not easily understood. Attempts to pigeonhole and stereotype it are as recurrent as they are fruitless. Liverpool’s 2008 Year as European Capital of Culture will be extraordinary. It is an extraordinary place, and elicits a strong response, one way or another. It has always had a cultural and artistic impact on the rest of the world, punching far above its weight intellectually and creatively in relation to its periods of acute decline. David Ward quotes Sir Jeremy Isaacs, during his stint as Chair of the judges of the 2008 bid, as saying that “There was a sense that the whole city is involved and behind the bid, when Liverpool won in 2003”.
And there is still a massive degree of interest and involvement; discussions of artistic and creative matters take place naturally in this city. At every level there are arts organisations, arts leaders, practitioners, business organisations, public and private sector institutions, talking about and planning for 2008, and beyond. David Ward’s article, of course, presents a superficial view of the build-up to 2008. It will be widely read and discussed in the city, and may be a salutary foretaste for all of us involved of what will be if we do not work together to confound predictions of failure and dysfunction which any mention of Liverpool seems to elicit even now. We live here. We can’t afford it to be a “complete cock-up”.
Liverpudlians will remain, (and many are starting to return here in ever-increasing numbers, from the Scouse Diaspora), with our particular culture and our peculiar wealth of talent, long after all the flags are tattered. Liverpool has come too far to regress. We will welcome the world here in 2008, and in 2012 they will come back again. People always do. Perhaps David Ward will accept a preview invitation, and see how the announcements of the death of something that has yet to happen are, in common with Mark Twain's obituary notice, premature?