Britain’s Ailing Port : Liverpool on Slow Road to Recovery

In the years since World War II, no West European metropolis had fallen further or faster into decline than Liverpool.

Once the principal gateway to the British Empire and home to one-seventh of the world’s merchant fleet, Liverpool since the early 1960s alone has lost a third of its population and nearly half its jobs.

A 1984 study ranking the economic health and quality of the European Communities’ 102 largest cities placed Liverpool 102nd.

“The only time potential investors mentioned the city’s name was as a joke to lighten the mood,” recalled Christopher Oakley, editor of the city’s leading newspaper, the Liverpool Echo.

Jokes May Be Over

But after decades of decline, there are signs the jokes may be over.

For Liverpool has begun to feel the impact of national economic revival which has already transformed much of Britain’s affluent southeast in and around London.

For skeptics who have long argued that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Draconian economic shock treatment has benefited only the nation’s haves at the expense of the have-nots, even the hint of revival in one of the country’s most desolate areas is considered a significant development.

Certainly no one is predicting overnight recovery for Liverpool. The endless rows of derelict factories, abandoned waterfront warehouses along the banks of the Mersey and jobless rates of 70%-80% in some inner-city pockets reflect the severity of the city’s problems.

But for the first time in the memory of all but the oldest of Liverpool’s 475,000 citizens, locals say they detect a mood of hope about the future.

Encouraging Signs

Among the encouraging signs:

-- Emigration from the city has slowed perceptibly, and unemployment, although still among the highest in the country at 23%, has begun to fall for the first time in over two decades.

-- A Ford Motor Co. plant at nearby Halewood, once infamous for its labor militancy, now routinely achieves its production targets. Tentatively, other industries have shown signs of interest in Merseyside, the area in and around Liverpool along the banks of the Mersey River. Even a local privately financed group named BOOM--Business Opportunities on Merseyside--has sprouted up to coax potential investors to take a look at the city.

-- A central government-financed $300-million refurbishment of derelict dockside land near the city center, replete with Europe’s largest maritime museum and the first branch of London’s famous Tate Gallery, has defied skeptics’ predictions of failure. It has also brought a flicker of life to Liverpool’s dying waterfront and, for residents, a place to go.

Construction of the next $50-million phase, for a sports and shopping center, is due to start later this year.

Collectively, these developments have provided an enormous boost of morale to a city that many have given up as a virtual lost cause.

“The biggest success is just overcoming the attitude that nothing can be done,” said Tony Potter, director of development for the Merseyside Development Corp., the body responsible for the dockside revival.

“For the first time I can remember, there’s a confidence, and people in Liverpool are saying, ‘Yes, it can be done. We can make it.’ The beginnings are modest, but they are there.”

Potter noted, for example, that locals scoffed at plans to include luxury apartments, a yachting marina and space for light industry in the dockside redevelopment, insisting that there was no demand for pricey housing, that industry was dying and that no one in his right mind would want to berth a pleasure boat amid Liverpool’s inner-city decay.

Apartments Selling Briskly

But the transit sheds converted for industrial space are already full, with a long waiting list. The riverside apartments are selling briskly at $85,000 to $200,000 each, and the marina has proven popular with boaters wanting to be near the open sea.

While some have questioned the choice of priorities in a city with so many desperate problems, even the project’s critics admit that it has provided an enormous boost to local morale.

“Things have changed,” said Keva Coombes, leader of Liverpool’s City Council, in an interview. “There’s a different atmosphere.”

One of the biggest changes is in the attitude of the city government.

Until last year, Liverpool was in the hands of a group of radical left-wing city councilors, professing an affinity to the teachings of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. They ignored central government directives to curb spending and, at one point, were forced to deliver severance notices to the city’s 31,000 municipal employees when doubt arose about their ability to meet the payroll.

But the majority of this group was disqualified from office after failing to set a property tax rate by deadline, then lost two-thirds of their seats in a subsequent election.

While Coombes stands to the left of the Labor Party’s center and only cautiously criticizes his colleagues of the radical left, he seems to have imbibed at least some of Thatcher’s own ideas about the need to foster a profit motive.

Addressing an international gathering of businessmen recently persuaded to view the city, Coombes urged them to come, to make money and take their profits--a message so astounding to Liverpool ears that the local press proclaimed it “ Perestroika on Merseyside,” using the word for the Soviet Union’s ambitious domestic reform program.

“The best political motive is self-interest, and our interest is to get jobs,” Coombes explained, brushing aside any suggestion he had converted to Thatcherism. “We need to break down people’s prejudices.”

Liverpool’s image has never been dazzling.

Lucrative Slave Trade

The city’s merchant class first grew fat on a lucrative slave trade in the early 1700s, shipping British-manufactured goods to West Africa in return for slaves, who were transported to the West Indies and traded for sugar, molasses and other spices in what became known as the Liverpool Triangle.

A century later, more than a quarter of a million Irish fleeing the potato famines of the 1840s settled in Liverpool, creating an abundance of cheap, casual labor and some of the most appalling slums in Europe.

Today, Liverpool remains the most Irish of English cities, a place dominated by a people who for generations have survived on their wits and have never forgotten an era where job security was measured in hours.

The foreman’s rejection of casual laborers--”You’re down for nothin’ “--is still used in the city, only now it is a judgment of failure in life rather than just for the day.

After reaching a peak population of just under 900,000 in 1937, Liverpool declined rapidly after World War II. With the empire crumbling and Britain’s focus shifted to Europe, Liverpool suddenly found itself isolated on the fringe of a declining region with almost no industry of its own.

A misguided public building boom of urban throughways and prefabricated concrete high-rises in the 1960s and early 1970s has left the city a bizarre blend of faded Victorian architectural splendor and some of the drabbest public housing anywhere.

“The best view of Liverpool,” local comedian Ken Dodd likes to deadpan, “is the view you get when you’re leaving.”

The port that employed 12,000 longshoremen as recently as the mid-1970s supports just 1,000 today. Industry lured into the area with government grants during the 1960s and early 1970s suffered such labor turmoil that many companies either cut back or gave up altogether and moved on.

A few years later race riots ripped through inner-city areas.

For a while, only an unusual mixture of energy, biting humor and moxie--as distinct as the thick Merseyside accent--seemed to keep Liverpool afloat.

Those who live here trace these qualities back to the city’s Irish overlay and its arduous history.

“We’re good at pricking pomposity, but we laugh at ourselves a great deal too,” noted a local disc jockey, Johnny Kennedy.

The widely used word Liverpudlian-- which substitutes “puddle” for the “pool” in Liverpool--to describe a resident of the city hardly smacks of pretension.

The city has produced an abundance of local comedians and an impressive array of other performing artists including actor Rex Harrison, singer Frankie Vaughan and the numerous pop groups of the 1960s’ Liverpool Sound, including the Beatles.

In the 1980s, Liverpool writers Willie Russell (“Educating Rita”), Frank Clarke (“Letter to Brezhnev”) and Alan Bleasdale (“Boys from the Blackstuff”) have all risen to prominence.

As in the past, the city’s pulse is best measured in its ever-crowded, beautifully ornate pubs, finished with skills of an earlier age by those who learned their craft on the interiors of the world’s great luxury liners that once called Liverpool home.

Through the smoke and din of a Friday night crowd, a cluster of regulars at the city’s popular Philharmonic pub gathered near a carved, polished mahogany partition and agreed that for Liverpool, there is no way to go but up.

And for the first time, many believe it might be possible.

Marshall, chief of The Times’ London Bureau, is on temporary assignment in Moscow.