Proud citizens of a world apart

Mar 4 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The whole world should feel Liverpudlian, say the enthusiasts behind leaflets helping tourists appreciate the city’s sculptural glories. David Charters reports

THE sky spreads like a great dish-cloth, grey as a mourner’s suit, and the feet on the pavement outside are scurrying to offices in the expectation of rain.

It could only be England.

But the young woman staring from the window says she doesn’t feel English, or even British.

Why is that then? “Well, I’m from Liverpool,” she says. “That’s different, you know. I feel a Liverpool person.”

The rain finally comes, in lazy splatterings against the glass.

And the three companions of Louise O’Brien seem sprung by enthusiasm for her observation, as they, too, contemplate the city.

So many Liverpudlians feel the same way, a people apart. Now millions of tourists from many lands will learn why some inhabitants of this city, which undoubtedly belongs to the UK, have that strange passion – citizens of the world, rooted in one of its greatest ports.

This quartet are among those behind photographic/information pamphlets about Liverpool’s World Heritage Site. The first of these is out now. When the other two are published, the ambition is to extend them into a book, celebrating the city’s great sculptures, in the context of the buildings and monuments around them and, more surprisingly, the shameful neglect from which some have suffered down the years.

The project and the special points of interest are linked to a series of websites.

It is a simple idea to introduce tourists to the mercantile and cultural quarters of Liverpool, developed during a period emerging prosperity, when the port was nearing its peak, at the pulse of international trading.

But to Louise, brought up in the Sefton Park and Cressington Park districts of Liverpool, it is more personal than that. Long before the official people with their fancy job titles and elasticated CVs had begun talking about the World Heritage Site or the European Capital of Culture, her imagination had been opened to the possibilities of Liverpool by the best guide there is, her own father – a patriot to the marrow and one of the city’s finest characters.

When you hear Fred O’Brien talk about this place – its heroes, ships, scallywags, war memorials, writers, homes, parks and gardens, cheats, merchant palaces and politicians, everything that makes a city – you know you’re in the company of someone who cares fervently.

Ironically, Louise, 40, who married last year, is now project manager of English Heritage (North West). “I have never felt as though Liverpool was England,” she says. “I don’t think this is like England. Liverpool is absolutely like nowhere else.

“When I started working for English Heritage, I said to my dad’s sister, Pat, off the cuff, ‘Isn’t it funny me working for English Heritage and I don’t even think of myself as English?’.

“She said, ‘Well, what do you think of yourself as, then?’. I said, ‘from Liverpool, it’s not necessarily the same thing’.

“You see, I was very lucky. I was taken round Liverpool’s World Heritage Site long before other people knew we had one. Dad always taught me to look above eye level – roofs, anything with slate. His father was a master roofer. He would comment on the beauty and curves in carved numbers on walls. He inspired in me a sense of curiosity about public art in particular. He made me think of history as physical and that it was only history if someone marked it as such.

“I was interested in people saying that the World History Site was in perpetuity, but that is only so if people look after what is in the site, including the metal of the statues.

“When I was little, Dad would take me to the docks, on ships, around Sefton Park and into churches – around the Albert Dock before it was restored,” adds Louise, the eldest of three girls and a former pupil of King David and Bellerive High School. “Dad talks to me as though I was a bloke.”

In those days, hung in the memory, when Fred, now 68, was the pathfinder, filling Louise with a sense of wonder, he said that she should always be proud to be a Liverpudlian because the city had given the world so much.