Mapping out everyone’s memory lane

Jun 30 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The ambition is high – a picture of every street in Liverpool to make the most comprehensive folk history of any city in the world. David Charters reports.

WE HAVE all done it in secret moments of parting. You walk around the old house from room to room, touching every wall, window and hidden memory, saying a little goodbye and a thank you, as the lump swells in your throat.

The “you” is important here, because each house becomes a member of the family to those who have lived in it.

“That’s the house, where I was born,” says the mother to the child, and it is one of the most emotional sentences in our language.

Imagine, then, if we had pictures or photographs of every house in every street, road, block of flats, avenue or cul-de-sac in Liverpool and its surrounding areas – those standing now and those that have disappeared down the years.

And, to these pictures, you could add your own recollections about the neighbours, the celebrations, the sorrows, the dramas, the highs and the lows.

It could give Liverpool the most comprehensive record of folk-history in the world.

Millions of people have visited this city. Some settled, others moved on. Smoke plumed from the chimneys, full of wheezes and ghosts.

Children stared into the coals, seeing the glow of faces. The place throbs with stories. They should be told and they should be seen.

So it is appropriate that just such a programme, using all the benefits of modern technology, has started in our year as the European Capital of Culture.

The Friends of Liverpool Monuments have set up a website called the Liverpool Street Gallery to document every street in the “L” postcode area.

There are about 27,500 streets on Merseyside, which also includes Wirral, Sefton, St Helens and Knowsley, though there are no plans yet to include those boroughs on the website.

However, photographs of the numerous demolished streets will be included, as well as pictures of Liverpool through the ages to the present day.

So it is a vast task. More than 3,000 images have already been placed on the site, and these have attracted 44,000 viewers, who have sent some 700 comments for inclusion in the files.

Photographers from the Friends are also out and about with their cameras. Some gathered on Fazakerley Street, opposite the Cotton Exchange, to discuss the organisation’s biggest project so far.

The Friends began in 2003 with the intention of saving and promoting all that was best in Liverpool’s architecture, statues, memorials and other monuments, including the famous drinking fountains bestowed on the city in the 1850s by Charles Pierre Melly, whose family had made a fortune from the cotton trade.

It is now an influential and respected group, supported by eminent local people, including Andrew Pearce, MEP for Cheshire West between 1979 and 1989 and chairman of the Liverpool Heritage Forum; Robin Riley, sculptor and chairman of the Friends; the local historians Rob Ainsworth, Mike Kelly, Brenda Murray and Florence Gersten.

The idea began when Tony Siebenthaler, 46, a community activist, contacted Pat Neill, telephone engineer and Friends’ founder.