A need for Plan Z

Nov 19 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

AS OUR spectacular culture year looms large on the horizon, Liverpool, almost to order, is embroiled in recriminations and controversy. It reminds me of that saying, why make things easy when you can just as easily make things difficult?

We have our volunteer cultural army brigade on the warpath over what is happening down on Mann Island. More on that later.

Then we had the long-awaited report into the collapse of this year’s Mathew Street Festival. It wasn’t exactly bedtime reading, but the report generated more questions than answers.

As I predicted some time ago, it identified a handful of individuals, shouldering the blame or fingered as scapegoats, depending on your point of view.

The breakdown in relationships among the top organisers, aided and abetted by poor communication, were the conspiring causes, it seems, when the 34 pages are digested.

That, in my view, looks at the trees and not the woods. Mathew Street is one of the biggest social events in the city’s calendar. A festival in which streets are closed to make way for a safe and happy carnival of music using outdoor stages should not need a rocket scientist in the driving seat.

What it does need is a plan B, C, D, etc, just in case the worst should happen, and being Liverpool the worst will almost certainly happen. Better have that Plan Z as a fallback.

Why didn’t the politicians, the sky-high waged executives and the team of advisors, all make sure they were up to speed on what was going on.

It seems incredible that a bit of a personality clash brought the whole thing crumbling down. Now we are told there is the equivalent of a War Cabinet, headed by Liverpool’s Churchillian leader, Warren Bradley, making sure there will be no repeat of this in our big Birthday Year.

So why wasn’t that War Cabinet in place last year? It seems the looming catastrophe spanned several months until it was too late.

There are so many issues in Liverpool that an orderly queue has to be formed these days. Latest is the decision by National Museums Liverpool to part company with the Danish architects who designed the under-construction Museum of Liverpool. I have always felt that such a museum makes more of a provincial statement about where we are as a city, rather than have something as a world-wide attraction. The saving grace was that the new building was to be faced in posh marble that would at least make it worthy of its place within our World Heritage Site. It is now to be finished in a much cheaper limestone, a decision we will eventually regret.

The Pier Head can be a hostile environment for buildings because of the impact of wind, rain, snow and ice. NML was given permission on the basis that the finish would be worthy of its place on the waterfront. Our planners should have told them where to go when they came up with the cheaper stone finish. Of course, it had to happen – otherwise how else could we live up to our reputation as a small-minded provincial town on the banks of a small river.