Mr Brocklebank: Off with his head

Apr 15 2008 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

THOSE who said 67-year- old Ringo Starr lost his head when, after opening the European Capital of Culture, he told Jonathan Woss that he missed nothing about the city, have been proved right.

A music lover has decapitated the life-size topiary figure of Ringo at Liverpool South Parkway station, but left the other fab three intact. How wise of the Hard Day’s Night Hotel to place out of reach its amusing, but perplexing statues of Gandalf, The Hobbit, Geronimo and Dave Dee.

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HAS Liverpool’s crown as outre sartorial style leader been misplaced on Dewsbury, West Yorkshire? Reporting on the estate where Shannon Matthews lives, The Sun newspaper describes how residents "regularly walk to the shops in their pyjamas up to mid- day . . . even in the rain".

Well-documented as a Merseyside habit, it’s taken five years to reach Yorkshire in a phenomenon called "Pennine drift".

Mr Brocklebank wonders if this Sun item is somehow linked to its ongoing attempt to retrieve Merseyside readers after its awful Hillsborough so-called "reports"?

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FANCY that: Liverpool City Council is hiring staff for what it officially calls the "legacy years" and this term is even used on their contracts, ie, post-Capital of Culture. So there is life after 2008 – and probably all too much like we know it.

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MR BROCKLEBANK has reported the desperate fate of many Liverpool trees which, including Canada Boulevard, were irrationally axed. Last week on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners Question Time, someone complained about increasing municipal pollarding, almost reducing trees to stumps.

The panel branded this as "council tree butchering" that endangered arboreal welfare and pleaded that local councils should discuss with locals before the axeman cometh. Let’s invite GQT on a Liverpool fact-finding tour, featuring Sefton Park’s 300 pollarded trees.

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ERRATUM: along with other critics, Mr Brocklebank attributed Liverpool’s recent dire planning decisions to Lady Doreen Jones, former council planning committee chair, including "The Three Grotesques" on Mann Island, the new Mersey Ferries "crazy shack" Pier Head terminal and No 6 Sir Thomas Street’s demolition. Mr Brocklebank apologises unreservedly to Lady Doreen, having realised after permission was granted to Maghull Developments to demolish the historic 1851 Josephine Butler House (a pioneering X-ray site), plus Manchester Dock and Bedford Road cinema, that the planning committee under new chair Cllr David Irving holds the city’s heritage in exactly the same regard.

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CURSE of Brocklebank: after his item about a giant beer bottle advert hoarding (not even for 2008 sponsor Cains) on the Pier Head’s listed Port of Liverpool Building, it has gone . .