Passengers all at sea with new cruise terminal
Jul 16 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post
WHAT great news that at last, after no more than a gap of 33 years, Liverpool is to get its ocean liner landing stage back. The time taken for the city council to reinstate this is symptomatic to the extent that the city during those years turned its back on the very attribute on which it was created.
Sadly, in spite of spending £19m, we’re not getting “the full monty” in cruise terminal terms. Ships will not be able to start and finish cruises at the new City of Liverpool Cruise Terminal, as bizarrely the terms of the grant-funding for construction are to stimulate in-bound tourism from visiting cruise liners only. Neither are there any baggage-handling facilities, the council cruise manager, Angie Redhead, tells me.
Surely round cruises from Liverpool would also bring cash into the city? Only the South East has more cruise passengers than the North West.
Can’t they be encouraged to stay in the city and, say, attend theatres or concerts? Instead, Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, which has soldiered on with its summer programme out of Liverpool for five years, have passengers tolerating the dismal Langton Dock Cruise Terminal (basically a shed), which is the worst of its kind I’ve experienced anywhere in the world. The Liverpool newcomer, Thomson Cruises, will presumably also berth here.
Once upon a time, Liverpool always deeply acknowledged that it was the sea from which its wealth derived.
Any Liverpool building which carries sculpture has motifs concerned with the sea and money. Banks, insurance buildings and shops are trimmed like wedding cakes with Neptunes, mermaids and cornucopias of flowing cash.
My favourite event concerning Liverpool’s gratitude was the marriage to the sea ceremony, when a symbolic ring was thrown into the Mersey, binding the city and river together.
But like many long relationships, such feelings of mutual benefit have faded and not survived the changing world.
But the strangest aspect is the current boom in cruising, which now appears unstoppable, was started by two obso- lete Liverpool transatlantic liners. It is because of these two sturdy, well-built passenger ships’ innovative success in the second chapter of their lives that the cruise industry is now so buoyant (yes, pun intended) to have forced the city fathers to want to be involved in ocean travel once again.
Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Britain and Empress of Canada were pensioned off, rendered redundant by air- lines, which in turn caused the landing stage to be scrap- ped, with no consideration given to a replacement.
These two white empresses, formerly stalwarts of the Liverpool-Greenock- Quebec-Montreal run, found their way into the fledgling Carnival Cruise Lines, a company which invented the bogglingly simple concept of “the Fun Ship”. Out went the stuffy atmosphere of starchy cruises as a once-in-lifetime trip for the upper classes. In came informal, no-frills one-week-duration cruises for the masses, running from Miami. The ships were tarted up and their dark north
Atlantic interiors brightened for the Caribbean. Out went ballrooms, in came discos; out went formal first-class restaurants, in came fast food and self-service. The formula was a huge success, although the founder, Ted Arison, had to mortgage his Israeli farm to raise the finance for the project. The company was so short of cash initially that, to save on paint, the company’s funnel livery (still worn today) was a minor modification of the Canadian Pacific colours.
From this shrimp of an operation grew the leviathan of Carnival Cruises which dom- inates cruising.
Besides its own brand fleet, the parent company now owns, among other world-famous and venerable shipping lines, Britain’s once-mighty Cunard and P&O, plus the Dutch equivaent of Cunard, Holland America.
Soon that other dominant sea-faring nation, the Norwegians, were also in the Caribbean employing similar style ships. Having lured so many Americans to take cruises, inevitably these companies came into Europe and we are now benefiting.
Peel Holdings, which now owns Mersey Docks & Harbour Co, has proposed its own landing stage so perhaps passengers who sail from Liverpool will one day get the facilit- ies they deserve.
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