Category Archives: Arts, Culture And Heritage
Wirral’s Ness Gardens: A Place To Learn Whilst You Enjoy
Ness Botanic Gardens, owned by the University of Liverpool, are a delightful example of how learning and enjoyment can come together. They are the creation of a cotton merchant who wanted to share his absorbing interest in plants from across the world (and especially from the Himalayas) with the people of his hometown, Liverpool. This work, begun in 1898, continues to prosper to the present time.
Ness Botanic Gardens are on the Wirral near Chester, away from the River Mersey facing the splendid windswept views of the Dee Estuary which overlook the North Wales coast. They offer delightful views which take one back to more pastoral times, and include the habitats of many species of birds and wildlife.
This apparent tranquility and timelessness has not however prevented some very forward-looking management on the part of those responsible for the site. Just this week (14 April 2006) saw the opening of the new Horsfall Rushby Visitor Centre, designed alongside a wider programme of development to encourage year-round enjoyment of this special location.
Where academic excellence meets family fun
The story of the Gardens is both unusual and enlightening. They were created by a Liverpool cotton merchant, the Fabian Arthur Kilpin Bulley, who wanted to establish in Britain the ‘new’ Himalayan and Chinese mountain plants he had funded the plant explorers George Forrest and Frank Kingdom Ward to discover . And so in 1898 began the adventure which was to become Ness Gardens, a place of elegance and education, as it welcomed vistors from near and far.
In 1942 Arthur Bulley died and left his ever-expanding Gardens to his daughter Lois (1901-1995), who presented them to the University of Liverpool in 1948, with an endowment of £75,000 per annum on the understanding that they be kept open for the public. Her intention that this beautiful place continue to fascinate and inform both young and older people is reflected in the current Visitor Centre, scientific programme and educational developments.
Journey of discovery
Our own involvement in Ness Gardens began back in the 1970s, when a reseach student friend at Liverpool University experienced what, at that time, seemed like a cruel blow. He had been assiduously observing a derelict site in the city centre to find out what sort of road-side plants and grasses best grew on such unpromising terrain when, because of a misunderstanding by a Council employee about location, a ton of topsoil was dumped on his experimental venue. The anguish was terrible – should there be an official complaint because the experiment was ruined; or should there be celebration of the act of reclaiming the derelict site for better use, albeit by mistake?
Resolution of this dilemma arrived in the form of an offer to recreate the dereliction by transporting a huge load of rubble to a fenced-off location at the edge of the University’s Ness Gardens. Our humble role in this adventure was occasionally to give our friend a lift over to the site to continue his work. The experiment was repeated, the results brought forth much in the way of understanding how to use grasses to reclaim land, the young scientist’s career was launched to great acclaim – and we became regulars at Ness Gardens.
The research and development continues
The striking thing about Ness Gardens is that, not only does it change dramatically with the seasons, but it has consistently expanded and grown over the years. The Gardens have spread across much more of the site, with a growing number of areas of specialist interest (the latest is the ‘Prehistoric Garden’ just created from an existing clay marl pit); and the world-class science has similarly developed over time.
Here is a place always worth the journey, where there is a conscious intention to deliver first-class research in the context of a welcome for everyone. Support the Friends of Ness Gardens if you can – and be sure to visit their new Centre and see the Gardens for yourself.
Good News On Hope Street
It has been over a decade since the campaign to renew Liverpool’s Hope Street was first mooted; but now at last we’re almost there. To mark the event, all the partners involved have agreed to host a day in June [later deferred to Sunday 17 Septmeber ’06] of arts-based celebration on the street. The arts, as ever, will give us common cause and help us to enjoy together the space which we have all been hoping to see refurbished for so long.
Today marks a new phase in the development of Liverpool’s Hope Street Quarter.
It may not have looked much to the casual observer – just a handful of people talking about an event in June. But to me it seems really significant: we, that is HOPES: The Hope Street Association and Liverpool Vision and the City Council have agreed to co-host a celebration of the completion of the Hope Street refurbishment, open to all who want to be there, and acknowledging the very complex partnerships which we have had to nurture over the past few years to get to where we are today.
The arts as common ground
Here, if ever there was one, is an example of how people coming from very different places can find common ground – a particularly apt metaphor in this instance – through the arts and community activity. If everything goes according to plan, mid June this year will see people from many communities sharing a friendly, family, fun event in Hope Street, enjoying the many ways in which we can all become involved in arts and community activities. [Later note: the event eventually came about on 17 September ’06, as part of a wider Hope Street Festival Day.]
The connectivity is why this event is so important for me. On the one hand we have very large organisations – the North West Development Agency in this instance – and on the other, we hope, the smallest arts groups and people from local communities, all sharing the successful completion of a long and testing project, over a decade in the making.
We’re not quite there yet – there are still many other things to attend to as we make progress on this exciting regeneration programme – but we’re well on the way. And the door is open to everyone who wants to be involved!
From Euston To Ecology, Engineering And Enterprise With The Virgin Trains Windowgazer
Travel takes many forms. The idea behind the ‘Windowgazer Guide’, a booklet explaining what can be seen as one’s train travels from London Euston northwards, is excellent. Here is a concept which can take us not only on physical journeys, but also on journeys of discovery of many sorts, scientific, environmental, cultural and much more.
How many people know that, as their train passes Stafford on the way northwards from London Euston, they are right by the 360 acres of the Doxey Marshes, an especially important breeding ground for lapwing, redshank, snipe, yellow wagtail, sedge, warbler and pochard? Or that a short while thereafter as they get to Crewe they are at the centre of a town celebrated in 1936 by W H Auden and Benjamin Britten in a documentary (Night Mail) extolling the work of the Royal Mail trains?
These are two of the interesting facts which I learnt from the Train Manager as he read from a travel guide over the public address system, on my journey home from Euston just this week.
It’s one of those odd co-incidences that the same day I ‘discovered’ the Windowgazer Guide I also learnt that today (9 April 2006) is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s greatest bridge builders, Isambard Kingdon Brunel – the man, so my Windowgazer Guide tells me, who came with his colleague engineer Thomas Locke especially to observe the installation of Robert Stephenson’s pioneering Britannia tubular bridge, now spanning the Menai Strait which divides Angelsey from the rest of Wales. My interest already alerted by the commentary on my train journey, I found the story of Brunel immediately relevant and memorable.
Always something new
This has set me pondering the many ways in which we can learn something new every day.
The Windowgazer Guide I saw is a free publication available on the Virgin Train North West line from Euston to Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. You obtain it from the refreshment carriage bookshelf, and it offers all sorts of interesting information about your journey.
The scope for this sort of publication, drawing together information across the whole range of arts and science is enormous. And it’s not ‘just’ trains which offer opportunities of this sort. Almost every journey does the same.
Bringing local knowledge to bear
The trend towards local access to the internet, be it via schools and community centres, libraries, housing associations or whatever, affords huge scope here. It would be great to see projects across the country which encourage local people to share their knowledge via the internet so that we can enjoy journeys illuminated by fascinating facts and ideas, wherever we go. What we learn might sometimes spark new and beneficial ideas of all sorts, who knows?
Perhaps there’s a way that someone could use the ‘Grid‘ to make available a route map of the U.K., with trainlines, roads, canals and whatever else marked out, onto which individuals and local communities could add their particular knowledge of where they live and work?
Getting from A to B is one form of travel. Sharing information and enjoying new ideas is another, perhaps even bigger, adventure.
World Health Day
‘Working together for health’ is this year’s slogan for World Health Day (today).
The World Health Organisation (WHO) quite rightly asks that we take time just for one day in the year to think about what ‘Health’ actually means. So today, 7 April 2006, is World Health Day.
This year’s strapline is ‘working together for health’. Reduction in child mortality, improvements in maternal health and combatting HIV / AIDS, malaria and other diseases are amongst the Millennium Development Goals ** which all Member States are signed up to meet by the year 2015.
[** The other five goals are eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women, environmental sustainability and a global parnership for development.]
A time to reflect?
But here we are in Britain, one of the half-dozen most wealthy countries in the world, and even we don’t get it right on all counts. There is plenty to worry about in the health of our nation; but it cannot be said, as of some other countries, that anyone ‘has’ to starve or die of cold, lack of clean water or because of any of the other horrendous experiences of people in other parts of the world. In the U.K. we have choices, and we have resources, which really do mean this never has to happen.
I say this neither (I hope) to make inappropriate comparisons – poverty in health or anything else in the U.K. is relative; poverty elsewhere is grimly absolute – nor to offer bland pronouncements about what we ‘ought’ to do to reduce such awful suffering in other areas of the globe.
What I seek to understand more clearly is how we can think in a more joined-up way.
Only connect…
We in Britain, like those in other first world countries, mostly know that how we treat our bodies and what we do to promote sustainability are critical both for ourselves and to what happens to people elsewhere, as well as people here. We know too that responsibility for this lies with us personally and as parents, as well as with ‘the government’, or ‘them’.
There’s a message here. It’s at base very simple. The fundamental question is, how do we deliver action?
If World Health Day does nothing else, perhaps it encourages us to reflect how, across the globe, we are all interconnected and interdependent. The ‘links’ are there, on the internet and, even more importantly, in our hearts and minds.
Time Is Energy (And ‘Clocks Forward’ Daylight Uses Less)
‘Daylight saving’ is a strange notion. But ‘daylight energy saving’ is a very different consideration. How we arrange the hours of light and darkness across our working day has many impacts – which makes it all the more curious that so little high profile or current research has been focused on British Summer Time and rationales for why the clocks ‘go back’ in the Winter.
My recent piece on British Summer Time has drawn a lot of comment, both on and off this website.
There are people who seem simply not to mind whether / when it’s light or dark as they go about their daily business, but there are many others who have responded quite strongly in terms of their need for as much daylight as possible. It must be very helpful in some ways not to mind how dark it is, but it’s quite incomprehensible to others that there are folk who genuinely ‘don’t mind’. Perhaps it’s rather like being ‘colour blind’ – if you don’t perceive the difference between red and green you just accept (and may not even know about) it; or maybe some of us have physiologies which are more photo-sensitive than others.
Daylight saving is energy saving
The most important thing to come out of the discussions so far, however, is not that people may have different personal preferences, but that the terms of engagement in this debate are becoming clearer.
One striking aspect of so-called ‘daylight saving’ which is emerging, alongside the prime safety considerations, is its significance not only potentially for business efficiency, but also, even more crucially, for energy. It does begin to look very much as though more ‘summertime’ would keep energy consumption down.
Where’s the evidence?
A big surprise in all this is the paucity of serious publicly available evidence other than on safety (avoidance of accidents). It seems in some respects that the last substantial governmental research in this area was conducted in 1989.
That was now seventeen years ago. Since then, it need hardy be said, much has changed.
Business and technological practices are much different from those dismal years of two decades ago. Our consciousness of the energy crisis and of ecological issues is far better developed now than it was then. The public (electorate) is now far more aware of the issues of sustainability than they could possibly have been in the 1980s.
What’s the cost-benefit of ‘daylight saving’?
So where is the cost-benefit analysis of the different ways in wihich we might distribute the eternally pre-ordained number of daylight hours we have at our disposal, summer and winter? Common sense suggests that arranging things so there’s as much daylight as possible in the hours when most people can use it is a good start.
If anybody really knows the answer, please just let us know!
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled
BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)…..
Read the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
The Clocks Go Forward … But Why, Back Again?
British Summer Time is welcomed by almost all of us – more daylight when we can use it is much appreciated, as Lord Tanlaw’s proposed ‘Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill’ acknowledges, for reasons of health, safety, energy savings and business benefit. So why do we need to revert to the darkness next Autumn? The answer appears to be historical drag, a reluctance to be ‘European’, and an obdurate insistence by some of national identity over common well-being.
Like 99% of the rest of the UK population, I’m really looking forward to the extra hour of evening light which will be ours as of this weekend. We may lose an hour of sleep just one Sunday morning, but then we get months of beautiful daylight at hours when we can actually enjoy them. It can’t come too soon.
It was always a huge puzzle to me why the ‘experiment’ to keep British Summer Time all year seemed to go so badly wrong when it was tried in 1968 to 1971. Then I learned that it was nothing to do with sensible allocation of daylight hours for nearly all of us – it was essentially a sop to the Scottish Highlands, where apparently people demanded the right to dark evenings for us all, so that they had a bit more daylight in the morning.
Why Highlanders couldn’t just adjust their working day a bit if they so like first light, is beyond me.
Safety – and Health – take a back seat
Since the missed opportunity of thirty five years ago, things have moved on. We now know about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and about the net increase in accidents – acknowledged in many countries – which wintry Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) brings in its wake – even for Scotland.
So there really is no excuse for any failure to support Lord Tanlaw’s current private Parliamentary Bill to adopt Single Double Summer Time (SDST) for an experimental three years from 29 October this year. The idea has the support of ROSPA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) and of PACTS (the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety) – who jointly last tried to effect such a change via Nigel Beard MP’s 10-minute bill in 2004. The previous time the change to all-year so-called ‘daylight saving’ was attempted before that was in 1994, with a Bill promoted by Nigel Waterson MP.
This debate has therefore now emerged as a matter of both safety and, equally importantly, health. The epidemiology of the proposed time shift suggests that it would not only reduce accidents, but also promote health; people would be more active in the winter, with beneficial effect to both physical and mental well-being.
My national identity before my health (and yours)?
The debate seems to boil down to two lines of argument:
Firstly, that it is the inalienable right of Scots people to conduct their morning farming activities in daylight – a ‘right’ which would be preserved in Lord Tanlaw’s bill, because it expressly accedes that the Scottish (and Ulster and Wales) Parliament/s could adopt current ‘winter time’ if they so determined; and
Secondly, that this is some sort of ‘European plot’, against farmers milkman and postal workers (…), foisting ‘non-British time’ on us – despite the additional difficulties which British ‘local’ winter time causes for companies seeking business across both Europe and wider afield. (It’s rather a surprise to learn in Hansard 8 Dec. 2004, Column 584W, that the Department of Trade and Industry has not conducted much research since 1989 (Cm 722) on potential economic and social effects of the ‘biannual time change’.)
Don’t play politics against common sense
Let us put aside the obvious issue that very few indeed of us live on farms (and that for many the sight of a postal worker before 10 a.m. – or a milkman at all – causes astonishment these days) and just focus on the facts.
Health and safety are what make our lives better. Not nationalities. And who wants his or her national identity to be seen as an obstacle to healthier and safer lives anyway?
~ ~ ~
The full debate about BST is in the section of this website entitled
BST: British Summer Time & ‘Daylight Saving’ (The Clocks Go Back & Forward)….. Specific articles include:
Making The Most Of Daylight Saving: Research On British Summer Time
The Clocks Go Forward… And Back… And Forward…
SaveOurDaylight: Victor Keegan’s Pledge-Petition
British Summer Time Draws To A Close
Time Is Energy (And ‘Clocks Forward’ Daylight Uses Less)
Read the discussion of this article which follows the book E-store…
Fire, Ice, Frost And Comets – A Lesson In Learning?
How we learn is always more complicated than we might imagine. The evocation of ‘fire and ice’ by both poet Robert Frost and, much later, NASA scientist Donald Brownlee, is an example to hand. Science and the arts alike depend for their impact ultimately on imagination and creativity, as well as rigour and formal insights.
Many years ago I was an American Field Service International Scholar, spending my senior high school year in Phoenix Arizona. This was a very ‘different’ experience to any I had had before or since, meeting an enormous range of people not normally encountered in suburban Birmingham England, my family home town at the time.
One of the enormous number of things I learned in Phoenix was the vast variety of interests to be found in a large American high school. And, drilling down from this, I came across a group of enthusiastic young people who Actually Read Poetry – and especially the poetry of Robert Frost, who was born on 26 March 1874 and died in 1963, not that long before I went to the States….. In a way we were perhaps a prototype Dead Poets Society, but with no sting in the tail.
A direct voice
Then a student of science, my knowledge of poetry at the time was (and sadly remains) pretty modest, but Robert Frost’s poems fascinated me. They are direct and elemental – qualities I do not enjoy in American classical music – but also somehow quizzical, which made them very challenging in a gentle sort of way; I was never sure quite what, apart from the pastoral or earthy images, they intended to evoke. And this was especially true of Frost’s Fire and Ice, which I learnt off by heart, and can indeed still quote:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
I subsequently discovered that there has been a huge amount of academic and also – engagingly – popular commentary on this poem, but at that time it simply drew me into a world away from the everyday, somewhere unknown and mysterious.
Where science meets art
Given the impression Fire and Ice had on me all those years ago, I was rather startled to read the BBC News online a few days ago, reporting Dr. Donald Brownlee, as chief scientist of the Nasa Stardust mission, on evidence that comets are ‘born of fire as well as ice’.
Immediately I was transported from a murky March day in Liverpool, back some decades past to the excitement of a group of young people in a sunny classroom in Phoenix Arizona, all seeking to understand the meanings, metaphorical and material, of the complex new world into which we were about to emerge as adults.
Frost had written of fire and ice as the future destruction of world; Brownlee spoke of the birth millennia ago of physical pieces of the universe; but the elements they referred to were the same. It seems fleetingly that we are back to the phlogiston philosophers, those earlier seekers after truth, but with an up-to-the-minute twist.
All ideas are creative
Here are modern observers interpreting their experience according to their different professional disciplines, each of them evoking, for me at any rate, striking and thought-provoking images. We all carry our own paradigms as the backdrop to our understandings, but explanations are worth little without imagination to bring them alive.
I may well have been studying science when I was in the States, but Robert Frost’s poems stayed with me at least as strongly as any of the factual lessons I learned.
It would be untrue to say the science left me icy, and the poetry set my imagination on fire. But without doubt in both instances the elemental images have been retained far more strongly than the formal educational input.
Survival Of The Fittest In The Marketplace, But Not For Life On Earth?
‘Survival of the fittest’ is often used to justify harsh business and other practices; but those who adopt this socio-economic position may also subscribe to ‘Creationist’ or ‘Intelligent Design’ notions about how life on earth has come about and diversified. This strange amalgum of beliefs arises from a lack of intellectual rigour which shows very clearly why Creationism should not become part of any serious school science curriculum.
It seems that Creationism is to be a feature of a new GCSE Biology curriculum in England. Whilst we have assurances that Creationism is not to be taught ‘as a subject’ I must admit to serious concerns about either Creationism or its close cousin, ‘Intelligent’ Design’ becoming part of the mainstream science curriculum.
General Studies can be a good place to discuss the ‘nature of science’ issues that arise from looking at Creationism or Intelligent Design, and maybe Religious Studies can offer perspectives on (non-)belief systems, but Science as a subject should probably not include subjects which are, quite simply, not subject to serious scientific scrutiny.
A conundrum of conflicting beliefs
One of the strangest things about the proponents of Intelligent Design and / or Creationism is that, for the most part, they have socio-economic beliefs which fit well within the Evolutionary Theory which they so strongly reject as an explanation of biological difference.
How can ‘survival of the fittest’ be seen to explain, and be acceptable, in terms of socio-political and economic / business affairs, but not biological ones?
Underlying this conundrum is perhaps a sense of preordination, that things are ‘given’ and cannot be changed on the whim of mere human beings; and this sense fits very helpfully into much of right-wing politics. But for those of us who respect the idea of science as a discipline and mode of knowledge, this is if anything completely the wrong way around.
Millennia to ‘change’ biology, but maybe minutes to change our own behaviour?
Living things change naturally over the millennia, ‘responding’ (i.e. surviving or not) to their contexts and inherent make up. This is a very long term and complex business.
On the other hand, human beings’ behaviour can, because we can perceive ourselves and reflect on what we do, change dramatically in the course of a single life time. ‘Intelligent Design’ is something we can all usefully engage in our own behaviour and outlook – not something which we need to dream up to ‘explain’ the amazing way in which the world as we know it has evolved over millions of years.
If survival of the fittest can be called upon by right wing thinkers to account for economic behaviour, they surely don’t have to devise other, quite undemonstrable, ‘explanations’ for the diversity of life on earth…. which leads me to wonder what less obvious reasons there may be for this strange conjunction of beliefs.
Let’s Celebrate International Women’s Day, Today (8th March 2006)
International Women’s Day is not a huge occasion for most people; but maybe it could be if we all grasped this annual opportunity to examine and where possible to celebrate, on a year-on-year basis, what progress has been made in gender equality. A start could be made, Monday Women decided, by ensuring we learn Herstory alongside His.
How does one ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day? And, indeed, should one? This was one of the topics discussed by Monday Women in Liverpool, today.
Given that women make up over 50% of the population of the UK, I suppose I shall be impressed when we are also invited to celebrate International Men’s Day… but I do know, really, that this misses the point at least for now.
Anyway, we all do what we can. One year we even managed to produce a chamber concert including previously unheard music by the composer, Dame Ethel Smyth (who probably wrote the music around the very time when first glimmers of the idea of IWD came into being, not that far from where she was studying in central Europe). And on many occasions there have been conferences, readings and much else to recognise the parts women play in contemporary society.
Not a big issue for women or men?
But generally people don’t get very excited about International Women’s Day, as far as I can see. I wish they would. It would be excellent if, on this day, we not only celebrated the contributions of many thousands of unseen, unheard women in our local communities, but also began to ask, really seriously, just why are they so unacknowledged?
There’s a lead story in The Independent today about how campaigners say that unless urgent action is taken on the status of women, the Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty, infant deaths and standards of education will not be met… but The Indy also reports that only one in four British women counts herself a feminist.
For those of us who have worked over many years to seek empowerment of women alongside men this is in some respects a truly puzzling and disappointing figure; but against it we need to ask what proportion of women in previous generations would taken this label. My guess, overall, is fewer than we imagine, despite Rosie the Riveter and all she taught us.
Herstory…
So let’s make a start by being a bit more realistic. If young people don’t know much about how things were (and how many young people actually want to look backwards at that point in their lives?) they will also not know about how things have changed. We more experienced feminists need to work from what is – i.e. an ahistoric perspective in which all that is wrong now actually seems to younger people to be ‘worse’ than what was before – and to find ways of challenging that strategically, not personally.
Rather than feeling upset that what we have worked for is not understood – upsetting though in my heart I must admit this is – those of us who champion gender equality need to find ways of ensuring that HERstory is told, to everyone, alongside HIStory. Then we shall be able to demonstrate what has already been achieved and, critically, to see more clearly where the obstacles to further progress lie.
Whose responsibility?
In curriculum terms, responsibility for herstory obviously lies with the schools and the government. But in other ways it lies with us all. I would like to see a focus on International Women’s Day 2007 on what each aspect of our daily lives has offered over the past year in terms of opportunities and life experience for women and men. Could this be a challenge for the media, and for us all? An agenda we could start to set now, for next year and all the years which follow?
In the meantime, Monday Women have said it already today on our e-group – have a great day!
Carnival, Festival Or Fiesta?
Different meanings apply to the words ‘carnival’, ‘fiesta’ and ‘festival’, but these are not always apparent in their day-to-day usage. The cultural, religious and indeed sometimes class-related nuances of these words influence decisions about what is appropriate for whom. But this may not help us to see that ideas of ‘excellence’ are not necessarily at all the same as the notion of ‘elitism’. Nonetheless, this distinction is very important, and never more so than in cities such as Liverpool, as they strive to re-invent themselves.
When is a series of celebratory perfomances a ‘Carnival’, when is it a ‘Festival’ and when is it a ‘Fiesta’?
My curiosity about these words was first aroused in the early 1990s, when we began to talk about resurrecting the Hope Street Festival in Liverpool. There is a tradition stretching back many years of Festival events in Liverpool – not least the Hope Street events (in some of which I was involved as a student) in 1977 for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and in the city as a whole through several decades before then.
Changing expectations
What rapidly became apparent when we began to talk with people in the 1990s however was that there were several very different undersandings about what a contemporary ‘Festival’ might be – and that most of them did not at all equate to my previous expectation that a Festival in Liverpool would be something along the lines of those in Edinburgh, Harrogate or, say, any of the Three Choirs cities.
Liverpool does indeed still have an annual ‘Festival‘, but that is a competitive event, mostly for children and amateur groups, and originally driven by a number of determined local citizens, such as the late Dennis Rattle, father of Sir Simon, and members of the Rushworth family (who had a music shop in the city). This performing arts competition, though in a fine British tradition, is neither a festival in the sense of a programme of formal professional events, nor a ‘fringe‘ in the sense that, say, Edinburgh has one.
Rather, it seemed that what people across the city expected from a modern festival around Hope Street was something in my mind more akin to a fiesta or carnival, perhaps along the lines of the event which has subsequently developed in Liverpool’s Mathew Street.
The formal definitions
These different understandings, which took a while to draw out from discussions, sent me off to look for the dictionary. What I found is interesting. The respective Oxford Concise Dictionary definitions are:
Carnival ~ festivities usual during period before Lent in R.C. countries; riotous revelry; travelling circus or fair; festivities esp. occurring at regular date
Festival ~ feast day, celebration, merry-making; periodic musical etc. performance(s)
Fiesta ~ religious festival in Spanish-speaking countries; festivity, holiday
All the terms I investigated arise from religious events, and usually Roman Catholic ones specifically – an interesting piece of background information in a city such as Liverpool, with in some parts its strongly Catholic, working class traditions.
Festivals are what you make of them
This has set me thinking. There is perhaps a tension here between what people in different places, with different previous experience, expect from a Festival. For the people of Liverpool, the large majority of whom have probably only a passing acquaintance with Edinburgh, Harrogate, Worcester, Salisbury, Cheltenham or other cities which host formal Festivals, the expectation is that celebratory performance will be community-based and, indeed, probably actually conducted on the street. A good example of this is the events offered by Hope Street Ltd, an arts training organisation in Liverpool.
Likewise, when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra decided to start a summer concerts series some years ago, it chose to do so under canvas and on the waterfront, on a ‘Pops‘ basis. (Since then, the event has taken a course which means that the RLPO is scarcely involved at all.)
Expectations can be important
There are however potential dangers in this apparent democratisation of performance art. Firstly, if people in a city are not encouraged to expect Festival performances by visiting artists such as we might expect in Edinburgh, Cheltenham or wherever, they are unlikely to value them; and the message that ‘excellence’ (both indigenous to the city and offered by visitors) is not the same as ‘elitism’ may be lost.
And, secondly, Liverpool will in 2008 become the European Capital of Culture. We in Liverpool may well have much to show visitors from Europe and beyond about how to engage local (largely working class) communities in arts performance – and I am genuinely eager that we should. But it is unlikely that visitors from further afield will be impressed by this if it is not backed up by evidence that we can also provide what many of them, from their previous experience, may expect in addition – which is a fine array of first rate professional offerings very visibly supported by the local populace.
In other words, there is still a lot of audience capacity building to be done in Liverpool before 2008, if we are to impress our very welcome visitors as we would wish. And time is short. Carnivals and fiestas are great; but they need to be nurtured alongside festivals of the sort offered by other sophisticated and ambitious cities, if we in Liverpool are to take maximum advantage of the possibilities now on the horizon for our Year as European Capital of Culture.
Dreaming Realist 