Issue 95 / Dec18/Jan19

a weekly family games club, a beautiful spacious garden and Sola
Arts, an arts charity. I have met Adele Spiers, who runs Sola Arts,
and she is a remarkable woman, economic with her time to the
point of being brusque, because her schedule is split between
helping innumerable people. Apart from running art groups and
organising Festival 31 (a celebration of refugee and migrant art,
greater every year) she offers social support and a listening ear
as an art psychotherapist. The halls of Toxteth Town Hall are
spilling over with people like Adele, and as a network they have
created a safety net which the state has never provided.
Tom was a trustee at the Town Hall for nearly 20 years before
moving on. He also helped restore his childhood youth club on
Miles Street, now affectionately known as The Belve, to a wellused
community sports activity centre. “Doing that gave us the
wherewithal and knowledge to go and do the big one, which was
The Florrie. She’s my girl.” The Florrie is a Grade II listed building
erected as the Victorian equivalent of a youth centre in 1889. I met
with Tim Tierney, who works at The Florrie now, and the place is
a huge, fully functioning complex of high-ceilinged rooms put to
use for more than 30 hours of programming a week. He shows
me their schedule, which is crammed: art, yoga and photography
classes; support groups for addiction, literacy, dyslexia; fitness,
drama and local singalongs. I meet today’s art teacher, Andy
Crombie, a staunch leftist who sees art as an empowering force
for his students, several of whom are elderly beginners. The class,
like many of their services, is free. “Everybody deserves stuff, it
doesn’t matter if you’re out of work,” Tim says. “Everybody should
building and the police would donate clothes. And here we are,
150 years later, and we’re still doing the same job. It’s almost like
nothing has changed for 150 years.” If we don’t shake the Tories at
the next election, things are set to get more difficult. With austerity
measures and privatisation continuing to disproportionately
impact the poorest, and the roll-out of Universal Credit, places like
the Toxteth Town Hall, the Belve, The Florrie and Granby Market
become all the more precious, and their resources stretched.
Underpinning all of these people’s actions is a deeply held
belief in collectivism and mutual responsibility. “People are so
greedy,” Hazel observes. “Capitalism has to become kinder. There
has to be an economic shift.” Her voice takes on an imperative
urgency over the phone: “It’s you, the young people. You have
to do something and you’ve got to do it collectively.” These
organisations rely on volunteerism to flourish. Tom says The Florrie
took hundreds of hands to revive. People like Tim, Hazel, Adele
and Tom have worked many an unpaid hour well into their careers;
as Tim puts it, “I’d like well more of me. I would like to never have
to say we’re too busy.” L8 is peppered with stories of eye-watering
resilience and rare success, more than can be profiled here. “I think
everybody needs to be more engaged. I think everybody thinks
their time is too precious,” says Tim, but concedes that “in the last
year or so, people have been getting more engaged, and that’s
all we need.” As he points out, organised demise is everywhere.
If regeneration is to happen without gentrification, communities
must unfortunately fight tirelessly for themselves.
Today, mass migration increasingly polarises global politics,
“Community
doesn’t really exist
anymore to a large
extent, but it does
round our ways”
be included in a community building.”
Tim was part of the Stop The Rot campaign that raised nearly
seven million pounds to save The Florrie. The building became
disused in the 80s, and a fire destroyed most of the roof in 99.
“You don’t realise how important places are until they’re gone,”
Tim reflects. “Without it, where are people going to escape social
isolation?” He describes how economic changes create loneliness;
“In Kensington, before, there was everything from a greengrocer
to a hoover shop. Now, all of a sudden, you go to Tesco and stand
at a self-checkout and don’t talk to anyone.” Now, the Florrie
provides somewhere to talk. Restoring it was a remarkable feat
against stacked odds, as Tom Calderbank recalls: “The city fathers
said it could never be done. I remember someone said, ‘God love
you, mate. But you’re beating your head against a brick wall,’ and I
said ‘Well, it’s my head, and it’s my wall.’ [That’s] the never say die
attitude of Liverpool 8.”
This relentless, fervent dedication to community through
creativity is at this point an L8 tradition. The Florrie is using its
growing platform to celebrate the prodigious artists and activists
who have emerged from the area over the years. 17th January
2019 will be ‘Dooley Day’ at the Florrie; they will honour the
remarkable life of Arthur Dooley, the artist behind the iconic Black
Christ statue on what would have been his 90th birthday. But as
Tom points out, the longevity of L8’s proud tradition of resistance is
evidence of its necessity, and repeated institutional failures. “When
Toxteth Town Hall was opened, one of the services it offered was
‘services to the destitute’, so if you had nothing, you’d come to our
and L8 is a particularly old and rich case study for this most
relevant of issues. Tom tells me Jeremy Corbyn visited Granby in
September and praised its present-day state as a model for other
communities. “It’s an example of how multiculturalism can work.
We just crack on.” In Tom’s voice, I detect the same note of pride
and love common to all these activists. Ian Ellington of Catalyst, a
multimedia production house based in Toxteth TV, speaks fondly
of the same dynamic. Catalyst was set up in 1984 by a group of
black kids from L8 who felt shut out by the white middle class art
world, and they won the Echo’s Arts and Performance Award this
year. Decked out with a studio that attracts artists from across
the country, they have worked with artists like Blue Saint, Ste
Two and Dorcas Seb for years. In October, two Catalyst singers
reached Robbie Williams’ house on The X Factor. Besides all this,
Ian’s team continues to engage people of colour and migrants
in free activities. He describes the results of a musical workshop
for migrant schoolchildren struggling with English as a second
language: “It was amazing, y’know, tracks with five different
languages on it!” This is testament to what Tom told me earlier:
“When we had the Capital of Culture we had the tagline ‘the world
in one city’, and I don’t know about that so much, but I do know
that we’ve got the world in one postcode.”
Toxteth TV is a huge complex containing more exciting stuff
than I could reasonably give the attention they deserve here.
There’s a fully-equipped TV studio, the VHS store and cinema
VideOdyssey, filmmakers, game designers and dance studios,
an artist management agency and more. Every occupant of this
creative hub is to some degree engaged in community work and
local artist development. Historically, L8 has been ignored or
actively oppressed; as made famous by the cover of celebrated
Granby councilor Margaret Simey’s book, The Disinherited Society,
Liverpool job postings were not long ago stamped with “no one
from L8 need apply”. Tom Calderbank decodes this: “That’s: if
you’re a person of colour, you can fuck off. The racism was that
overt.” Now there is an entire building full of technology in L8,
making itself open to the creative vigour that has always existed in
L8’s demographic.
I ask Tom whether he wishes the rest of Merseyside would
contribute to the centuries-old, ever-growing fight for L8 to
prosper. “It’s not about us catching a break off the rest of the city,
they just need to look at our example.” Areas like the Baltic Quarter
are often hailed by the press for rejuvenating creative traffic, but
gentrification seems to rear its head before anything can really
pop off. “Regeneration is the most abused word in the English
language. Around here, it’s a dirty word; it’s something that’s
done to you. But the very best is community-led regeneration.
All the buildings we have talked about there, they have all been
community-led projects, and there’s lessons there for us all.” In this
confusing time, where the technological explosion seems to have
made us hyper-connected but socially isolated, L8 is a unique
place. “Community doesn’t really exist anymore to a large extent,
but it does round our ways, doesn’t it?” !
Words and Photography: Niloo Sharifi
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