Issue 95 / Dec18/Jan19

IMPACTS 18 -
GIANT STEPS?
As our city evaluates the impact of 2008, Craig G Pennington asks
whether we need to rethink the way we invest in culture.
It’s 5th October 2018. A million people have hit the streets
and NBC news are in town. Liverpool, for a moment, feels like
the centre of the world.
I’ll admit to being one of the fence-dwellers when it came
to the subject of our over-sized cousins from across the Channel.
The amount of emphasis and resource poured into the realisation
and the ‘idea’ of The Giants felt overburdening. I was so wrong.
As the sleeping monster rose from the beach at Fort Perch
Rock and made its way across the waterfront at New Brighton –
flanked by thousands of frenzied onlookers of every age and from
every background – I welled up. The looks on children’s faces.
The sense of wonder, imaginations in bubbling effervescence.
My home town was alive again; and it took a 33-foot French
dude powered by 44 rope-dangling Lilliputians to realise it.
Three generations from both sides of the family descended on
our house that day to join the Giant-chasing throng. If the idea of
‘art for everyone’ really means anything, this was it – in glorious,
over-sized action.
With impeccable timing then, Impacts 18 – a conference to
evaluate the legacy of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture
year in 2008 – rolls into town little over a week later. It is an
opportunity for Dr Beatriz Garcia of the Institute of Cultural
Capital (ICC) to introduce initial findings from the latest chapter
in a sequence of longitudinal studies which have taken place
between 2005 and 2018.
And it is a broad body of work, including analysis of
9,300 press clippings, repeated interviews with over 70 key
stakeholders, consultations with 800 residents per year and
surveys with over 2000 people from across the UK. What comes
through loud and clear is a fundamental repositioning of our city;
a new story has been told.
The most powerful observation is in how Liverpool’s
perceived cultural renaissance has instigated a change in
perceptions of the city and ‘brand Liverpool’. Across both tabloids
and broadsheets alike, there has been a narrative shift from
the ‘city of crime’ to ‘city of culture’. According to the research,
the idea of Liverpool’s ‘cultural renaissance’ has become the
cornerstone to media narratives associated with our city.
In the 1990s, Liverpool was dominantly represented by
the national press as a city ridden by crime, poor health and
low education levels (over 40 per cent of stories focussed on
these topics in 1996, with only 11 per cent of stories dedicated
to culture). However, following 2008, focus on discussion of
Liverpool’s cultural assets grew to 42 per cent of all coverage
across broadsheets and tabloids.
This change has also been evident in the way the city views
itself, with a newfound confidence and a modern incarnation of
civic pride. 90 per cent of Liverpool residents surveyed agreed
that “since 2008, Liverpool is a more creative city”. Whether this
is true or not isn’t the pertinent question; there is a transformative
power in local people believing it to be so. And this is borne out in
the research’s findings around engagement in cultural activities;
in 2018, three quarters (74 per cent) of Liverpool residents are
now interested in going to museums and galleries, compared to
just 26 per cent in 2007.
The research also explores the boom in Liverpool’s tourism
industry, celebrating the fact that we are now the fifth most
visited UK city. According to the LCR Visitor Economy Board,
tourism “supports 49,000 jobs”, and “the total expenditure across
the City Region in 2014 was £3.8bn”.
So far, so good.
Yet despite all this, the ICC research confirms that, “from a
socio-economic perspective, Liverpool still lags behind national
and core city averages across all measures”. Our city was the
most deprived local authority in the country in 2010 and the
fourth most deprived in 2015. It begs the ominous question; if
this is success, what would the city have been like if we hadn’t
successfully landed 2008?
If the celebrated tourism boom is to be developed and prove
sustainable – if this does represent the next chapter in Liverpool’s
relationship with the world – then why is our city still struggling?
How well-paid and high-value are the jobs being created in this
new tourism economy? Is the sector sustainable and what does it
look like without mega events? And are profits being reinvested
in Liverpool’s cultural infrastructure or simply lining the pockets of
well-heeled hoteliers?
On that point, if we are measuring the economic impact of
our cultural offer through hotel bed nights and secondary spend
(even if we shouldn’t be), then we need to rigorously pursue
the idea of a tourist tax; a nominal charge added to hotel room
rates (as is the case in cities around the world) which would
be reinvested in the city’s cultural offer. City leaders will point
to how, currently, the city cannot do this as taxes can only be
set by central government. But, if the idea of devolution means
anything, if this notion of the Liverpool City Region has any
substance, this is the kind of localised policy-making which needs
to be lobbied for and realised.
Yet, as essential as a tourist tax is, it is not the long-term,
transformative solution. If we are to truly embrace the cultureled
regeneration mantra there must be a fundamental change in
perspective, a shift to our view of how we support culture. We
need to re-balance our focus and move from a city of presenting
and showcasing, to a city of creating, developing and producing.
Whatever the art form, we must develop the potential for
high-quality, secure jobs through strategic investment within
the cultural sector, building production capacity. We need to
retain graduates and develop new industries which can embrace
and utilise Liverpool’s perceived position as a global cultural
powerhouse. Much was made of The Giants’ return – and yes, it
was seismic – but having shaped a narrative for Liverpool as a
home for large-scale, public realm artistic interventions, we now
need to produce them here.
This is an area where the arts organisations of the city have
been leading the way for decades. From the Everyman to the
Philharmonic, MDI to The Kazimier (to name but four), we are
home to some wonderful, internationally significant cultural
producers. But these are individual organisations. As a city, we
need to learn from their work and experiences, help to amplify it
and – through a shift in cultural policy – stimulate new production
capacity across the creative sector.
Music is a great example. As we have been arguing for a
number of years, we need music policy in Liverpool that is as
much about developing the music industry in the city as it is
about music tourism. It is as much about developing talent and
reimagining the sector’s relationship with education, as it is about
tackling the challenges facing live music.
The shift from a city of celebration and consumption to a
city of production represents a fundamental re-think and poses
challenging questions for the creative sector and our city’s
cultural leadership. What proportion of finite resources should we
be spending on events and festivals in comparison to investing
in sector development? Should we be bringing The Giants to
the city or investing that resource in developing the capacity to
produce such large-scale, public realm artworks here?
It is not an either-or scenario, but it does require a shift in
priorities. The work of the film office over recent years and the
plans for a new studio complex on Edge Lane are encouraging
evidence of an ambition to move in this direction. We have been
calling for a new sector-led approach to music policy for years
and the (hopefully imminent) arrival of the Liverpool City Region
Music Board can’t come soon enough.
Put simply, the ICC’s research shows the power of
storytelling. Culture has the potential to tell stories about a place
like nothing else can and this was brought into focus again with
The Giants’ latest visit. But now, for the good of our collective
future, we need to move into the next chapter of our city’s story;
where Liverpool is lauded internationally as a great centre of
cultural production, as well as being celebrated as one of the
world’s great playgrounds. !
Words: Craig G Pennington
Illustration: Mr Marbles / mrmarbles.co.uk
“We need to move into
the next chapter of
our city’s story; where
Liverpool is lauded
internationally as a
great centre of cultural
production, as well
as being celebrated
as one of the world’s
great playgrounds”
FEATURE
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