Pier Head Station

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

This archive image from the 1950's is a revelation! The sense that this area around the Pier Head was part of a thriving metropolis, a place where pedestrians and traffic were part of the same context, that the street was occupied!

There is a great website http://www.photobydjnorton.com devoted to the photos of D J Norton put together by one of his sons, that includes photos of the Overhead Railway in Liverpool. The website explains:

• Dennis John Norton - was my father. Born in Birmingham in 1930, he suffered ill health throughout his life. He died from an asthma attack at the age of 35 in Ledbury, Herefordshire where my family had moved hoping that a country location may help alleviate the symptoms of his illness. He left my mother, brother (aged 4) and me still 9 weeks away from being born.
• Although I never met him I developed many interests that were similar to his - electronics, astronomy and photography. It was this latter interest that he left most evidence of. We have several hundred black and white photo's from the 1950's and 1960's that he took and developed himself. We also have several hundred full colour slides, also from the 1950's and 1960's.
• Many of the photographs are railway related - another great interest of his. The ones that captured my imagination were of Birmingham prior to and during the development of the inner ring road. It was these that inspired me to take these fascinating images out of their dusty old boxes and make them available to the world.
• This is a project that will take time to complete. My aim is to expand the site as and when time allows. Eventually I hope it will stand as a suitable memorial to my father and a life that was cut tragically short.
• If you take copies of the images here for you own use, a small donation to Asthma UK would be very much appreciated. Also, an acknowledgement of their source would help spread his name as an important photographer of his day.

This kind of historical knowledge is what makes what Foucault calls 'subjugated knowledges' available for us to research. There is this photo taken in 1960 that shows how things changed on the Dock Road so quickly in the 1950's and 60's. The website explains:

• In 1960 my parents went to the Isle of Man for a holiday. My father obviously had to re-visit the site of Pier Head station to see what was left. The simple answer - nothing. After it's closure in 1956, the railway remained in place for a year or so with the hope that someone would take it over and get it running again. The investment never happened and the system was dismantled starting in September 1957. The demolition was completed by January 1959.

These are photos of the Overhead Railway that D J Norton took in 1955, the year before closure and demolition took place. It is another world, but one that overlaps with my memories of 1950's Britain.





Posted by Philip Courtenay

Cities where they do things first

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

In the 19th century people from all over the world would make visits to cities like Liverpool and Manchester, to see for themselves what the future might hold. Liverpool and Manchester were linked by the very first passenger railway.

• The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) was the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all the trains were timetabled and were hauled for most of the distance solely by steam locomotives. The line opened on 15 September 1830 and ran between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in North West England in the United Kingdom.[1] The L&MR was primarily built to provide faster transport of raw materials and finished goods between the Port of Liverpool and mills in Manchester and surrounding towns. Wikipedia

The Liverpool Overhead Railway was the world's first electric overhead railway.

• The Liverpool Overhead Railway was the world's first electrically-operated overhead railway. It was located close to the River Mersey in Liverpool, England. It opened in 1893 and closed in 1956.
• As early as 1852 the railway had been suggested. Although it wasn't until much later that the railway came into existence. Engineers Sir Douglas Fox & James Henry Greathead were comissioned to design the railway. They chose electric traction, due to the possibility of sparks igniting the cargoes in close proximity of the railway. The works commenced in 1889 & were completed in January 1893.
• Known locally as the Dockers' Umbrella, the Liverpool Overhead Railway was opened on February 4, 1893 by the Marquis of Salisbury. The railway ran from Alexandra Dock (LOR) to Herculaneum Dock, a distance of six miles. It used standard gauge track and there were 11 intermediate stations along the line. It was an electric railway from the start, and was the first electrically powered overhead railway in the world.
• The line was later extended northwards to Seaforth Sands on 30 April 1894. A further extension southwards from Herculaneum Dock to Dingle was opened on 21 December 1896. Dingle was the line's only underground station and was located on Park Road; the station is now used as a garage. The extension was achieved by spanning the Cheshire Lines Committee's extensive goods yard at Brunswick with a 200 ft lattice, girder bridge & then boring a half mile tunnel through the sandstone dock, under what are known locally as the 'Bread Streets'. The tunnel portal is one of the few surviving signs of the railway's existence.
• Finally, a northward extension was connected to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway's North Mersey Branch on 2 July 1905. The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway ran some of its own specially-built vehicles on the line, and these were especially used during race meetings at Aintree Racecourse.
• The railway was carried mainly on iron viaducts, with a corrugated iron decking, on which the tracks were laid. As such, it was vulnerable to corrosion - especially as the steam-operated Docks Railway operated beneath some sections of the line. During surveys it was discovered that expensive repairs would be necessary to ensure the line's long term survival, at a cost of £2 million. The Liverpool Overhead Railway Company could not afford such costs and looked to both Liverpool City Council & the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board for financial assistance. This was to no avail.
• The Liverpool Overhead Railway Company had no option but to go into voluntary liquidation. Accordingly, and despite considerable protest, the line was closed on the evening of 30 December 1956. The final trains each left either end of the line, marking the closure with a loud bang as they passed each other. Both trains were full to capacity with wellwishers and employees of the company.
• The service was replaced by a bus service (route number 1) operated by Liverpool Corporation, which could not compete with its predecessor's much faster service, due to congestion along the Dock Road. The public continued to campaign for the railway to reopen, albeit in vain.
• Demolition of the structure commenced in September 1957, with the whole structure being dismantled by the following year. The bridges were removed for scrap, leaving very little trace of the railway, save for a small number of upright columns found in the walls at Wapping and the tunnel portal at Dingle.
  

These days people travel to Shanghai to get a taste of the future! Shanghai has a brand new Maglev, but how long will it last? These videos were taken by e-space lab member Jonathan Kearney in July 2007 while taking the Maglev from Pu Dong airport to the Shanghai city centre area where the Expo 2010 is taking shape:





Posted by Philip Courtenay

The dockers' umbrella

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

The "dockers' umbrella" was the the worlds first overhead electric railway. Running from Dingle, south of the city centre, along the Dock Road to the northern docks, the elevated track provided dockers with shelter from the rain, as they waited for work. Dockers were employed to unload and load cargo from vessels moored in the docks as and when they arrived. It was hard and dangerous work, but dependent on the traffic into the port, and so employers preferred a "casualized" system, paying dockers wages for particular unloading and loading work, not a weekly wage!



These videos from You Tube show views of the docks from the railway.





Posted by Philip Courtenay

Looking for work

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

I found this archival photo of the Dock Road, apparently it was taken in 1961. Looking for work in an empty city? What was it like? It was raining that day, and the dockers' umbrella was long gone!

Posted by Philip Courtenay

Aerial views of Liverpool's northern docks 2007

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

Lynn Pilling, a colleague of e-space lab co-founder Peter Hatton in the arts organization TEA, has allowed us to use some of her photos for TEA research, to document the northern docks and the Dock Road area during the summer of 2007.



Posted by Philip Courtenay

View of northern docks from a train October 1992

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

This video's source is Super 8 film, so it is silent. It shows the northern docks area of Liverpool from a suburban train travelling towards Bootle back in October 1992. It shows three large chimneys of the then demolished power station on the docks. As a landmark these three chimneys survived the German bombing of Liverpool in WWII but could not survive the city re-generation plans of the 1990's. In Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, urban regeneration has led to the demolition of both factories and a power station. The footprints of these old industrial sites have become public parks, public spaces or commercial offices, but the old chimneys have been preserved, restored and maintained, as monuments to past realities and fading memories.



Posted by Philip Courtenay

Back into the red! That was quick!

I found this! And I thought of William Blake and his Laocoön engraving/manifesto.


"Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on, but war only." William Blake

He says everything!

The whole business of man (human beings) is the arts and all things common! No secrecy in art!

Posted by Philip Courtenay

Another river, another city, another memory!

Sean, thanks for the addition to the international conversations about birds post (15 Nov. 2008). It connects quite personally as a living memory. Battersea Power Station loomed over where I lived as a very young child, and I remember the building of the fourth chimney. The last time I visited the power station it was the dramatic location of a huge show of work by contemporary Chinese artists.

The grand scale of the site drowned out the best work and foregrounded the spectacular, and on terms that were governed by the "local" art politics of London based interests. I saw the work, as did many others, but it was the usual chicken run past artworks, so brilliantly masterminded by the Tate Modern model of how best to experience art as a cultural tourist. Tate Modern is also housed in an old Power Station, where the old turbine hall becomes the venue for works that have to compete with its enormous scale. Faced with the big we can feel small. Feeling small means we will feel a pressure to stay as we are. We stay the same and things stay the same.

The architect of Battersea Power Station was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a noted architect and industrial designer, famous for the design of the red telephone box, of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and of the other London power station mentioned above, Bankside, which now houses the Tate Modern art gallery. Both power stations are on the River Thames that flows through London, another sister city to Shanghai.

Posted by Philip Courtenay with B&W photo of a black swan on the River Thames in London (1973) by Sean Halligan

Dock roads in Liverpool and Shanghai

This post, along with the others under the sign of "Dock Roads", is a shared research resource, principally for Philip and Hangfeng who are working on an idea that explores the situation of the Bund in Shanghai and the situation of the Pier Head in Liverpool.

Views from Broadway Mansions in the summer of 1965 looking towards the Bund. Horse and carts were used to move goods around the docks in Liverpool, as in this picture at the Pier Head, up until as late as the fifties. Living memories?

We are going to do a bit of excavation of the present and exploring the past, and in particular looking at Shanghai's Bund, and Dongdaming Lu running through the "North Bund", and juxtaposing findings with Liverpool's Pier Head and Dock Road.

Pink is the new red

Our friend Meng Ni Beh, who has translated English to Chinese for us on our website, curated a show in the Triangle Gallery at Chelsea College of Art & Design that was called PINK is the new Red (March 11-19 2008). The exhibition was an opportunity to see a spectrum of art practices being conducted by some staff and students from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, celebrating the exchange programme with Chelsea College of Art & Design that, together, we had instigated.

Shades of pink are everywhere. We are using shocking pink in our banner, a colour inspired by the latest Shanghai Biennale catalogue. This kind of pink makes an appearance in the Made Up banner and catalogue cover designs too! Pink is the colour for the upcoming Bluecoat show called Next Up, that includes work by Jay.

Perhaps we need to move on, or back to red? The Translocalmotion catalogue has some images that contrast Shanghai's past with the present. You can see the overviews of the city, the old racetrack and present day People's Square. The old Horse Racing Clubhouse is now the Shanghai Art Museum, the main home of the last six Shanghai Biennales.

Looking at past and present is what we will be doing on the blog for a while, and with special focus on the Bund and Dongdaming Lu in Shanghai and the Dock Road and Pier Head in Liverpool. This research will be part of the programme of support for a project that Philip and Hangfeng are working on at the moment.

Posted by Philip Courtenay

City symbols?

I had this idea. Where did I get it from? A conversation whilst walking around Shanghai? I have this image/memory of some sculptures of cranes or herons (birds) in somewhere like Peoples Square or Park, and the associated idea that the crane was a symbol of Shanghai. But I can't find any evidence for this now. Googling "symbol of Shanghai" produces a large number of references all based on the "English" grouping of these 3 words. Most of them refer to the Bund or the Pearl of the Orient or the Pu Dong skyline.

Posted by Philip Courtenay

The cranes are leaving!

The English word for the large, long-legged and long-necked birds of the order Gruiformes, and family Gruidae is the Crane. The lifting machine called a crane takes its English name from the shape of the long-legged and long-necked bird.

• Unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back. There are representatives of this group on all the continents except Antarctica and South America. Most species of cranes are at least threatened, if not critically endangered, within their range. The plight of the Whooping Cranes of North America inspired some of the first US legislation to protect endangered species. (Wikipedia)

The Crane has been the inspiration for mysterious ceremonies in cultures across the world, including dances based on their mating displays. The modern dance of the cranes is more likely to be found in the activity of construction. I seem to remember Stefan Szczelkun had some idea for a ballet of construction site cranes 20 or so years ago.

BEFORE



AFTER



In Liverpool city centre, 42 acres, in the zone where Liverpool built its first dock, have for the last few years been a building site with cranes everywhere. Now that the main Grosvenor House commercial development has been completed many of the cranes have gone. Around this central zone there are construction projects still in progress, but the credit crunch will hit hard. At the edge of the city centre neighbourhoods like Kensington and Toxteth are full of streets with houses all boarded up. Lots of money was promised in boom time for re-generation, but what was it spent on? Moving people out? Where have they gone? What is going to happen now?



Posted by Philip Courtenay

To copy right!

The Liver bird has a history, a history of mistakes, takes that didn't quite translate or copy.

• The Liver bird (pronounced /ˈlaɪvəbɜːd/) is the symbol of the city of Liverpool, England.
• The pronunciation of liver in this word is not homophonous with the first two syllables of Liverpool; rather it rhymes with "driver".
• What species?
• The bird's species has long been the subject of confusion and controversy.
• The earliest known use of a bird to represent the then town of Liverpool is on its corporate seal, dating from the 1350s, which is now in the British Museum. The bird shown is generic, but the wording of the seal contains references to King John, who granted the town’s charter in 1207. John, in honour of his patron saint, frequently used the device of an eagle - long associated with St. John. Further indication that the seal was an homage to King John is found in the sprig of broom initially shown in the bird’s beak, broom being a symbol of the royal family of Plantagenet.
• By the 17th century, the origins of the bird had begun to be forgotten, with references to the bird as a cormorant, still a common bird in the coastal waters near Liverpool. The Earl of Derby in 1668 gifted the town council a mace "engraved with ...a leaver" - the first known reference to a liver bird by this name. A manual on heraldry from later in the century confuses matters further by assuming this term is related to the Dutch word lefler, meaning spoonbill - a bird rarely found in northern England.
• When the College of Arms granted official arms to Liverpool in 1797, they refer to the bird as a cormorant, adding that the sprig in the mouth is of laver, a type of seaweed, thus implying that the bird's appellation comes from the sprig.
• The bird thus appears to have originally been intended to be an eagle, but is now officially a cormorant. Many modern interpretations of the symbol are of a cormorant, although several - notably that on the emblem of Liverpool Football Club - distinctly show the short head and curved beak more readily associated with a bird of prey. (Wikipedia)

Mis-translations, mis-hearings, mis-understandings, are capable of generating new ideas, and this is an area of our work at e-space lab that we are especially aware of whilst there is a real exchange of ideas in an inter-cultural context.

The science of botany didn't take off until the woodblock illustration (15th century onwards) created a fixed visual reference that connected to the names and properties of plants. And in the screen capture image in the post of 16th November 2008, the Wikipedia Ornithology entry, comments on field work and the breakthrough of photography:

• The study of birds in the field was helped enormously by improvements in optics. Photography made it possible to document birds in the field with great accuracy. High power spotting scopes today allow observers to detect minute morphological differences that were earlier possible only by examination of the specimen in the hand.

Tony Potts, the 'so-called' 5th member of the band Monochrome Set, worked on lyrics for a track on the Album Love Zombies, and called "The Weird, Wild and Wonderful World of Tony Potts" (Bid, Potts, Square) that included references to modern cinema, and were translated for a Japanese edition in a wonderful way. Rather than ask for a copy of the lyrics, somebody in Japan listened to the Album tracks and wrote down what was heard, and what was mis-heard! Fritz Lang becomes Bread Slam. The Bread Slam Theatre of Japanese Whispers was thus born in November 1990 at a "Raft" meeting at Tony's house on Dyers Hall Road!

Posted by Philip Courtenay

Good luck Hangfeng

Good luck with your installation!

Copyright

A mythical bird, the Liver bird, has been at the centre of recent controversy in Liverpool.

Surrealism got it right, juxtaposition, not connection! In googleland the links create juxtapositions that may or may not be connections, but we connect anyway, it is our human programming clicking in. Perhaps we are all vulnerable to nonsense because we are pre-programmed to make sense and meaning out of things?

My favourite book, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), by Marshall McLuhan, collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, approached the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype .

• One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater. (Wikipedia - Marshall McLuhan)

In the chapter Archetype they write:

It is necessary to consider the incident of the cliché-archetype theme in its nonverbal forms. Language as gesture and cadence and rhythm, as metaphor and image, evokes innumerable objects and situations which are in themselves nonverbal. The extent to which the nonverbal world is shared by language is obscure but no more so than the effect of human artifacts and technological environments on language. We are taking for granted that there is at all times interplay between these worlds of percept and concept, verbal and nonverbal. Anything that can be observed about the behavior of linguistic cliché or archetype can be found plentifully in the nonlinguistic world.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
-W.B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

The human city in all its complexity of functions is thus "a center of paralysis," a waste land of abandoned images. The clue that Yeats offers to the relation between the verbal and the nonverbal cliché and archetype is, in a word, "complete." The most masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process begins anew.

If the world of kettles and bottles and broken cans and the world of commerce and money in the till are fragmentary specialisms of man's powers, it becomes easier to see the bond that remains between verbal and nonverbal cliché or archetype. The specialist artifact form has the advantage over language of intensification and amplification far beyond the limits of word or phrase. The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché - an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment.

A flagpole flying a flag may become a complex retrieval system. The flag could be the Russian flag, with its hammer and sickle. As flagcloth, the flag could retrieve an entire textile industry. By virtue of the fact that the flag is a national flag, it can retrieve flags of other nations.

The cliché, in other words, is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive: other archetypes' residues adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we, unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact whenever we "quote" one consciousness, we also "quote" the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others "the archetypal unconscious."

Liverbird as cliché!
Liverbird as archetype?
Googleland!

Posted by Philip Courtenay