Chloe Robinson ‘ Liverpool ’
A Creative Critical Essay First year student CHLOE ROBINSON decided to approach the brief to write about Liverpool with a wide perspective , choosing to examine not only the history but also the culture surrounding it . She aims to capture the constant movement of Liverpool – the people , the traffic , the rain – and how the motion has allowed it to remain such an interesting place to be . However , she also explores how Liverpool has echoes that will never come back – much of its former lustre had fallen into disrepair and many of its shining moments are behind it . Chloe explores the two sides of the city and how , hopefully , it can grow past its roots into something better .
Liverpool is ‘ a centre of consciousness for the human race ’, Ginsburg once said . It certainly felt as such , skimming the tracks and wandering under vaulted ceilings . The trains hum and sprint off into the distant country of England . For , here , secluded in its elbow of the Mersey , Liverpool ‘ is almost English but not quite … a city that has been transformed — and set apart from the rest of Lancashire ’ ( Crane 2007 p89 ). You need only ride along the motorways and find yourself in another continent , inhabited by those far removed from the life of Liverpudlians . In this nook of England , a new land stands upon the washing Mersey , singing its song . One can call it ‘ The Mersey Sound ’. It ’ s poets , supposedly , were ‘ the best thing that made poetry less Oxbridge ’ ( Duffy , quoted by Viner 1999 para . 20 ). They cemented the unobtainable into a mundane shell ¬, doing so in a uniquely Liverpool fashion . The Mersey swells with the sheer volume of culture and history filling the bay .
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But what of the history that does not shine ? As sunsets clustered along the horizon , around 1.7 million people were shoved into boats ( Morgan 2007 p15 ). This city , the second of its empire , hid in shadows and filtered much of its twinkling light . The yawing grief of humans carted from their homelands rested like dust upon the mantel of Liverpool , waiting to be dusted off . And what to show for it ? Collapsing and crashing , the fall of Liverpool comes with bombs and economics and unemployment and poverty . Liverpool ‘ which once valued itself as the second metropolis of the empire ’ now , ‘ by the 1980s , Britain ’ s most deprived city ’ ( Crane 2007 p 103 ). One could call it a crying shame . Others , their bones at the bottom of the Atlantic , seek retribution amid the toppling ruins .
I can see echoes drifting along the streets . Behind the Cavern Club comes the howls of what lay before . They have diminished , disappeared off