Deja Views

I've been revisiting places from my past over the last few weeks.  Nothing planned, it just happened that way, but it has felt slightly strange.

So a little while ago I went back to Liverpool.  This was strictly a work trip, aimed at starting a conversation with a social enterprise (I hate that term) we might be able to work with. 

I ended up lugging a huge overweight laptop around, so I had less time than you might expect for sightseeing - the places I spotted or remembered were either significant or just a little random

Now for over two years, immediately after leaving University, I lived and worked on Merseyside.  That is, I lived on the Wirral and worked in centre of Liverpool.  There used to be an old Plessey factory and offices off of Dale St, on Cheapside (demolished now).

For the trip, all we did was walk along Lime St/Renshaw St and up Mount Pleasant to the Catholic cathedral, visited some offices, had a snack in the cathedral coffee shop and walk back the same way.  So we barely touched the surface of the city.  But it did strange things to my head, all the same.

Liverpool has been through a lot of development and change.  So the old Lewis's is closed (with the 'statue exceedingly bare' that people used to meet beneath), and looks rather sad, while cathedral seemed virtuall unchanged.  Similarly the Everyman theatre, where I saw The Warp, presided over by Ken Campbell in the early '80s.  Apparently the Everyman is about to undergo some significant refurbishment and will be closed for a couple of years.

A lot of the buildings, on Hope St (which joins the cathedrals of course, and used to have late night jazz club/drinking dens in some of the basements - sounds romantic perhaps in hindsight, but I just remember them being very sleazy and violent), and Mount Pleasant, seemed unchanged - spruced up even; they seemed oddly new/old.  When I was there origninally, it had been in the dark, sad days of Thatcher, and the heavy-handed policing that led to the Liverpool riots (in Liverpool 8, not Toxteth, please). 

From the top floor of the bright, managed offices we could see across the city, and of course the Liver Building dominated the view.  That seemed wholly unchanged from the distance.

The other place of significant note was the Great Court of the British Musuem - which I can recall when it was first opened, and the Duke of Edinburgh was such a repellent visitor for the first day.

We dashed through it quickly, on the way elsewhere, and it felt strangely alien.  The central commercial hub wrapping the Reading Room was always a little clinical, and on the day we were there the light - to me - seemed a little garish.  Either way, it felt unusual and odd, for somewhere I worked for many years.

And then this week, the Museum won the Art Fund prize for "The History of the World in 100 things" on BBC Radio.  About which we should be pleased.  But the photo they used in The Guardian was quite old, and went back to the Michelangelo Drawings exhibition mounted around five years ago.  When I worked there, and the Great Court was a place I was in almost every day.