Liverpool

by Dixon Scott

CHAPTER IV
THE SUBURBS

§ 1.

If one wanted very badly to indulge a passion for historical retrospect, this chapter, of course, would provide the great opportunity. For although it is customary to regard them as mere upstarts, the Suburbs of Liverpool, like the suburbs of so many great towns, are really much more venerable than the City itself. West Derby, for instance, was a place of power and dignity when Liverpool was a mere huddle of patched cabins on the marshes away below; and Bootle, Litherland, Crosby, Walton, Kirkdale, Smithdown, Wavertree, and Toxteth, unlike the place that now looks down upon them patronizingly, are all distinguished by references in Doomsday Book. But in spite of this, and although, as we shall see, some faint odour of antiquity still here and there survives, yet to make anything more than the barest mention of their fine old memories and traditions would be to create a very false impression of the aspect they present to-day. It would be quite possible, I imagine, to wander through Kirkdale for a lifetime (an inspiring pilgrimage) without once suspecting that it owed anything to any other era than excessively mid-Victorian; and to tell over the far-off things that made Smithdown and Toxteth names of terror or magnificence in old days would be to give about as fair an idea of the expression now worn by those sober neighbourhoods as a description of the old tithe-barn that once stood there would give of that cautious ante-room in Tithebarn Street. The Suburbs are certainly older than the City, but the City has infected them with her youthfulness. They do, in cold fact, grow younger every day.

THE HORNBY LIBRARY.

This double process of suburb-subordination and suburb-rejuvenescence has always, of course, been dependent upon the progress of the arts of locomotion; and its latest and swiftest phase was undoubtedly heralded by the clangour of the gong on the first electric car. It is her cars, as we have seen, that perfect Liverpool’s most characteristic beauty. It is her cars, again, that have helped to perfect her characteristic homogeneity and compactness, that have helped to bind the whole sprawling mass, City and Suburb and all, more and more tightly together, both physically and sentimentally, into one unigenous organism. The London suburb, save in such districts as are tapped by the Tube and its companions, is a fairly self-contained community; it has its own shops, interests, concerts, society; and even in many of our smaller towns and cities the general effect is that of a number of self-interested colonies pouncing upon the central spaces for the mere means of life, and then returning to their own private recesses to dispose of them. But in Liverpool the Suburbs tend more and more to part with their independence, to “pool” their interests and enjoyments, to form themselves into a kind of family party ranged round the brightly burning grate of the City. And they grow more like a family party, not only because of this absorption in a common atmosphere, but also because of the increasing freedom which marks their intercourse one with another. That division of the residential semicircle into specific social faubourgs—Scotch engineers in Bootle, for instance, Welsh builders in Everton, merchants in Sefton Park—which subsisted very definitely until quite recently, is now in large measure being broken down. Interfusion of social states goes on with constantly increasing rapidity. Families who now migrate with the utmost nonchalance from, say, Kirkdale to Aigburth, confident of finding somewhere there precisely the strata to which they have been accustomed, would have looked on such a flight only last generation as being almost as impossible, almost as profoundly charged with social significations, as a transfer from Poplar to Park Lane; and were content, as I well know, to live and die and inherit without stirring, without dreaming of forsaking an equally static coterie of friends. Well, the chief agent in breaking down these social divisions was also that art of locomotion to the encouragement of which Liverpool, as I have said, has so peculiarly devoted herself, and the latest, the most democratic, and the most mobile of the creations of that art, the electric car, has inevitably increased that fluidity in a very remarkable degree.[4] The overhead wires that bring every suburb into vital connexion with the centre are like the radiating nerves of the organism, flushing all the extremities with one sympathetic life.

[4] It is impossible to doubt that Liverpool’s conspicuous devotion to the business of locomotion—a devotion that is briefly evidenced by the significant association of her name with the first railway, the first canal, one of the first sub-river underground railways, the first electric overhead railway, the first sustained application of electricity to long-distance railway traction, and now with these electric road cars—owed its first impulse to that comparative isolation of her early situation to which I referred in the first Chapter, and that the eager continuance of that devotion was largely due to the function of universal carrier which was afterwards imposed upon her. It is equally impossible to doubt that it was that early isolation which helped, at the outset, to foster her spirit of independent and concerted effort. And it is, therefore (to me, at any rate), rather a pleasant reflection, and not perhaps a wholly useless one, that the circumstance which primarily and directly induced that essential solidarity was also the circumstance which created the tools for riveting it; and that the creation of those tools was considerably aided by the apparition of precisely those forces which seemed to threaten her with a disrupting cosmopolitanism.

§ 2.

It is by the presence of these wires, then, that you may recognize the great suburb-reaching thoroughfares, the raying bones of our all but unfurled fan, and by taking up a position at one of the central junctions—that river-side terrace would be an excellent place—you may traverse them all in turn, and examine almost all the details of the residential plume, with no more trouble than is caused by stepping from pavement to car-platform, from car-platform back again to pavement. Seaforth tips the first bone; Litherland the second; Walton, Aintree and Fazakerley, Everton and Anfield, Cabbage Hall, Tuebrook and West Derby, variously feather the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth; whilst Fairfield, Old Swan and Knotty Ash, Edge Hill and Wavertree, Sefton Park and Mossley Hill, Dingle, Aigburth and Garston, fledge the remaining branches in the east and south.