CHAPTER II
THE DOCKS
§ 1.
THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK.
As Liverpool lies deployed upon the South Lancashire landscape, she falls into the shape of an all but fully unfurled fan. The root bone-work of that fan, its unwebbed handle-part, is formed by the commercial apparatus of the place, the municipal apparatus, and—pleasantly conjoined to these hard masculine concerns—the more feminine region of the great shops, the flowers, the carriages, the shopping women. All this has been compactly tugged down towards its central wharves by that inevitable arbiter the River; it forms the area, busy but uninhabited, which the traveller enters the moment he steps ashore. In it are the streets of offices, the banks, the various Exchanges—Cotton, Corn, Produce, Stock—and occasional dense masses of warehouses; all about these—a pattern of dull jewels, say, on the grey essential framework—there lie the great official buildings—the Town Hall, the Municipal Offices, St. George’s Hall, the Art Gallery, and so forth—with here and there, more vigorously flashing, the glassy bulbs that tip the railways; and there, finally—a series of decorative flourishes—curve the bright ways of the emporia. Next, to right and left of this clean-picked fabric, appear, like two swart brush-strokes, the twin quags of the slums—their position, too, explicitly defined by the River; and beyond these, again, drooping down V-wise towards the handle in the centre, but for the rest holding consistently aloof, spread the vast, indeterminate plumes of the suburbs, curving round from the river-side at Seaforth, away through the open country, and so back to the river-side at Garston.
Thus, the whole congeries splits up, it will be seen, rather more automatically than is usual, into just those four great divisions which every modern city is theoretically supposed to display. Here and there, of course, a divergency appears: over at Linacre, for instance, a group of industrial exploits—match-works, dye-works, a tannery—have lunged out towards the open, have tended to create out there their own special circle of suburb, their own little patch of slum. Over at Garston, again, there is a somewhat similar happening; and across the River, on the shores of the Wirral Peninsula, Birkenhead, with its Town Hall and its Docks, makes an attempt to complete that tangential impulse which the River has interrupted. But, for the most part, the two main facts in Liverpool’s career—the precipitancy of her uprising and the singleness of her purpose—have served to make her adherence to that basic plan a singularly faithful one;[2] and I propose, therefore, to take advantage of it in this book, dealing in the third chapter with that central region of shops and offices and civic architecture, the formal van of the army; in the fourth chapter with the plumes of the fan, the skirmishing sweep of the suburbs; and in the fifth with those dusky smears of the underworld.
[2] It is interesting to observe that in this, as in so many other matters (the strength of her civic spirit, for instance; the nature of her municipal exploits; the conspicuous attention she is giving to the specifically urban problem of the Housing of the Poor; her constant devotion to the specifically urban business of locomotion), the abnormal circumstances of Liverpool’s growth have made her an unusually faithful embodiment of certain of the most essential of modern urban impulses. She is, as I have said, boldly different; and it is of the body of that difference that she should be thus clearly representative: there being nothing, in actuality, quite so exceptional as the typical. On the one hand, that is to say, she is exceptional because she is typical; on the other, she is typical because she is exceptional.
But before I approach even the first of these, there remains yet another region, perhaps more memorable, certainly more remarkable, than them all: that queer specialized region of the Docks, the most extensive thing of its kind in the world, which runs all along the littoral, from Dingle in the south to Seaforth in the north, sustaining, both pictorially and essentially, practically the whole of that great fan of masonry, making a kind of long entrenchment, behind which the army of the City is drawn up: the elaborately forged handle, really, which Liverpool has constructed in order that she may grip her weapon more effectively.