Beautiful Birkenhead: the ‘ugly sister’ I love
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Version 0 of 1. Promotion on my latest book has seen me clock up the air miles this year. On previous tours, I’ve found myself in places such as LA or Berlin or Paris, just wishing I could stay a few more days; wondering what it would be like to actually live there. This time round, I’ve found myself counting the days and pining for what Morrissey dubbed the “bowels of the north”. Beautiful Birkenhead. I never would have thought it. It’s true, though. Whenever I’m stuck on the book I’m writing or if I need a rest, I hop on my bike and bash around Birkenhead’s dockland. There’s a route that takes you over the cast-iron Penny Bridge and past the former Spillers flour warehouses, along the East Float past the weird old wooden customs house, the weighing station and back over another run of swing bridges. If you catch a pale sunset, it is breathtaking. Last night, I saw a cormorant swoop down on to the rusting husk of an old ship and I thought: I love this place. The rough old shipbuilding town of Birkenhead is the ugly sister – “over the water” from glamorous, garrulous Liverpool. It’s New Jersey to New York – always the bridesmaid. Yet in the 12 years I’ve lived here, I’ve come to understand that hard-faced, ballsy Birkenhead has its own identity – a personality that, while made by the Mersey, is split from it too. And I’ve come to cherish its quirky identity as something kind of special. Back in frozen January, I began directing my first feature film, The Violators. One of our key locations is a Cash 4 Gold shop in Birkenhead’s grandly named, down-at-heel Charing Cross district. The Cash 4 Gold shop is flanked by two pubs – Recession Bar and Moodz. We arrived one chilly dawn to set up an exterior shot. Over the road, a bizarre tableau played out at Moodz. Standing on the window ledge so they were technically still “in” the pub, a group of smokers leaned out backwards from a long horizontal window, blowing their smoke outwards and upwards. Padded up in our North Face coats, we howled with laughter – only in Birkenhead – and got on with our set-up. Yet, sitting in my boutique hotel in Toronto a month later, I found myself replaying the scene in my mind, weirdly nostalgic for the Cross and its crazy cast of characters. A few weeks ago, the comedian Mark Steel arrived in Birkenhead for his In Town series for Radio 4. To my amusement, he visited Moodz and namechecked Recession Bar. Then, to my irritation, he began making fun of us. He paused after mentioning Recession Bar so people could laugh and he could say: “I kid you not” – then went on to lampoon a young shoplifter selling cut-price cheese. I felt a sudden lurch of protectiveness. I was thinking of dirty old Birkenhead as Us. How did this happen? I was born and raised in Warrington and couldn’t wait to get out. If Birkenhead has an inferiority complex, then Warrington – a rugby league town planted smack between two of the world’s most mythologised football cities – has a split personality. I did my degree at Liverpool University and lived in the south end of the city, immediately identifying with Liverpool’s maudlin romanticism. Part and parcel of nailing your colours to Liverpool’s mast is cocking a snook at Birkenhead, whose residents the Scousers call woollybacks. (Anyone, it transpires, not born in the single-figure L postcodes is a “wool”.) As someone who grew up where I did, the idea of legitimately patronising another town was irresistible. I gelled with Liverpool, yet never felt I belonged there. It didn’t really feel like home. Local identity has exercised me greatly these past few weeks. What is it about a place that fuels such extremities of partisanship? Last Wednesday, I watched in awe as London’s Turkish community turned out en masse to support Galatasaray at Arsenal, yet this went deeper than the love of a team. Those fans – Londoners now, the majority of them – were saying: “We may well be here, but our hearts will always be back there.” That is what has crept up on me. I may well be in Paris, but my heart is on the Penny Bridge, Birkenhead, wind in my hair. Helen Walsh’s latest novel is The Lemon Grove |