Toxteth then and now: photographs of a bygone Liverpool

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/19/toxteth-then-now-tricia-porter-photographs-liverpool

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Some 40 years ago, in 1974, when I was a twentysomething from London, I made the move up north to Liverpool 8, an area of the city that was notorious for its poverty, planning blight and vandalism.

My future husband, David, was living there as a student. He was very concerned that, despite all that was being written and photographed about the area, where tight-knit communities were being pulled apart by redevelopment, its people were being forgotten.

Who were they? As a young photographer, I set out with David to find them, to tell their story in words and pictures as they went about their daily lives.

We started at the Bedford Stores, which had been recently relocated across the road to the new Myrtle Street shopping parade. Mr and Mrs Boswick and their staff told of former days when the Bedford Stores was a high-class grocer’s serving the wealthy in the area. They wanted to keep some of the ambience of the store in its new “supermarket-type” venue. We built up our contacts from there.

The resulting Bedford Street exhibition was shown at the Liverpool Academy of Arts, and later the Half Moon Gallery in London. The project gained Arts Council support, and I went on to create a follow-up exhibition, Some Liverpool Kids, which was also shown at the Academy a couple of years later.

On the other side of Upper Parliament Street, the Council had built housing for those who had been displaced by the redevelopment. I photographed the children there, playing outside, running errands and just hanging out, and was eventually welcomed into some of their homes.

Invites to schools and clubs followed, enabling me to gradually build up the story. I had been advised to carry a cosh with me, but I ignored the warning and never felt the need for one.

On the weekend that the photographs were shown again, this time as part of Look/15, Liverpool’s international photography festival at the Bluecoat, I returned with some of those who featured in the original pictures – Kevin Davies, Lizzie Hodson and her sister Jacquie, as well as some other family members. The area has since been known as Toxteth, following the riots of the 1980s.

Lizzie and Jacquie still live in the area, but their childhood homes – some of Liverpool 8’s larger houses – have been refurbished. New houses have replaced the tower blocks and smaller houses. The former Windsor Street school building is now a community centre, and the new school next door boasts of its high Ofsted rating.

Related: The street that might win the Turner prize: how Assemble are transforming Toxteth

Over near Falkner Street, what were once shops are now bistros. The area has a sense of gentrification, but half of the Myrtle Street shopping parade has gone – including the Bedford Stores – and a tower block is being built in its place. Redevelopment is continuing in Sugnall Street, but the Belvedere pub is still going strong. A lady I met at the exhibition told me she still lives in Percy Street. “At the time of the riots it was frightening,” she said. “The noise ... and I had a baby then.” But it was her home and she didn’t move away.

On our visit back to Liverpool 8, we were joined by Ann, whose brother and cousin were in the street football team picture. She reckons their homes will eventually be replaced with student accommodation, and that they will have to move further out of the city. The area, she says, is “too prime a spot, so near to the city centre”. Four decades on, there may still be a sense of fragility in Liverpool 8, but its residents remain as strong as ever, hanging on to their heritage and living their lives in the place they have always called home.