The Edge of Creation

Abstract

Liverpool is on the edge, its born from the edge and retains a distinctive edgy disposition. Liverpool’s edge opens onto the Atlantic a characteristic which drove the city’s exponential growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as gateway to the New World. The city has a distinctively Northern “vitality, sheer staggering vitality” [01] a characteristic it shares with other Northern cities, such as Manchester, Sheffield and Hull. These cities are where the heavy industrialisation was concentrated and consequently all were adversely affected by the de-industrialisation of the United Kingdom. The docks were Liverpool’s economic ‘raison d'etre’ they were also integral to its cultural character providing an exchange of strangers and the strange as unique events in a folded ‘fecund’ of cultural creativity. This is a distinctive characteristic of edge territories; the edge holds in or out encouraging overlapping and subsequent interaction. The closure of the docks and the subsequent exodus of heavy industries in the 60s left seven linear miles of redundant docklands. Liverpool’s edge redundancy removed ‘event’ as that difference generated from repetition. The city needed to transform to adapt however the extent of the redundant dockland was vast and so inextricably linked to the cities existence that it constituted an inconceivable endeavour. The change required was so vast that the city went into a double decade transitional state that can best be explained as a ‘liminal defensive reaction’