Ticket to ride
From Glasgow to Liverpool, why getting around matters so much
I picked the restaurant because it was one of the scant few still open when I rolled into Liverpool the other week, just after 9pm. Lebanese, slightly pricey but the food was fresh and full of flavour. I was one of only a few diners; a student couple sat to my right — they’d opted for what looked like ordinary pizza, a choice I tried and failed not to judge. A chatty group of middle-aged, Middle Eastern men rolled in for coffee and sweets as my mezze arrived. Along with their menus, the waitress handed them the same warning she had minutes earlier, when seating me: “Just so you know, we close at 10pm”.
It was the context that made this such a depressing statement. In my rural hometown, a hospitality business closing at 10pm on an ordinary Wednesday wouldn’t seem out of place. But I was in Liverpool’s so-called city centre, eating at a restaurant in a prime position on one of its most famous and “vibrant” thoroughfares: Bold Street. And bar a few takeaway spots, almost every eatery had its doors shut after the clock struck ten.
Walking back to my Travelodge, slap bang by the Royal Albert Dock, a flagship bit of waterfront, the only signs of life were a few tracksuited teenagers, some service workers shuffling back to their accommodation, and two police vans, rolling ominously through the quiet streets. Sure, it was a weekday but the scene was still a stark contrast with the excited buzz of Manchester’s equivalent Market Street that had surrounded me just hours previous.
For the past year, I’ve had the privilege of doing a lot of domestic travel, mostly to the same cities: Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. This is thanks to my day job as a managing editor of Mill Media, a (very exciting, if you ask me and lot of other people in the media industry) local news company. The role requires me regularly hopping on a cross-country train but I also jump at the chance. Any opportunity to break out of my London bubble is a gift. The capital might be home but it doesn’t have to be the whole world.
Such frequent travel, often completed in quick succession (last week, for example, I went from Manchester to Liverpool to Glasgow. I started this column on the train home from Birmingham) makes it almost impossible not to start doing broad brush comparisons of places. Similarities and differences jump out. You start trying to gauge the sensibilities of a city. What’s the general vibe? Is it on the up? In a death spiral? What’s in the air?
City states, states of cities
Manchester is easy because Manchester is, quite obviously, having a Moment. The city has never been one I’ve instinctively been drawn to but it’s still hard not to be swept up even a little by the overwhelming swagger Manchester — and the surrounding areas that have been pulled into the city-region of Greater Manchester — currently has.
Sure, it might be following a development model that has made parts of London glossy ghost towns, but this is definitely the UK’s second city now, no question. It’s richer (just don’t ask where all that cash is actually going), productivity is up, more people are moving there, and the spring in its step is so noticeable that it’s legitimately turned the region’s mayor — a position that doesn’t actually carry nearly as much power as people think — into a would-be challenger for 10 Downing Street. Stockport — a place my Boltonian friend recently remembered being as “rough as anything” in her youth — has been turned into vinyl and wine bar central. The transformation is staggering.
But other places are struggling: Birmingham and Liverpool feel particularly downbeat. You can take a city’s pulse via its centre. Even if not your favourite spot per se — and god knows, the likes of Soho and the City are not mine — if central London suddenly became devoid of people, I would be concerned for the overall economic and cultural health of the capital. It’s where everything meets: jobs, leisure, transport hubs. Both Birmingham and Liverpool, to me at least, are in desperate need of a defibrillator.
In the daytime, the picture is still bleak; much lower levels of activity than say, Glasgow, which is often discussed in pessimistic terms but actually isn’t in such a dire state (as a Glaswegian wisely observed to me recently, Glasgow will always be Scotland’s biggest city, and has that status backing it, whereas places like Liverpool and Birmignham don’t. I also think there’s clear signs of a regeneration on show in Glasgow. But yes, it’s not fully at its best right now).
Business opening hours reflect this state of affairs. Take a much trumpeted new indoor food hall that’s just opened in one of Birmingham’s prime city centre spots. Great — except it only operates two weekdays out of five, plus weekends. On the weekdays, the hall opens from 5pm and closes at 10pm. No workers can eat there during the day which feels like a big oversight. Maybe it fills up at night, but given how few people seem to be present in that part of Birmingham when I’ve walked through it after hours, I’m sceptical. Again and again I think: where the hell is everyone?
How do I get home?
The answer is: in the suburbs. What Manchester has, that Birmingham and Liverpool and Glasgow, to an extent, don’t, is much more advanced and joined-up public transport infrastructure. I do think it’s that simple, at the end of the day. A city lives and dies on how easily and affordably its population can move around.
If the answer is: ‘not very’, you end up with a disconnected metropolis, its centre dying, inhabitants scattered to the wind. In Glasgow, for example, the decline of city centre nightlife — particularly around the iconic Sauchiehall Street — is much bemoaned. The council have responded to this issue by debating whether to increase the provision of private hire car licences e.g. letting more Uber drivers operate in the area to ferry people home after hours. This is not even worth being deemed a sticking plaster of a solution.
