Context 153 - March 2018

54 C O N T E X T 1 5 3 : M A R C H 2 0 1 8 with sacks of produce. The imagery is a glorification of Pesaro and La Serenissima (the Venetian Republic) that placed him at its head. To my 21st-century eyes a more apt satire on the abuse of empires could scarcely be devised. I would like to think that this slant was not lost on the sculptor, the German Melchiorre Barthel, who gave the Africans a strength and dignity absent in the rest of the composition. The monument has not passed unobserved over the years. John Ruskin in The Stones of Venice (1851–3) perhaps predictably has it as the second worst in Venice. Mark Twain describes it in some detail in his travelogue The Innocents Abroad (1868). He also describes his Venice guide, whom he lamentably omits to name: an impeccably dressed, well-educated, erudite and polyglot son of former South Carolina slaves, who has, Twain says, ‘no desire to go back to his native land. His judgement is correct.’ Oh to have had a conversation with these men about this imagery! Mention of South Carolina contrives a link, via the trade in cotton and tobacco, to another world heritage site and maritime city founded on the fruits of empire: Liverpool. Like Venice, Liverpool has much historic fabric in need of new uses. Over the past 35 years or so a great deal of regeneration has involved the city’s considerable portfolio of historic buildings and docks. But whereas in Venice the very strict planning rules mean that the biggest danger to the world heritage site is lack of action, in Liverpool it is the impact of the positive actions of regeneration projects themselves, to the extent that Unesco currently has it flagged with a red marker. A real estate of derelict docks with few remaining unconverted buildings of quality means regeneration must be in a reimagined spirit of the place. This is not always easy. The principal issue is the extent to which the zeitgeist of the place is visual, and it is this that forms the nub of the controversy over the future of the Maritime City World Heritage Site. When I commuted daily to Liverpool from Birkenhead on the Mersey Ferry in the early 1980s, part of the appeal was the buzz of the Pier Head, which was then the city’s principal transport – and the departure point for the Isle of Man ferry. It seems to me that this was as much part of Liverpool’s heritage as the adjacent ‘Three Graces’, and that its pseudo- replacement with cultural activities such as funfairs leaves it a shadow of its former self, however tastefully landscaped. A heritage place must be valued for what it is in the round, not just what it is physically. This issue cropped up in another recent world heritage site designation: the English Lake District. There is a school of thought, led by George Monbiot of The Guardian, that it should not have been designated because of its long history of ecological degradation. But this misses the point that historic agricultural practice, the call of the wild for walkers and the romanticisation of the place by the lake poets are all part of the designated heritage. Erosion by three-peak challengees, as with New Zealand’s Milford Trail and other bucket-list adventures, is a matter for management, just as it is for historic cities. So I have some sympathy with the views of Liverpool’s Lord Mayor, Joe Anderson, in wanting heritage to be a driver and not an inhibitor of regeneration. Of course, the opposing perspectives of the city and Unesco should be capable of resolution. One hopes that the recently established task force will be able to achieve this, whether or not its formation was driven by the dogged campaigning of the late Gavin Stamp writing as Piloti in Private Eye. Back in Venice, the vast and out-of- scale Mulino Stucky received planning permission in 1895, despite much public disquiet, only because the city council was threatened with job losses if it did not. But this building (now a Hilton Hotel) is now just part of the place.Without it, and the other trappings of tourism, Venice would have none of the exciting buzz of its zenith years. So if it takes a new Goodison Park on a filled-in Bramley Moore Dock to bring the long-absent buzz back to Liverpool’s northern dockland, that might not be much different from the filling in of the 18th-century St George’s Dock in 1900 to provide the site for the Three Graces themselves. History’s ‘mistakes’ have this uncanny way of becoming today’s heritage. Liverpool quite properly has no intention of going the way Mark Twain saw Venice: ‘To-day her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty… she sits… forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.’ Forgotten of the world? Hardly! To quote Henry James again: ‘if you are wise you will step back there presently.’ And to Liverpool too. James Caird, chair@ihbc.org.uk