Having been born in Birkenhead to two Liverpudlians and spent the first eighteen years of my life within ten minutes’ train ride of that city, my relationship with Liverpool is a complicated one to say the least. In my childhood, it was nearly always the city, apart from occasional trips up to London while staying at my Auntie Joan’s in Surrey; Manchester didn’t really exist for me until I was about eight or nine and Chester was reserved for occasional school holiday trips. As a bright child, one of my great pleasures on a Saturday morning was to travel with my dad to Liverpool Museum and spend a couple of hours wandering around; my favourites were the Transport Gallery with a Liverpool Overhead Railway carriage and the 1830’s steam locomotive ‘Lion’ and some of the wildlife galleries, where I could stare fascinated at the dinosaur skeletons or the stuffed specimen of the extinct Great Auk with its egg, although I remember the Giant Eagle Owl in the two-tiered rainforest display giving me nightmares. But the seed of my dislike of Liverpool was also sown at this point; the reason I went out with my dad on Saturday mornings was that every other Saturday afternoon he went to watch Liverpool Football Club with his friends and, like a child of divorce, I was handed over to Mum and Grandma for a trip around the supermarket.

At the time, of course, Liverpool FC were roughly halfway through their dominance of English football and European success and, having supported them since boyhood, Dad could hardly miss this. His season ticket was probably his one prized possession at this point and I seem to remember occasionally being allowed to flick through it and glance at the programmes he brought home. He even took me a couple of times although, the Kop of the time not really being suitable for an eight-year-old, tickets were bought for the seated Anfield Road end for matches against Southampton and Oxford; the former being particularly memorable for the presence of Peter Shilton in goal, and my abiding memory of the match being one of particular amazement that I was several yards away from the Peter Shilton, the Ian Rush and so on. But as time went on, I started to unconsciously resent the way my Saturdays were organised for me, loathed the supermarket trips and ultimately Liverpool Football Club itself. In recent years my feelings have mellowed, to the point where I enjoy Liverpool’s success because it makes Dad happy, but I suspect that it’s not unlike the emotional journey that Princes William and Harry have had to make with regard to Camilla Parker-Bowles.

What I couldn’t have appreciated at that time, of course, was that the city of Liverpool was going through a crucial stage in its transformation from a port of national importance to a regional centre at best. To walk through Liverpool in the 1970s was, to a large extent, to see the confident post-war developments of the 1950s and 1960s before the later decline set in. For over a century Liverpool’s development had been built on being a particularly suitable port for embarking people and goods for the Americas, but as air became the way to travel to America, the liners sailed away one by one, and coming to containerisation somewhat late, much of the freight went away too. The re-orientation of Britain’s trade after joining the EU also favoured south- and east-facing ports, leaving Liverpool today with a steady traffic to and from Ireland, but not all that much else. It seems strange today that Liverpool could at one stage talk of competing with Manchester on an equal basis as a regional centre, but over the last couple of decades a combination of bad luck and poor leadership left the city out of favour with politicians of all colours at national levels and thrown on its own resources. The key moment was perhaps Neil Kinnock’s public denunciation of the Militant group within Labour, which effectively ran Liverpool some twenty years ago. Now looking like the last bastion of traditional, ideologically-based socialism as well as one of the early breeding grounds of obsessive political correctness at a time when Labour started to realise that it had to change if it were ever to be electable again, the Militant crisis meant that not only could Liverpool not rely on any help from the Thatcher government, any future Labour administration would also keep the city and its administration at arm’s length. It was particularly cruel that this should be followed shortly after by the Heysel and Hillsborough incidents- after Hillsborough in particular, there was a feeling at national level that there was no smoke without fire and the lack of sympathy at a national and institutional level only served to redouble the intensity of feeling in the city itself.

With no friends in high places, Liverpool had to reinvent itself on its own resources, and this it has done by marketing its own assets more effectively. Even before its reinvention as a tourist destination over the last ten years, it had a constant stream of visitors coming to see the places associated with the Beatles, especially high-spending Americans and Japanese (how I remember being accosted by a group of Japanese tourists in the city centre who wanted to know what bus to take to Abbey Road!). Similarly, the European successes of Liverpool and Everton, although curtailed by the post-Heysel ban, brought several thousand visitors at a time who were there to be tempted to stay for a few days. Its Victorian affluence had left Liverpool with a legacy of cultural venues and fine buildings which would shame a city twice the size; not only an excellent local museum, but an art gallery with an almost prescient collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in particular and a superb concert hall with one of the most highly-regarded provincial orchestras in Britain. One positive legacy of the 1980s was the establishment of museums emphasising the more recent aspects of the city’s history- a Maritime Museum taking over some of the disused docks nearer the city centre (adjacent to the Albert Dock, home of a series of specialist shops and Fred’s Weather Map) and what started out as the Museum of Labour History but eventually transformed into the Museum of Liverpool Life when it was realised that somebody was going to have to ask Mrs Thatcher for some money to keep it open. Given the extent to which Liverpool has shaped British popular culture of the last century, from the Beatles and football to the Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen partnership and a string of comedians, it’s entirely appropriate and perhaps inevitable that outsiders should be drawn to find out exactly how and why a city on the nation’s periphery should have produced such creativity and what if anything is distinctive about the Liverpudlia approach to life.

So where do I stand with Liverpool at the moment? The watershed was perhaps when I went away to university and no longer needed Liverpool’s bookshops and museums in the same way. For many years, Liverpool was no longer somewhere I visited regularly but where I changed trains to get back to Birkenhead. Six months on a training course in the mid-1990s showed me a city finally trying to do something with itself, but even recently I can’t help feeling that the people running Liverpool are still incapable of thinking things through properly. Litter is an endemic problem in the city centre; a new fountain or statue only has to be up five minutes before it’s full of Coke cans and takeaway wrappers, and the locals seem to be blissfully unaware that people from outside the city might draw some conclusions about them and their city from this. And the locals’ sense of irreverence and informality has unfortunately resonated badly with declining standards of behaviour in our society at the moment, so there’s a lot of work to be done on people’s attitudes before Liverpool becomes Europe’s City of Culture in 2008. But I’ve reached a kind of peace with the city, even if it’s one which comes from living at two hours’ remove and not having to live with it from day to day.