Prestons and Liverpool’s Regeneration

A recent blog , describes in glowing an enthusiastic terms Liverpool’s recent regeneration. The blog is based on an article from the wall street journal and  describes the ideal of what a regenerated northern city should be like. The title of  European capital culture has transformed the city into a “Cluster of waterfront museums and galleries like the Tate Liverpool, as well as the hum of construction projects.” The article describes the Bluecoat Gallery and the Foundation for Creative Art and Technology. One of the creators describes how:

“It’s an edgy city that’s got character, and artists are attracted to that edginess,”

The article describes how: “Encouraged by European Union funding and local initiatives, commercial development has been on the rise in the region. Growth industries include car manufacturing, biotech and digital technology (Sony has a videogame-development studio in Liverpool).”

The article contains a description of the city as :

“There’s a digital-art gallery where there was once an old tea warehouse, designer-driven hotels and restaurants are opening and, in the fall, the city will host the MTV Europe Music Awards”.

So according to the article the city has reinvented itself as a new, edgy, exciting city with a  focus on art galleries, designer shopping and restaurants and new technology.

This idea of regeneration through culture is a convincing one. The same article describes how:

In 1990, during Glasgow’s stint as the EU’s culture capital, the Royal Concert Hall opened and overall theater attendance jumped more than 40%. Today, the city is filled with artsy bars, hip hotels and critically lauded restaurants.

 

These core ideas, new, trendy bars, cultural activities, new technology and high class shops are things which seem, to me at least perhaps the way of defining whether not a city has been regenerated. These  things  are obviously lacking in Preston.

 

Hours of looking at blogs about Preston seem to show that the residents of Preston at see the city as crime ridden and unpleasant. Sadly though this fails to translate itself into regeneration.

Although the website is meant as a joke,the website Chav Towns gives in interesting insight into how the people who live here view Preston. on  the animosity that the bloggers on it feel is far to bitter for it simply be meant in good fun. The first users posts a comment which says:

But what’s this? Glancing through my Chav-O-Scope I spy the unmistakable stink signatures of myriad Chav and Chavettes, greasing their way along this North West town’s highways and byways and as the hours of the day pass into night the glow given off by their chunky gold jewellery begins to interfere with the delicate instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Houston, we have a problem, a Chav problem, and it appears to be getting worse. It’s too late, the needle of my Chavometer is nudging off the scale. The life force beacons of the ordinary citizens of this place are dimming, dimming, dimming . . .We’re. All. Doomed.”

 

 Another user then adds:

I’m from Preston, and I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned Avenham in any of these posts yet.It’s got to be the number one chavviest area of the city, yet it houses probably the richest people in Preston.

The houses and flats on Winckley Square in Avenham are a blend of horrendously expensive historic buildings and new studio apartments and many of the city’s law and civic offices are based around there, which seems strange when you see what lives next door..

The chav-scum part has to be 99% council or slumlord-owned accomodation, and most of the remaining towerblocks in Preston are there. They’ve just been given a facelift, so they don’t look quite so festering anymore, but they’re still dens of chavviness.

 Nights in Avenham are times not to walk out alone, or to walk with great care.. Pissed up burberry muppets lurk around the entrance to every block, swilling plastic bottles of White Lightning from the neigbourhood newsie/offie, often greeting you with cries of “gizza fag, cha!” or, if there are a few of them “Oi! Nobhead! I’m talkin’ to ya, innit!”

 

One of the few other blogs which I can find which describes life in Preston is one in which a woman complains about people listening to music on thier mobile phones on the bus but says that she is too fightened to talk to them to ask them to turn it off. 

 

 This fits in with the earlier discussion I reported on about Winkley square, whenever people blog about their lives in Preston they mention crime and petty vandalism.  There seems to be no mention of developing high tech industries or an artistic community.  The only name that is mentioned is the PAD gallery. A visit to the gallery however, which I was reviewing of the course newspaper revealed it to be an art shop with a exhibition room for local artists.The opening hours of the shop/gallery are 10-5  Weds – Friday   and 12pm-4pm  on Saturday. To describe this an artistic venue is slightly exaggerated.

What is interesting is that having seen the blog about liverpool I now have a descritption of what a regenerated city should be like.