The stunt man’s fall, in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff
by Nick Moss
A new website will tell the story of Liverpool through the lives of the people who experienced it, including through the arts, sport and other cultural activities.
Liverpool People’s History is an open-ended project put together by former Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker, in collaboration with local people. It focuses on the 1970s and 80s, which for growing numbers of people happened before they were born. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of others who remember the events and can contribute to the website.
This period was a turbulent time for Liverpool, marked by industrial strife, factory closures and the uprooting of communities by slum clearance. The “people’s history” of that period is the story of how the public viewed it and responded to it, often through the arts and culture.
There was a remarkable level of organised resistance in both the workplace and the community. Adversity had an energising effect. It brought a new vibrancy to popular culture and there were some notable – but mostly unsuccessful – experiments in alternative ways of doing things such as the Scotland Road Free School and the workers’ takeover of the Fisher Bendix factory in Kirkby.
Content of the Liverpool’s People’s History website is grouped under seven broad themes: Activism, Arts and Culture, Communities, Education, Race, Women, and Work. So far, it includes stories of the women who worked at the Littlewoods pools firm, a sit-in by students at Liverpool University, pirate broadcasts by Radio Free Liverpool, the filming of Boys from the Blackstuff and the foundation of News from Nowhere, the still-running radical bookshop.
The aim is to gather more stories through participation by the public. At present, Liverpool People’s History is operating informally and online meetings – open to anyone who is interested – will discuss ideas for future articles.
Liverpool People’s History arose out of an earlier project. Brian Whitaker was one of the team who produced the Liverpool Free Press, an “alternative” newspaper of the 1970s, and had kept copies of all its issues. He decided to preserve them in an online archive along with various grassroots publications from around the same time.
As part of this process, he consulted with Bryan Biggs, Director of Cultural Legacies at the Bluecoat, Liverpool’s contemporary arts centre, who had drawn cartoons for the Free Press. Brian Whitaker says:
Reflecting on that part of the city’s history we began to feel the archive could become a starting point for exploring it further – and the idea for a ʽpeople’s history’ of the period emerged.
For further information contact Brian Whitaker (07557 946794; brianwhit99@gmail.com). And visit Liverpool People’s History.
