THE ANGELOF THE PUB

A photo in The Guardian in 1989 showed Lord Gifford QC, briefcase in hand, positioned at the junction of Upper Parliament Street and Princes Avenue. He was conducting his study into policies and community relations in Liverpool 8, the area in the city’s South End that had witnessed an uprising in 1981, dubbed by the national media, the ‘Toxteth riots.’ When Gifford’s report ‘Loosen the shackles: first report of the Liverpool 8 inquiry into race relations in Liverpool’, written with Wally Brown and Ruth Bundey, was published it revealed systemic and ‘uniquely horrific’ racism.

What may not be evident in this black and white press photo is that the Toxteth street sign behind Gifford had been painted in three bands of colour, like a tricolour: the red, gold and green of Rastafari. This inspired piece of graffiti was one of several that appeared on street signs throughout L8 during 1985/86, delineating a neighbourhood, in particular Granby, that had for generations been the heart of Liverpool’s multicultural community. It took many years for the aerosol colours to fade, a reminder of the slow progress in terms of investment, job opportunities, or in any other sort of improvement of the area.

The person responsible for the painted signs was artist and local resident Leroy Cooper, whose street art was part of a creative practice that also encompasses poetry, photography, painting and music, playing in bands like The Blood Group, and DJing with his Cosmic Ambassador Hi-Fi sound system. All these initiatives were interlinked, but it was as a poet that I invited Leroy to participate in 1987 in 2nd Site, a collaborative project at the city’s contemporary arts centre, Bluecoat, in which four poets and four sculptors worked together in the gallery with local schools over ten-days to create an installation of words and structures, reflecting the sort of urban environment the children envisaged living in.

The resulting installation, open to the public, was a sort of utopian vision, an imagined world that transcended the reality experienced by the young participants. Leroy, too, in his photographic work, was turning his attention to his own environment,

the streets and people of L8. Part of the Windrush generation and with relatives already in Liverpool, his parents had come from Jamaica to settle in this area of the city, which would provide Leroy with his canvas. A training course in black and white photography at Open Eye Gallery introduced him to the possibilities of the medium, and the camera quickly became his ‘weapon of choice’.

Documenting daily life in L8, the majority of the images presented here are from 1985–88 and capture that period, before the area was allowed to ‘disintegrate’ through a policy of ‘managed decline.’ Over the following decade unity became fractured, there was a mass exodus of people heading to London and further afield, hard drugs flooded the city. One photograph, Do Not Trust The Media (Granby Street), captures this atmosphere, as two presumably out-of-town reporters are observed standing in front of a graffitied wall: ‘NEWSFLASH! THIS IS TOXTETH NOT CROXTETH. STRICTLY GANJA’ – a reference to the heroin epidemic in the city’s North End estates and, in contrast, the South End’s predilection for weed.

In the 1980s and 90s, the national media found Liverpool a convenient scapegoat, a symbol for all that was wrong in post-industrial Britain and the declining fortunes of its Northern cities – a negative characterisation that included striking workers, football hooligans, high crime, militant councillors, even a television soap opera, Brookside. Post the 1981 riots, L8 was paid particular media attention, and vilification. How instructive, then, particularly for viewers coming to the work for the first time, to revisit Leroy’s images from the 1980s, which paint an alternative picture of the area and help, by connecting place, people and time, to construct a richer geography of it. While using familiar settings of street corners, rows of terraces, local shops and boarded-up windows, the photographs aim to get under the surface and suggest a different narrative: the “street” considered, not as a site for confrontation, but as “the neighbourhood”, community, a place that people take pride in and have made their own, often through decades of family roots that go deep.