The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes

By David Lewis

Book review and interview by Richard Lewis 1/12/2010

In autumn 1965 John Lennon was struggling to write a track for The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, when he hit upon the idea of penning a song that would describe a bus journey from his childhood home in Menlove Avenue into town, listing the neighbourhoods and landmarks he passed. The Woolton to city centre idea never came to fruition on that occasion as the song in question, In My Life, made no direct reference to Liverpool. Lennon later used the concept the following year however in Strawberry Fields Forever, one of his most acclaimed songs.

Of all the musicians of the past fifty or so years, The Beatles have remained the best at imbuing ordinary places with wonder. Strawberry Fields, its accompanying double A-side Penny Lane, Abbey Road, the Cast Iron Shore glimpsed in Glass Onion. David Lewis’ The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes traces the origin of many of these locales. The stated aim of the book is to see the stories “from the city’s perspective, not the fans,” staking out corners of the city that other Beatles’ writers had overlooked or neglected to write about at length. Aside from the now world famous addresses of 247 Menlove Ave, 20 Forthlin Rd and The Cavern, the book traces many of the pubs, parks and friends' houses the pre-Beatles frequented in their formative years.

Aside from the locations known to the band themselves, Lewis traces their family routes back as far as the 1850s, where fortuitously the unknowing great-grandparents of Lennon and McCartney cross paths. The images in the book are all presented in monochrome, befitting an era Paul McCartney remembered in 2004 as being in “black and white.”

Giving the lie to John Lennon’s self-embellished background of being a Working Class Hero, Woolton is pictured in its enduring semi-rural state of dairy farms and golf courses. The Dingle Richard Starkey grew up in - with its two-up, two downs and a pub on every corner - throws the difference between his and the middle-class Lennon’s backgrounds into sharp relief. Ringo’s home in Admiral Grove, Lewis reveals was earmarked for demolition as early as the 1930s, yet is still with us, unlike Ringo’s previous address of Madryn Street, which is soon to be (controversially) demolished. The Wavertree of George Harrison’s childhood is vividly brought to life, citing the landmarks that remain: the Coffee House Pub, the cinema (now a supermarket), Picton Clock and the now sadly disused Town Hall, where The Beatles later played.

Lewis is particularly good in evoking the musty bohemia of the group's college days, just as the 1960s were beginning. Although the buildings around Pilgrim Street and Hope Street are still intact, the artists, novelists and musicians who lived in this area of the city have largely gone, forced out by higher rent prices. John, Paul and George, living in Gambier Terrace and attending the institute (or in Lennon’s case the School of Art) found themselves in the midst of this world. As Lewis writes, “Bohemia is a state of mind, an idea, an invisible place of acceptance for artists and poets, oddballs and low-lives, where academia and the literary world rub shoulders with crime and alcoholism.”

In this social whirl the band encountered a grittier variant of the Parisian Left Bank Existentialists, and the avant-garde set they would later meet in Swinging London. This formative period - breezed over in the best-selling biography of The Beatles, Philip Norman’s Shout - was crucial to the band’s development, as they mixed with creative types they had never encountered before, who opened their eyes and ears to a different world.

The sheer variety of locations the band played in is also covered, in an era when scores of local ballrooms, clubs and coffee bars covered the city, stretching out into the suburbs. In an age before the gig circuit solidified into a chain of Academies and universities, The Beatles could be found playing venues such as the Casbah coffee bar in West Derby Village and Litherland Town Hall.

For Beatleologists, The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes is a worthy addition, illuminating many of the formative places the band grew up in and the influence it had on them in later life. One little-known anecdote describes John Lennon making an unannounced visit to Woolton in the early 1970s (over a decade since he had lived in the city) to point out places in the suburb that he remembered from his childhood to Yoko Ono. Moving to New York for good in 1972, Lennon seemingly felt the need to revisit his birthplace prior to the move, a reflection on how important his formative years in Liverpool had been to him.

Nerve talks to David Lewis, author and photographer of The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes.

What inspired you to create the book?
In a way the book is a response to one sentence in Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles (the band’s only official biography) which originally came out in 1968. One of the early chapters ends with the line ‘Liverpool was now where they had come from’, which stayed with me when I first read the book. It seemed to be critical of the city in some way, and also suggested that there was no going back to Liverpool once the four lads became The Beatles. But it also seemed to suggest that they were leaving the city behind, that you can get rid of a home town simply by moving away from it, and also that the city had played its part in their story and should leave the stage quietly.
I grew up in Liverpool in the 1960s and 1970s and the city was full of Beatles stories and places – everyone knew the places and the people but nothing was made of it. I thought even then that the city was a big part of the band and their stories, and that there was a lot more here than the famous places – the Cavern, their old homes and schools and so on. And living on Newcastle Road in the early 1990s I would see Beatles fans and even have them knocking on the door, looking for Number 9, where John Lennon’s mother’s family lived - and this reinforced the sense of hidden history and buried stories, in a way.
So it’s a book I have always wanted to write – and then in the summer of 2009 I realised that John would have been seventy in 2010, and so would Stu Sutcliffe, and Ringo was going to be seventy in July 2010, and then Nowhere Boy came out, and the time seemed right to put some ideas together and approach publishers.

We talked briefly about conserving old buildings (especially houses) in the city, is this another passion of yours?
Yes, definitely. I love walking urban landscapes and documenting change and what survives from before. One of my devices for writing is to walk the landscape first, so for my Liverpool books and exhibitions I have walked across the city many times, either alone or with other writers, artists, photographers. My first book was The Churches of Liverpool and that grew out of realising how vulnerable many of the city’s landmark buildings are, how easily we lose them. I see Liverpool – the older city - as basically a Victorian landscape with modern areas around it and I think we should keep as much of the old city as possible, adapting it to modern needs. Ringo’s old home Madryn Street off High Park Street is one of the six or eight ‘Welsh streets' of small terraced houses which are earmarked for demolition, then reprieved, and then put down for clearance again.
When I walked them these streets were empty and deserted. I think it would be far better to renovate these houses – and they’re not that small, Ringo remembered three bedrooms – and rent them to young single people or young families, or make six or eight houses together into a sheltered housing scheme for pensioners. We should make a virtue out of not owning cars in these streets, rather than demolish them for what are basically ugly copies of 1970s suburban houses with car ports and hanging baskets. Cities have to move forward and I’m not saying ‘keep the slums’ but the Victorian city has character and dignity, and too much of this has been lost in Liverpool.

How important was it to chronicle Liverpool as The Beatles remember it?
One of the aims of the book was to uncover what is left of the 1950s city they knew, which in turn was often the city built in the 1920s or 1930s, or even the Victorian city. I wanted to get across the idea that they didn’t just come out of nowhere, that they had family stories and landscape stories that rooted them in the city, the way we all have – local parks, local shops, bus routes, grandparents’ houses, the places that were important to them. They often turned out to be immigrant stories as well, which rooted them still more in Liverpool culture.

How long did it take to research the locations in the book?
Not very long. I started with the early days – childhood and schools – in the Beatles history books and worked out from there. Their early homes and schools are fairly well known – especially the two owned by the National Trust, obviously – but also Ringo’s homes and George’s homes which are now private houses. I got out on foot and had a wander around their locations, seeing the shops they knew, the bus stops, post boxes, pubs etc. There were often tiny clues in their memories, such as the ‘Anthology’ stories, where one street name or the name of a pub could set me off walking.
I was able to make links between stories, such as how near George lived to Wavertree Mystery, which his family might have walked through – probably walked through – to see grandparents on the Wellington Road side, so he probably played in the park as a small boy – and it is possible that John Lennon did as well, at about the same time, with his grandfather from Newcastle Road. It’s a book of explorations and poetic journeys, might-have-been history, not hard facts. It’s more about me too, in that way. Lots of my family history came to the surface as I explored the city, such as having relations on Madryn Street fifty years ago. More and more I am becoming a character in my own books!

How did you decide on the locations other than family homes to cover?
Well, I started with the four Beatles who made it, not the band members who dropped out or the big ‘lost’ Beatles like Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, so I had four places to start from. Basically one small fact would start me off! I started with places of birth and earliest homes and went walking. ‘If he lived here then he must have known This Street, and That Street’ and so on. And there is a huge amount of information online these days about their family histories, which took me further back into Liverpool’s history. The internet stories were interested in the people, but I used them as starting points for explorations of landscape. For example I found a Lennon ancestry website which took me to Michael Byron’s Irish genealogy research, which set me off exploring Saltney Street and the places around St Albans Church on the dock road, where the Lennons might have lived in the 1860s, 1870s. I was guided by what I was told by the books and the websites and by what I found on the ground. Like I say it’s a book about landscapes, and my reactions to them and the stories, not about history as such.

How do you think Liverpool's relationship with The Beatles is in the present day?
When I was a teenage Beatles fan in the 1970s, the city didn’t make anything of the band. The Beatles shop was in a small cellar on North John Street and of course the city cheerfully demolished the Cavern in the early 1970s because of the underground railway. Now it’s very different, with the bus tours and the National Trust houses, and the Mathew Street Festival and everything – the city has woken up to the potential now the Beatles are fashionable again. I think the city itself is more ambiguous – everyone of a certain age seems to have a Beatles story but that generation sees those days very differently, there is no nostalgia for the poverty of the 1960s and the damp, crumbling, badly heated places they grew up in, and no wonder.

How do feel the landscape of Liverpool has changed since the early 1960s when The Beatles relocated to London?
I was surprised to find that some places have changed hardly at all – where the band grew up, for example, Wavertree, the Dingle, Woolton, Allerton – and that many of the old clubs and venues are still there, or at least the buildings are. Other places like Liverpool 8 have changed a lot more and of course the city centre is a very different place with a lot of new building especially in the last decade or so. Most of the changes are subtle, I think, things gone like the old money, steam trains, gas lamps, and the coffee bars in cellars not Starbucks! I wonder if people are different and I’m not sure. Do we think differently now than we would have in 1960? I suppose I think that yes we do, we are kinder and more liberal – very broadly speaking – and I think that this is a consequence of the 1960s, which were defined as a decade by The Beatles.

The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes is available at bookshops and from www.dbpublishing.co.uk

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