Genghis Khan, Kirkby Market, and me

This week marks the anniversary of the re-opening of Kirkby Market. Let’s take a trip home and a look at why markets, parks, and playgrounds are just as important as houses in making a place to live.

In 1218 the Shah of Khwarezmia made one of the worst decisions in all of human history; he picked a fight with Genghis Khan.

The Mongol leader had made a tentative peace-with-trade offer to the Shah, sending a caravan of ambassadors to negotiate an agreement that would allow both empires to co-exist.

In response, the Shah killed the emissaries. Khan was so enraged by this act of provocation he declared war on the Khwarezmian empire and its leader. Victory on the battlefield was swift, although the Shah himself escaped and fled.

Khan ordered his troops to the Shah’s hometown, where they demolished and dismantled every single building until no structure was left standing.

Yet this was not enough to satisfy Khan’s desire for retribution. His troops went on to re-direct a local river through the place where the town once stood, washing away the last stumps of human settlement and wiping the Shah’s birthplace from the map.

While the course of the River Alt is probably safe, I sometimes wonder if I have done something to provoke the similar wrath of my hometown planning department. Let’s look at the historical evidence.

Here is a list of the buildings that played an important in my early life which have since been demolished:

· The estate where I was born and lived to the age of four.

· My infant school.

· My junior school.

· My senior school.

· The church where I took my first Holy Communion.

· The swimming baths where I rescued rubberised bricks from drowning while wearing my pyjamas.

· The sports centre with its infamous ski slope — see below.

· The library.

· The local newspaper building where I did work experience and had my first article published.

· The ‘Mercer heights’ tower block where my uncle lived and which offered a view all the way to the Mersey on a clear day.

One of the buildings left standing is the house where I lived from four to the age of 18. Although that makes an unhappy appearance later in this story.

There is another explanation as to why my hometown has been involved in this seemingly endless cycle of clearance and construction. An explanation that exposes the folly of putting property before people.

To understand that story, we need to take a look at the history of Kirkby.

Over-spill

In 1951, Kirkby was a village of 3,000 people on the Eastern fringe of Liverpool. Its economy was sustained by agricultural production on the farmland that surrounded the village.

All of that was about to change utterly and at phenomenal speed. Kirkby would grow at a pace barely seen in England since the Industrial Revolution.

The transformation was driven the UK’s post-1945 approach to urban and economic development. Vast tracts of Liverpool had been destroyed or heavily damaged by the Luftwaffe during World War Two.

As we explored a few weeks ago, government policy at the time subsidised clean-sweep demolition and the dispersal of populations out of cramped and bomb-ravaged city centres into ‘new towns’. Southdene was the first estate was built in Kirkby New Town in 1952, and was quickly followed by many, many, many more.

By 1961, the population had rocketed from 3,000 a decade earlier to 52,000. That’s nearly a twenty-fold increase in ten years. As children, my grandparents were part of this vast wave of managed migration.

The immediate problem on “Merseyside’s largest over-spill estate” was the absence of social infrastructure or, in simpler terms, the lack of anything to do outside the house. Especially for the huge numbers of young people.

“For building’s sake”

By the early 1960s, virtually half (48%) of the Kirkby population was aged under 15. The average for England was just over a quarter (27%). If you find buses or trains quite noisy when half the passengers are school kids, imagine an entire town like that. All the time. With virtually nothing for them to do.

These kinds of demographic imbalances are understandable in the post-war context. Less comprehensible is the failure to anticipate the consequences of concentrating thousands of families in a new town without support structures or social amenities.

In ‘New Jerusalem Goes Wrong’, John Boughton cites a 1965 article in The Times; “no-one has yet built a cinema or dance hall and, possibly for this kind of reason, the 13- and 14-year old are the town’s most frequent law-breakers.”

On the same theme, one resident complained of the local council that “all they’ve built for is building’s sake but not to take the children into consideration. Have a look around here, where on earth can children play?”

From the beginning, the people who built Kirkby knew how to build houses, but chronically undervalued the importance of places and spaces for people of all ages to rest, relax, and play.

Sloping off

The Council may have been have been put off the idea of building anything other than houses by its experience of trying to instal a ski slope in Kirkby sports centre. This is the one of the oddest, and still quite mysterious, examples of urban misadventure in England’s post-war history.

The idea was to offer residents the chance to get some exercise by emulating the professionals on Ski Sunday. In reality, neither the planners nor the contractors knew how to build a ski slope in a built-up urban environment. Costs increased as, during trials, both people and parts of the slope kept falling off, requiring the addition of fencing and regular de-bumping of the surface.

The bumps may have been caused by the “hazard collection of builders’ rubble” used to make the mound, according to a BBC investigation. This prompted an internal inquiry, which found that the slope has been built “without planning permission, over a water main on land the council didn’t own”.

The worst allegation was that the slope had been built the wrong way around, threatening to send terrified skiers into the path of oncoming traffic on the M57. Amid howls of derision, and before it was completed, the council stopped further construction and, you guessed, knocked it down.

Strife

Unlike the Kirkby skiers, the local economy was heading in the right direction. The teenagers may have been bored, but the adult workforce was kept busy. With a new workforce and modern factory plants, the town was initially economic success story. By 1967, the Industrial Estate supported a mammoth 25,000 jobs. After the youthful exuberance of the 1960s, however, came the strife of the 1970s.

In 1971, the Ford factory at Halewood, where my dad worked on the assembly line, laid off 1,000 workers in the middle of a strike over pay and conditions. Many more redundancies followed as factories were shuttered and workforces shrank in the face of competition and technological advancement.

By 1981, almost a quarter (22.6%) of the working-age population was unemployed. To echo last week’s article, Merseyside in the 1980s was once again ‘the place everyone is talking about’, but for all the wrong reasons.

The residents of the New Town had been promised a New Jerusalem. In reality they were “let down by central government planners, corrupt councillors and the private sector alike”.

“Driven by debt and speculation”

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kirkby continued to demolish its ‘old’ estates and build new ones. It was incentivised and aided in the job by government funding programmes that, as in the post-war years, ignored the lessons and legacy of Octavia Hill. One effect of this destabilising cycle of clearance and construction was to exacerbate population loss.

By 2001, the town was home to just over 40,000 people, down from the peak of 60,000 in the economic heyday of 1971. I was part of that outflow, leaving for university in 1996 and returning regularly but only ever temporarily to see my family.

In 2011, on one such visit, I drove past my old house, the one mentioned above, where I lived between ages four and 18. I was shocked to find it not just empty but vandalised and partially burned out. Its the house in the picture at the top of this article.

I wrote about the situation at the time and it was later picked up by Aditya Chakrabortty for The Guardian.

The crash and the Great Recession had exposed the danger of relying on a fundamentally unstable and over-inflated housing market to drive economic growth. In effect, the council had used housebuilding as a form of economic boosterism without, as we’ve seen, investing in the social and economic infrastructure that needs to accompany new homes.

This wasn’t building to make a community, but building to stimulate economic activity in the absence of anything more sustainable or useful. As Chakrabortty put it, “places such as Kirkby remind us that what’s collapsed isn’t a handful of countries, but an entire model of economic development: one driven by debt and speculation, and which ignored the need for productive industry.”

“Kirkby reverses its fortunes”

During 2021, Kirkby was in lockdown, with the rest of the country, but as the economy continues to open up, there are some encouraging signs of recovery. In early 2022, the Liverpool Echo described Knowsley as “experiencing one of the strongest post-pandemic recoveries throughout the UK when it comes to local spending”.

As well as further investments in the town centre, the Merseyside Combined Authority had dedicated £10.5m to the development of the Shakespeare North Playhouse and another £8m in transport improvements.

The Financial Times noted that these direct interventions by the council were “driving a retail revival in a deprived northern town”.

Thoughts for the week

If Kirkby’s post-pandemic recovery is to be sustained, the lessons learned in the hardest possible way during Kirkby’s past need to be applied to its future.

Lesson 1: The profound and long-lasting social costs of constant clearance and construction outweigh massively the short-term gains of using housebuilding to boost the local economy.

Lesson 2: Demolition should only ever be the last resort, after every attempt has been made to repair the physical and social fabric.

Lesson 3: Neighbourhoods need to contain pubs and parks, creches and community centres, libraries and lidos, to encourage a sense of community and give people the best environment to have a decent crack at life.

To ignore these lessons would be a folly worthy of the Shah of Khwarezmia.