Graffiti, electricity substation, ?Brunswick Dock, Liverpool - awaiting translation.
A Liverpool walk - Cressington to Echo Arena along the waterfront
A bright day and a busy park, a walk to explore change and stasis; the ever-changing river and its cloudscapes. I find myself recording the passing clouds over a landscape, especially over water. The crowds thinned as I left Otterspool and headed into town. A change of security fence, from the sleek modern ones to the upright older ones, rusting and meshed. A fine day, warm for the time of year, people using the waterfront at all points. The reclaimed waterfront of the Prom and then the Garden Festival site, a waste of space, the waterfront renamed and given names that didn't stick, like the city calling all of the road along the river 'the Dock Road'. The old Garden Festival waterfront, rusting logos and sculpture; river-furniture. In a decade it will have gone. A huge buoy, marooned as sculpture, decoration; dribbles of graffiti as if oozing from inside.
The river's tides and moods; small redbrick beaches at a low tide, new patterns of river movements with the newish river frontage. A series of new beaches along the housing areas, the water-suburbs. These decorated with hanging baskets, an urban(e) existence seen as a stepping stone to the suburbs proper. Older dock furniture and huge granite blocks. Empty benches to fill the space. A giant stone tablet, granite, deeply carved, representing a legal obligation from the 1850s to depict in stone an imaginary line on a parliamentary bill; a found text, 'Eastern Imaginary' for this recreation of water landscapes and a rough north-east/south/north-west walk. Fantastic graffiti, so subtle and well-installed it is invisible. The fishing village of Brunswick Dock; fishing boats and a small sailboat, bringing something of the disreputability of the sea to these exclusive suburbs; a saltiness. And a derelict car park, revitalised, regenerated a decade ago and then amputated behind security fences, benches with graffiti a decade old, weeds, broken lamp-posts. Why? The most interesting landscape I found; I wanted to see more.
The new city growing around me as Brunswick and Coburg became Queens and Kings. A vast stone car park, rubbled and pooled, tiny wild-flowers and flocks of gulls. A shimmering, mirage-view of the Albert Dock reflected in a restaurant's glass wall. The shiny whale-flesh reflection of the Arena; and the walk ended with the security men - semi-retired pirates, no teeth or gold teeth, missing eyes, wild earrings - trying to get me free tckets for the MTV Awards the following Thursday, the old city resurfacing gently through the new.
