Liverpool Street Gallery

[Howie]

Liverpool Street Gallery

Photographing every street in Liverpool.

www.liverpoolstreetgallery.com

[Howie]

Photographing Liverpool

Liverpool Street Gallery is an online project to photograph every street in the Liverpool postal area which will be used as a free resource for schools and local historians. This project can only succeed with your photographic contributions. It's not an project where we hum and ha over the artistic merits of your photo. All are equally welcome. The website address is www.liverpoolstreetgallery.com and after 6 weeks, it already has over 2,200 photos.

Dave Wood
E-mail: dave@liverpoolpictorial.co.uk
Homepage: www.liverpoolpictorial.co.uk

[Ged]

A great project that'll need as much help as possible, everything welcome - there's no snobbery or 'that's not a good enough photo' and I should know as some of mine were good enough

Come on everbody, get behind it, if you're photographing anyway, get them on there too.

[shoney]

some really good pics on that site, well done

[Max]

Does every Liverpool street have history though If local historians needed photos?

Certainly a good project though, hopefully some gems will be uploaded that people don't commonly know about.

[Howie]

Mapping out everyone’s memory lane
Jun 30 2008
by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The ambition is high – a picture of every street in Liverpool to make the most comprehensive folk history of any city in the world. David Charters reports



WE HAVE all done it in secret moments of parting. You walk around the old house from room to room, touching every wall, window and hidden memory, saying a little goodbye and a thank you, as the lump swells in your throat.

The “you� is important here, because each house becomes a member of the family to those who have lived in it.

“That’s the house, where I was born,� says the mother to the child, and it is one of the most emotional sentences in our language.

Imagine, then, if we had pictures or photographs of every house in every street, road, block of flats, avenue or cul-de-sac in Liverpool and its surrounding areas – those standing now and those that have disappeared down the years.

And, to these pictures, you could add your own recollections about the neighbours, the celebrations, the sorrows, the dramas, the highs and the lows.

It could give Liverpool the most comprehensive record of folk-history in the world.

Millions of people have visited this city. Some settled, others moved on. Smoke plumed from the chimneys, full of wheezes and ghosts.

Children stared into the coals, seeing the glow of faces. The place throbs with stories. They should be told and they should be seen.

So it is appropriate that just such a programme, using all the benefits of modern technology, has started in our year as the European Capital of Culture.

The Friends of Liverpool Monuments have set up a website called the Liverpool Street Gallery to document every street in the “L� postcode area.

There are about 27,500 streets on Merseyside, which also includes Wirral, Sefton, St Helens and Knowsley, though there are no plans yet to include those boroughs on the website.

However, photographs of the numerous demolished streets will be included, as well as pictures of Liverpool through the ages to the present day.

So it is a vast task. More than 3,000 images have already been placed on the site, and these have attracted 44,000 viewers, who have sent some 700 comments for inclusion in the files.

Photographers from the Friends are also out and about with their cameras. Some gathered on Fazakerley Street, opposite the Cotton Exchange, to discuss the organisation’s biggest project so far.

The Friends began in 2003 with the intention of saving and promoting all that was best in Liverpool’s architecture, statues, memorials and other monuments, including the famous drinking fountains bestowed on the city in the 1850s by Charles Pierre Melly, whose family had made a fortune from the cotton trade.

It is now an influential and respected group, supported by eminent local people, including Andrew Pearce, MEP for Cheshire West between 1979 and 1989 and chairman of the Liverpool Heritage Forum; Robin Riley, sculptor and chairman of the Friends; the local historians Rob Ainsworth, Mike Kelly, Brenda Murray and Florence Gersten.

The idea began when Tony Siebenthaler, 46, a community activist, contacted Pat Neill, telephone engineer and Friends’ founder.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could photograph every street in Liverpool and put them up on the web,� said Tony, casually. “If we could get enough photographers involved, it wouldn’t be too much of a task,� he added.

Well, it clearly was an immense task, but there was a determination to do it, driven by that patriotic fervour you don’t find in any other city.

Dave Wood, 52, a professional photographer and expatriate, who now lives in Luton, but is an enthusiastic Friend and a bit of a computer wizard, said that it would be possible if people could “load� their own photographs on the website.

“Within a few days it was done,� says Pat, who was brought up in Berkley Street, Toxteth, always called Liverpool 8 when he was a child.

“Every street has a story to tell,� he continues.

“We have people interested in the streets where they were brought up. They were emailing us and asking if we had photographs of that street.

“We set up a project which enables us to photograph the street to order. People in Australia have asked us to do that and we have been able to .�

The network of photographers, covering every area of the city, provide this service free of charge.

From the following examples, you can sense the scheme’s scope.

“Looking for a pic of Gregson Street L6. My great-grandmother was born at No 4 in 1855 when the area was known as Toxteth Park.�

“Would like a photo of Edgley Lane, off Orrel Lane.

“My wife lived there when we met.�

“Does anyone have pictures of the prefabs that used to be off Hillside Road, in Longview, Huyton? They were demolished in 1969-70.�

The potential is obvious. But these photographs are for the Liverpool Gallery only.

A warning says: “All photographs appearing on the Liverpool Streets’ website are the exclusive property of the person who took the image and are protected under international copyright laws.

“Photographs may not be used or manipulated in any form without the permission of the photographer. This includes use of any image as part of another photographic concept or illustration.

“No photograph or image or any part of this site is within the public domain.�

“People are sending in black and white photographs of the 1950s and they are generating lots of interest because you can see the cobbles and there are no yellow lines and people have brought out their tables and chairs,� says Pat, 54.

“We are not really bothered about the artistic merit of the photos, though they can be arty and some are, but we do want an accurate representation of the street at a particular time.�

“I think this is the most photogenic city in the UK and that includes London itself,� says Dave Wood, who lived in Hughes Street, near the famous Grafton dance rooms, before the family was moved to Cantril Farm.

“Photographing every street in the city is a fantastic idea, one of those Don Quixote things.

“I just want this to go on and on. I will be quite sad when it finishes.�

He need not worry. It will never finish. “Don’t forget that in the fullness of time, the houses which are about to be built will have their own history,� says Robin Riley.

“Just imagine what the personal history of Liverpool would have been like if we had had this kind of facility in the 19th or 20th centuries.

“This project will not provide a Domesday Book (William the Conqueror’s census to ascertain the potential revenue of his realm) – but a total humanity book of Liverpool.�

Some argue that online facilities lack the warmth of old-fashioned reference books, but you couldn’t contain all the material from a project like this between covers.

In the past, the city engineers’ department photographed streets and buildings for the official records.

The difference here is that the Gallery is being filled by the people themselves, contributing what would once have been dismissed as “snaps� of street parties celebrating great national events, as well as more personal memories.

In this way, history is being taken away from the college professors and returned to the people who made it.

“It’s all about the street where you were born,� says Tony.

As the idea grows, arrangements could be made for people without computers to post their photographs. For search purposes, the website has listed the streets and roads in their postal districts.

You probably didn’t know as a child, when you were playing hopscotch or skipping on a rope, that you were making history.

But you were.

Now you have to make sure that its recorded for posterity.

THE website is www.liverpoolstreetgallery.com

Source: Liverpool Daily Post

[Maggie May]

WOW....this is fabulous.....I have just had a walk down memory lane via the website........so many places I knew as a child and beyond that I had forgotten about are all there....thanks so much for posting the link

[Liverpool Streets]

Almost 4,000 images contributed. Don't be shy contributing
It's already a fantastic resource for Liverpool schools and local/family historians, but it can become even better with your photos and coments.