Now With Added Bollards!

The Bollards of Liverpool 8: Part Two

The day dawns sunny, unlike the deluges of yesterday’s post and it’s nearly time to set out on Part Two of our weather interrupted tour of Liverpool 8’s bollards. This one walking through Lodge Lane to Granby and Canning.

Before we do, a couple of clarifications in response to discussions over the past day or so on Twitter. Firstly I don’t for a minute think that ridding Liverpool 8 of its bollards is the most important issue facing society or even Liverpool 8 today. Of course it isn’t. But I am pointing out that there are rather a lot of these bollards, most of them have been here a long time, and I think we should consider getting rid of most of them as they are producing arid and blocked off neighbourhoods. Blocked off for reasons of authoritarian convenience, bordering on social control as I pointed out yesterday.

Secondly, I certainly do not want to turn the bollards into any kind of art project or even any kind of campaign. After what I’m about to write I will have had my full say on Liverpool 8’s bollards, and I’ll move on to other things. So let’s get going.

Now you may remember from yesterday’s post, which was mainly around the Dingle and the Welsh Streets, the beginnings of a theory that there are bollards around the borders of Liverpool 8. But can this be true here too?

But turning left on Hartington and looking across at the entrance to Fern Grove, Liverpool 8?

So do the good citizens of the leafy avenues need protecting from the wild savages of Fern Grove and the other streets leading on to Lodge Lane?

Then down at the end of the road?

So why does ‘Lodge Lane’ need to be so sectioned off from ‘The Avenues?’

Actually these venerable restrictors are amongst the area’s very oldest bollards. Installed, you may remember from yesterday’s post, to stop kerb-crawling in the early 1970s.

Daphne’s always lived in Granby and Yvonne grew up here. But the reason Yvonne knows my name and, as it turns out, a good deal about me is she’s a regular reader of this blog! So we talk bollards and their delight at Granby 4 Streets and I take this picture before we all walk on. Lovely to meet both of you.

But although I mainly concentrate on the 4 original streets end of Granby, today, in the interests of our Bollard-quest, we’re going to walk through the very altered rest of it. Between here and Upper Parlaiment Street.

Well this didn’t used to be the end corner. Granby Street used to flow through to Upper Parliament. And now, marking where this used to happen?

A blank walled 1970s estate.

So these are nothing to do with the 1981 riots. This estate had already cut Granby off from Upper Parliament by then. But we’re about to see a landscaping feature that is to do with those riots.

Certainly not. In 1981 both sides of Upper Parlaiment had wide borders of flat land. Land left behind by the clearances that had been done in the 60s and 70s. At first so Upper Parliament could be part of the M62’s entrance into Liverpool. Then when that didn’t happen, when it was to be part of a planned inner ring road.

During the ’81 riots this flat land was a major gathering place.

I’ve never seen them. It’s a pretty steep hill.

Yes, very special and decorous bollards indeed. These are the ones that stop you crashing your car through that bus shelter and ramming your way into the Women’s Hospital. Let’s cross over and have a look.

Let’s go round the corner into Canning.

Now in anybody’s ‘Big Book of Liverpool’ Falkner Square has to feature as a place of astounding beauty and also great significance. It is a complete Georgian Square. The only one we have and in the opinion of many, including me, the very finest complete square of Georgian buildings on Earth.

Well it’s the old red light problem from the 1970s. When kerb-crawling was run out of Granby it crawled over to here. So when I started working here for Liverpool Housing Trust in 1975 this was a tough place, down on its luck and full of predatorial men looking to pick up prostitutes in their crawling cars. So like Granby before it, it was bollarded.

And eventually replaced by the Women’s Hospital.

Next, approaching another edge of Liverpool 8 where it shades into Liverpool 7 and University land what do you expect we’ll find?

At no point do I think ‘Thank goodness I’m surrounded by protective bollards!’

Which brings us pretty much back to the Rialto along there, where our bollard quest started yesterday.

Which takes me roughly in the direction of home. But more importantly, past the L8 border I haven’t checked yet. At the end of Aigburth Road. ‘Surely’ I think, there won’t be bollards there too?’

So check here for Part One of ‘The Bollards of Liverpool 8’ – the Dingle and Welsh Streets companion to this.