Remembering Eleanor Rathbone & Jane Jacobs.
One day in Liverpool 8, walking through what the people of the place have done and are doing. And remembering two great women, Eleanor Rathbone and Jane Jacobs.
Eleanor Rathbone you’ll well know about if you’ve been around this blog a while. Liverpool’s greatest suffragette and politician. From our first female City Councillor – for Granby, through votes for women, then as an MP changing all of our lives, our greatest social reformer and well overdue the posthumous Freedom of Liverpool so many of us are determined she should get. So our children and their children will know in whose benign shadow we all walk.
Seventy years dead but celebrated in her Granby this day.
And Jane Jacobs? Born 100 years ago and also celebrated on this one amazing day. We’ll come back to Jane, I am always coming back to Jane.
Early morning in Lodge Lane.
Thriving now through the independent efforts of its people.
Nationally celebrated.
Walking through to Granby.
On a very big day.
The Street Market, in its seventh year, having moved out onto the main street, onto Granby Street.
Where Eleanor Rathbone is being remembered.
The street is closed, thank you Liverpool City.
And we are all here.
Talking ideas and possibilities.
A Winter Garden in Cairns Street? Yes, on site this summer.
‘Bettylicious’ from Betty Varden? Yes.
Remembering Eleanor Rathbone? Always.
The market finally in its rightful place.
Granby Street once again singing to the sound of buying and selling and making and doing. The brave traders who have survived so many years of racism and destruction joined proudly by their new friends.
And wolves!
Our neighbours are here too.
We’ll be visiting later.
So anyway, let’s just walk around and enjoy Liverpool’s greatest street market – of the people, by the people and for the people. Imagining how great it will be when we in the Granby 4 Streets Community Land Trust can get the empty corner shops opened up and running again soon. So Granby Street can once again have this buzz about it all the time?
And walking round with us?
The steady, independent, determined and revolutionary spirit of Eleanor Rathbone.
Who has this to say:
“If it is Socialism to believe that there is much wrong in the present social conditions, that the rich are too rich and the poor too poor, that every worker who does a fair day’s work should receive a fair day’s wage, a wage upon which he or she can live and not merely exist: that the City Council should set the example of being a model employer, that drastic action should be taken against unsanitary slums, and that there should be a gradual effort to level up the conditions as to housing, education, opportunities for holidays and recreation, hours of labour and rates of wages – if to hold these views is Socialism, then I am a Socialist.”
The guiding spirit of everything I do and that me and my friends are about to do with ‘Coming Home.’
What a day.
Next it’s ‘Jane’s Walk.’
Beginning at the Princes Park Gates.
In the company of my friends.
Marianne Heaslip.
And Gemma Jerome.
Walking us all through the story, the thoughts and ideas of Jane Jacobs:
“Diverse, fine-grained cities made for and by ordinary people?” Here we are, the ordinary people of Liverpool.
I join in, of course I do. And I open up one of the doors of of our particular City’s future:
Next we walk over to the Welsh Streets and hear of our City’s plans to soon and finally restore them.
Walking through the story with our Nina.
“New homes for all who want them, restored homes for all who want them. What we need here is a big party!”
Walking with the spirit of Eleanor Rathbone who always knew that sometimes getting it right takes years of talking.
So let’s talk.
And let’s listen.
Like we’re all coming home now.
Because we are.
Thanks Gem, thanks Sammy.
And thanks always, and forever, Eleanor Rathbone.
More on Jane Jacobs and ‘Jane’s Walks’ in wherever you are here. And from ‘Project for Public Spaces here.
