@YorkshireTheatreNewsletter

4 years ago

As a young civil engineer working for Alfred McAlpine, my father helped build the M53. It dominated my childhood too - we lived at Eastham and I can remember being driven down the road at high speed in a works Land Rover one Saturday morning shortly before it opened. Ever had an empty motorway entirely to yourself for miles? I have! It's easy to mock the vision now but, as Jonathan Meades' very interesting documentary 'Bunkers, Brutalism And Concrete Poetry' points out, brutalism was a grown-up style that sought to use the sculptural qualities of concrete to their full potential. And - am I wrong? -- those bridges, in Leckey's artwork at least, look really good. We should try to imagine them as they would have looked to people at the time -- confident, modernist, future-orientated and striking. It was the ubiquity of a cheapened and degraded style that subsequently rendered them banal to our eyes. As a Royal Engineer stationed in Cyprus during the 50s my father sometimes had to take lonely trips to the AOKA strongholds in the mountains. The poverty he saw there shocked him and he was disgusted that, as he saw it, the occupying British had seen fit to build roads between the military bases but not into other areas where roads were desperately needed to improve the living conditions of the people. So building roads had a positive meaning for him. To live on the Wirral in the 1970s was to live 'nowhere'. The population of a previously rural area had expanded rapidly with the new industries -- as well as Liverpool 'overspill' (what a horrible word!) on vast new council estates we had neighbours who worked at Stanlow Oil Refinery, Plessey in Liverpool, the detergents factory at Port Sunlight and the mysterious facility at Capenhurst about which the less said the better. The council estates joined up with the new private estates joined up with the old villages until the place was a huge, centreless urban-rural sprawl. In retrospect maybe it would have been better if the government had designated south Wirral a New Town then we'd have got some decent arts and sports facilities designed in from the get-go. But nonetheless there was an optimistic and vibrant street life, in our street at least, as working class women like my mother recreated the various inner-city communities they'd only recently left to acquire semi-detached houses with indoor toilets and front gardens. We bailed out in 1979, part of a mass exodus of population in the late 1970s and early 1980s that almost turned Merseyside into the British Detroit. I went back a couple of times in the mid and late 1980s after spending time in the prosperous South and there was a listlessness and low ebb about the place that was horrible to see. Gangsterism was rife, and skag, and a lot of other stuff. It's clear that his South Wirral upbringing has left Leckey with trauma and bad memories. And we have a different value system now -- as a woman I wouldn't like to walk or cycle under that bridge. But I don't think you can make an architectural style the scapegoat for the failures of social policy and neoliberalism.

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