Looking south along Brunswick Place to the docks.
Walk north of Liverpool’s magnificent Liver Building – leaving behind the bustling tourist area around the Albert Dock – and you enter the city’s liminal dockland zone – the northern part of a vast interconnected port system that stretches over 7 miles along the Liverpool bank of the River Mersey. In 1907 – at the height of Liverpool’s preeminence as a global port – the writer Walter Dixon Scott described the ‘romance’ of the city’s docklands, a ‘strange territory’ that formed ‘a kind of fifth element’ to the world – ‘a place charged with daemonic issues and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that have long passed out of their control.’
The 1901 Tobacco Warehouse seen from Regent Road.
Regent Road facade of the Tobacco Warehouse.
Today, those ‘great forces’ have seemingly abandoned Liverpool, wielding their power now in the Global South, but their traces remain everywhere in the city’s docklands, which are perhaps an even stranger territory today than they were at the turn of the twentieth century. Walking north along Regent Road, which hugs the granite wall that encloses most of the docks (with their evocative succession of imperial names – Trafalgar, Salisbury, Nelson, Wellington, Canada), one sees everywhere the material remnants of Liverpool’s former global maritime dominance. First, surrounding Stanley Dock, are gargantuan abandoned buildings, including the world’s largest brick-built warehouse, completed in 1901 to store the vast quantities of tobacco that were then imported from the United States. Flanked by a host of other brick warehouses, the entire complex hovers between a state of ruin and recuperation, the largest buildings being slowly turned into apartments and, in the case of the Tobacco Warehouse, a vast hotel, while the smaller examples continuing to languish in redundancy.
Brunswick Place
Effingham Street
Ruined grabber, Huskisson Branch Dock No. 3.
Things become even stranger the further north one progresses. In the streets beyond Huskisson Branch Dock No. 3, the semi-ruinous buildings accommodate many uses: spaces to store and sell salvaged car parts in Brunswick Place; unspecified ‘Units to Let’ in Effingham Street; offices for a stationary company in Princes Street. All of these streets face the docklands beyond, where enormous hills of scrap materials accumulate before one’s eyes (presumably waiting to be exported for recycling). It is as if one is witnessing the wastes of the world being gathered into one space and urban development going into reverse gear.
Hills of scrap metal, Huskisson Dock No. 3.
Former spare car-parts warehouse, Brunswick Place
This feeling of being witness to the ‘great forces’ of material destruction is, of course, a mainstay in (post) apocalyptic cinema, particularly within the cyberpunk trend that began with the first of the Mad Max films in 1979 and has continued up to the present in The Matrix trilogy and the recent Robocop reboot. Within the cyberpunk genre, salvage plays a critical role in imagined apocalyptic futures, whether seen in the hotchpotch of technologies in machines in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), or the appropriation of architectural ruins as domestic spaces seen in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008). The image of ruins in cyberpunk is both romantic – a form of neo-Gothic revelling in the excess of decay – and also critical, namely of late-capitalism’s increasingly accelerated regime of ‘creative’ destruction.
Walls of buildings along Brunswick Place.
Walking in Liverpool’s ruined docklands – in effect, the type of real spaces that underpin cyberpunk’s alternative realities – is equally fraught with contradictions, from the startling clash of serene emptiness with violent destruction to the melancholic sense of lives and buildings clung onto in desperation. Liverpool’s docklands simultaneously speak of past, present and future: what was exists as both material remnants and absent ruins; what is shows itself in the ingenuity of those who continue to use the semi-ruined buildings; what will be comes in the sense of the landscape as prophetic of what will inevitably be the fate of every place in the world ruled by capitalism.