Programme

There is no end to the history of anything whether it’s a street or a city. Even if, as so often happens, a street is physically destroyed, there will always be the different histories and memories of the street. There’s no reason to think that Hope Street is likely to be lost under a giant carpark in the near future so it will go on generating history and stories, and we’ll be there to look at them and backwards in time to ‘make history’. The Chronicles will continue indefinitely.

To give you some idea of the shape of the project, below is a brief description of the first phase of the project. It’s designed to peak just after 18^th September when the Hope Street Festival or Hopefeast takes place, and we’ll have a video and more to celebrate the event.

Another milestone will be the production of a booklet about our project towards the end of the year, and somewhere in between hopefully there will be some sort of photographic exhibition. We will also be producing Hope Street ‘postcards’: these will all be based on actual images (photographs) of Hope Street, but taken from unusual angles and perhaps with quirky captions. These will remind us that every image has a ‘point of view’ or ‘angle’, and that reality can be ‘framed’ in ways to produce many different ‘realities’.

The Project

1. We’ve spent almost three months collecting materials about Hope Street, doing research, then beginning to make videos, sound recordings, interviews and photographs (almost a thousand photos so far!). We’ve built up a resource bank of printed materials from the internet, newspapers and other sources. This work is ongoing.
2. There will be items (sometimes single posts, but where the subject is big several posts) on individual people, buildings and events starting with:

St James Cemetry

The Liverpool Workhouse

The Everyman Theatre

The Unity Theatre

Arts organisations in Hope Street

Imagine Mental health

Merseyside Trade Union Community and Unemployed Resource Centre

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

The Merseyside Youth Orchestra

Bohemian Liverpool in the 60s

History and Development of Health

(includes hospitals, Florence Nightingale, Kitty Wilkinson

Josephine Butler, Agnes Jones, William Rathbone)

Pubs and music/poetry venues

Modern redevelopment of Hope Street area

New Bohemia

Maghull Group

Bishop Sheppard-Archbishop Worlock Statue, context

Links with Knowledge Quarter

3. That list includes fairly straightforward history, but running throughout are poems and stories written especially for the project, some drama, personal memories, video productions and hopefully stuff that will help you see the everyday and ‘normal’ in new ways. Our first posts will include:

A short story

An autobiographical account

An interview about life in the Art College

A snippet of video, an ‘out take’ of a production being edited just now

A whistlestop tour of Hope Street on a tourist bus

Postcards

Adrian Henri's 'collected' street sign on loan at the new Museum of Liverpool

Advertisement