Regenerating Liverpool VI – Liverpool FC

We spent an afternoon in the Stanley Park/Anfield Road area of Liverpool. The two big football teams, Liverpool and Everton occupy either ends of the Stanley Park and area attracts tens of thousands each matchday. Our guide to the area was a local City Council Regeneration worker who is overseeing a 15 year housing renewal programme involving the renovation or demolition of 1,200 dwellings which are in bad order.

Anfield football stadium is typical of the traditional football stadiums in England and Scotland. The shadows of the stands fall over rows and rows of terraced housing. Drive down a Victorian shopping street of ground floor retail units and you suddenly come across a 45,000 seater football stadium, almost as if it was another unit of shopping real estate. The Anfield area is one of the most deprived areas in the whole of the UK and the most distressing street was Tancred Road, barely 200 metres from the famous Anfield Road gate at the stadium.

The standard of housing was appalling, so bad in fact that the Council had bought up almost the entire street of 26 houses and were gradually rehousing the residents prior to renovating. The remaining six houses are in private hands. The work would be so extensive that effectively these terraced homes were being rebuilt. The estimate was £85k per home to make them habitable again.

What struck me was the proximity to these homes of one of the most successful global sporting brands. Sporting superstars like Stephen Gerrard regularly drive through these streets on the way to games and drive away with a weekly wage that would redevelop one the homes less than a long throw from the ground. If the Liverpool first team squad surrendered a week’s wages they could transform the whole street.

We asked local people and council regeneration employees about the relationship between the clubs and the city communities. None! they said. One anecdote concerned a famous Everton footballer who promised to come and open a newly built community facility. He never turned up and gave no explanation.

Another story stemming from the late 90s told of a previous regime at the club and the previous council leadership. A plan was hatched in secret to demolish 300 local homes in order to extend Anfield which, when it leaked out, caused uproar among local people. They subsequently organised themselves and developed their own, much more radical regeneration plan, which involved the demolition of 1,200 homes. Not one of the club’s proposed 300 was included.

As these clubs internationalise and the playing and management staff become more cosmopolitan the links with the community are being lost. One could imagine in a previous era that the homes in the shadow of Anfield contained diehard ‘pool fans. The local streets and parks provided the playing staff  expressing the umbilical link between the community and the club. No more. The club is just an parasite living off the city and putting little back in.

Living miles away from premiership football, and with a slightly sentimental view, I have been thoroughly disenchanted by this visit.