In April 1980, when I was 16 years old, I would go for walks in Liverpool city centre on Sunday afternoons. On one such afternoon, as I was walking down Upper Parliament Street and reached its junction with Great George Street, I came across the ruins of the David Lewis Youth Club on the corner. The building had stood on that spot for 74 years before being demolished earlier that month. It had ceased operating as a youth club in 1977, and I never knew it as a living place. My only contact with it was seeing its remains that Sunday afternoon in 1980, when the building had already fallen into dereliction.
What remained was a mountain-like pile of reddish stone slabs, rising to a height of around fifteen feet, or so it seemed to me. The original building had been around a hundred feet long, and the rubble covered much of its footprint, heaped up into rough, uneven mounds.
Being more adventurous in those days, I decided to investigate. The site wasn’t cordoned off, as it would be now, so I began to climb the rubble cautiously, feeling like an explorer in dangerous territory, which it was—one slip and I could have been seriously injured if not killed.
When I reached the highest point and looked out across the surrounding area, catching a glimpse of the docklands and the River Mersey beyond, I felt like Alexander the Great surveying a conquered city.
The David Lewis Youth Club had once seemed a solid monument to Victorian philanthropy, a place explicitly built for young people. Now it was reduced to dust (a casualty of a road-widening scheme) and, looking back, its demolition seemed symbolic of Liverpool’s decline over the previous 30 years.
I carried on with my walk into the city centre. In 1980, Sundays were satisfyingly quiet. Almost everything was closed: the shops, the cafés, the offices. The few exceptions were the museum and art gallery, the three cinemas—the Odeon, the ABC and the Futurist; a handful of chip shops and a couple of Wimpy fast-food outlets, then known as “Wimpy Bars”. To the best of my recollection, there were no McDonald’s or Burger King branches in Liverpool at that time.
Apart from myself and a few other people out walking, it felt like I was walking around a village whose population had fled. I enjoyed the lack of hustle and bustle, and looking in department-store windows imagining what I would buy if I had the money.
Looking back now, I don’t remember the city centre as being run-down. The streets were clean, the buildings largely intact and the newer architecture of the late 1960s and early 1970s were streamlined and neat. There was little street furniture and none of the visual clutter that there is now.
The silence of Sundays contrasted with weekdays, then, the city centre offered young people a range youth-oriented of places to go: trendy cafés, music shops, free or discounted courses, a wide network of youth clubs, discounted access to theatres and cinemas; and informal community hubs such as the Open Eye Gallery café and the Unity Theatre café, alongside many other places to congregate and feel part of a shared cultural life. So as a 16-year-old, I never felt I was living in a city in decline.
