The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Keiller
terminal in Northern Ireland, but nonetheless Liverpool was (and still
seems to be) “the most profitable port in the U.K.”
Reading these figures, I imagined there might be some exceptional
reason for the MDHC’s profitability—a one-off land sale, perhaps, commercial
rents, or grant aid from the European Union (EU). Like many
people with a tourist’s familiarity with the waterfronts of Liverpool and
Birkenhead, I took the spectacular dereliction of the docks to be symptomatic
of a past decline in their traffic, and Liverpool’s impoverishment to be
a result of this decline in its importance as a port. In fact, in September
1995, when the images of Liverpool in the film were photographed, Liverpool’s
port traffic was greater than at any time in its history.
In modern terms, individual British ports are not very large: Rotterdam—the
world’s biggest port—has an annual traffic of about 300 million
tonnes. In contrast the United Kingdom has a long coastline and its
traffic, though greater than ever, is divided among many different ports.
Since 1960, the tonnage of exports has quadrupled, increasing most rapidly
in the 1970s when North Sea oil was first exploited. The tonnage of imports
has fluctuated, but overall it has risen by more than 20 percent.
London is still the largest port in the United Kingdom (sixthlargest
in the EU), 8 with a total of about 52 million tonnes in 1994. “London,”
however, consists of the Port of London Authority’s entire jurisdiction
from Teddington Lock to Foulness, more than seventy miles of the Thames
estuary. The largest single location of port activity is at Tilbury, where the
docks are now owned by Forth Ports, but Tilbury itself is not a large port.
Much of the traffic in the Thames is to and from other U.K. ports, especially
that in oil. The total in foreign traffic for London and the Medway (which is
a separate entity) is exceeded by the combined total for the Humber ports
of Grimsby and Immingham, Hull, and the rivers Trent and Humber.
The second-largest total tonnage in 1994 was in the Forth estuary—44
million tonnes, 68 percent more than in 1993—which is as fragmented
as the Thames; there the traffic is mostly oil. Next are the port
authorities of Tees and Hartlepool, and Grimsby and Immingham, each
with about 43 million tonnes. In these pairs, the Tees greatly exceeds
Hartlepool and Immingham exceeds Grimsby, though to a lesser extent:
Grimsby handles imports from Volkswagen and exports from Toyota. The
traffic in the Tees estuary is largely bulk—imports of iron ore and coal for
the steelworks at Redcar, exports of chemicals from the plants at Billingham
and Wilton, and oil and petroleum products. A large figure for oil exports
arises from the reexport of the product of a Norwegian field in the North
Sea, which comes ashore by pipeline. There is not much container or semibulk
traffic (timber, etc.). The traffic at Immingham is also largely bulk—