The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Keiller
for wealth. Liverpool’s population in 1994 was estimated at 474,000, just
60 percent of the 789,000 in 1951. At its peak, the port employed 25,000
dockworkers. The MDHC now employs about 500 dockers (and sacked 329
of these in September 1995). Similarly, a very large proportion of the dock
traffic is now in containers and bulk, both of which are highly automated
and pass through Liverpool without generating many ancillary jobs locally.
The Channel Tunnel enables the MDHC to market Liverpool as a continental
European port for transatlantic traffic, so that the ancillary jobs it supports
may even be outside the United Kingdom. Also, like any English city
outside London, Liverpool is now largely a branch-office location, and long
ago lost the headquarters establishments (White Star, Cunard) that made it
a world city, the point of departure for emigrants from all over Europe to the
New World.
Another influence on Liverpool’s economy and culture has been the
virtual elimination of the United Kingdom’s merchant shipping fleet. According
to Tony Lane, of Liverpool University’s Sociology Department, although
there were never more than about 250,000 seafarers in the British
merchant fleet (about a third of whom were of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent),
seafarers were once the third most numerous group of workers in Liverpool.
9 The typical length of a seafarer’s career was about seven years, so that
at a given moment a very high proportion of men in Liverpool had at some
time been away to sea. Most of the few remaining British seafarers work on
car, passenger, or freight ferries, on which the majority of jobs are in catering.
Apart from the decline in U.K.-owned ships and U.K. crews, modern
merchant ships are very large and very sparsely crewed: there are never many
ships in even a large modern port. They don’t stay long, and crews have
little—if any—time ashore, even assuming they might have money to
spend. The P&O’s Colombo Bay, for example, a large U.K.-registered container
vessel, has a crew of twenty and a capacity of about 4,200 twentyfoot-equivalent
containers (4,200 teu), typically a mixture of twenty-foot
and forty-foot units, each one of which is potentially the full load of an
articulated lorry. Presumably, jobs lost in port cities and on ships have to
some extent been made up by expansion in the numbers of truck drivers.
Not only do ports and shipping now employ very few people, but
they also occupy surprisingly little space. Felixstowe is the fourth-largest
container port in Europe, but it does not cover a very large area. The dereliction
of the Liverpool waterfront is a result not of the port’s disappearance
but of its new insubstantiality. The warehouses that used to line both sides
of the river have been superseded by a fragmented and mobile space: goods
vehicles moving or parked on the United Kingdom’s roads at any given
time—the road system as a publicly funded warehouse. This is most obvi-