Radical Route through Liverpool

The TUC and Unite have put together a “Walking Tour of Liverpool, City of Protest”. A two-hour walk around town takes you around 15 sites of demonstrations, strikes, protests and commemorations.

You start outside St George’s Hall, where the police attacked demonstrators on Liverpool’s Bloody Sunday in August 1911. The massive transport strike of that year is the biggest single theme of the walk. From there you go to Islington, where the UCATT memorial of 2001 is dedicated to victims of the construction industry.

You pass the Town Hall and learn of the sailors revolt of 1775. You drop in the Newz bar and take in the ‘Radicals’ pictures including James Larkin, before reaching the Pier Head where the ‘Titanic monument’ is dedicated to marine engine-room workers. Lord Street and Church Street are places to remember the struggles of carters and tramworkers, together with the visit of Paul Robeson in 1949. You end up at the Peoples Centre on Mount Pleasant where a plaque lists the 27 Merseysiders who died fighting for the Republic in the Spanish civil war.

The tour map can be downloaded from the internet (see link below). It will also be well worth listening to the soundtrack that will be available shortly from the same site. The tour is also designed to combine with the slavery history tour that is organised from the Maritime Museum.

Can we be critical, apart of course from saying ‘about time too’ and ‘we got our 2008 calendar out first’? The printed map mentions no specific events less than 50 years ago. (What of the plaque in the Town Hall dedicated to the Cammell Laird sit-in of 1984, for example?) More could be made of the Pier Head as a centre of demonstrations and mass meetings. But this is a welcome piece of political history and the more people see of it the better.

Links: www.unions08.co.uk and www.slaveryhistorytours.com