A return, from London to Liverpool

This year: was Labour conference all that bad, really? Why does Liverpool have so many London place names? And Rutherford B. Hayes buggers up America.

Labour conference, I learned from reading about it and speaking to some of my colleagues, was a miserable affair, an entire political party so dour as to make Gordon Brown look like Rylan. Last year’s event, the first in years in which anyone seriously imagined there'd be a Labour government anytime soon, took place beneath a blaze of autumn sunshine. This year, the first in a decade and a half to be addressed by an actual Prime Minister, it rained. A lot.

That was not, I must say, my experience of this year’s conference at all. Yes, it rained so heavily that I started planning my schedule based on whatever events were happening inside whichever building I already happened to be in. And it was irritating to find the place so busy I couldn’t get into half the fringes I’d hoped to, and utterly failed to catch up with friends I just assumed I’d at some point see. But for all the headlines about avoidable scandals and unforced errors, and despite the fact much of government is currently a policy vacuum pending a budget that won’t happen for another month and will only bring more rain when it does, the Labour party I spent the weekend with was, if anything, buoyant. Sure, being in government is hard – but it beats being in opposition. This is what politics is for.

Why the disparity? It’s possible my sample is biased: I spent a lot of time with yimbys, who are excited to be winning, and did a podcast with Emily Thornberry, who’s mastered the art of answering difficult questions by turning directly to the audience and saying, simply: “We won”. Or perhaps it’s just really hard to get a handle on the mood of such a big event. Different people had radically different conferences, their mood shaped by what they read and who they ran into and whether they got caught in that rain. When I posted on BlueSky earlier about not recognising the headlines, some of those who replied agreed with me (councillors are apparently happy, too), while others very much did not (those closer to Westminster might actually have to fix things).

What is clear, though, is that Keir Starmer is not going to change direction just because of some bad press. In his speech, which in an underrated joke I summarised as “the KC’s not for turning”, he utterly refused to do what everyone had predicted and attempt to lighten the mood.¹ This is not a government that will be making policy on the hoof because a newspaper that never liked it anyway runs a few headlines that end with “IN CRISIS”. Whether this proves to be a refreshing change from a predecessor government that switched direction every five minutes, or a mark of dangerous complacency in the face of unpopularity, still remains to be seen.

The book bit

Hey, a chap named Steve Gold got an advance copy of the North American version of 47 Borders and gave it five stars. “I loved this book. The writing is conversational in tone and very clever.”  I’ll take that. Want to know what all the fuss is about? Check it out on Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles or Bert’s Books.

Anyway, that’s enough about me, one of my mates has a book out, too. Here’s Neil Atkinson, a man who’s been kind enough to get me on the Anfield Wrap on several occasions even though I know sweet FA about football:

As Jonn leaves Liverpool, I have written here a book about its favourite adopted son of the last ten years. It’s called Transformer and isn’t solely about football or Jürgen Klopp or solely about anything. It is partially about what it is to have the joy of work and do the work to elicit joy; it is partially about why nostalgia should always be rejected and why the work of today has to be for tomorrow to be better. 

But it is also partially about football and Jürgen Klopp and given I’ve spent the last decade talking about those bits every day hosting The Anfield Wrap, it has the decency to be good at that stuff too.

You know that thing when you’ve been quietly assuming a book isn’t for you, and then realise that maybe it’s for you after all? That. Anyway, you can get your copy here.

A tale of two cities

Back in 2016, the BBC news website ran a story about Kensington, where average household incomes stood at a shocking £14,000 less than the national average. The district was struggling with high levels of crime and unemployment, and low levels of educational qualifications. In all, over 98% of the area’s population ranked in the most deprived 5% of the country – a rate nearly twice as high as the city as a whole.

The twist – you’ve no doubt seen this coming a mile off – is that this is not the Kensington that’s the richest part of the richest city in Britain. It’s Kensington in Liverpool, which gave us David Morrissey, the McGann brothers² and an occasional member of Atomic Kitten.³ “They may share the same name,” the story begins, “but the Kensingtons of Liverpool and London are separated by a lot more than 218 miles.”

This was far from the only article to have used the two Kensingtons as a device for highlighting Britain’s economic divides – it’s too perfect a contrast, I’ve found two from the Independent alone. The weird thing about it, though, is that this coincidence is in one way not weird at all. The map of Liverpool is absolutely packed with names familiar from the map of London.

So: the district of Kensington, to the east of Liverpool city centre, takes its name from its main street running east. Immediately to its west you’ll find another district which takes its name from a mononymous street: Islington. My accommodation in the city this week was on Cheapside, a tiny road whose name generally indicates a market place; there is no evidence a market ever existed on the site. Cheapside is also, of course, one of the main roads in the City of London.

Elsewhere in Liverpool you’ll find a busy thoroughfare named Pall Mall, and a scrappy backstreet named Covent Garden. Cornhill, Drury Lane, Fleet Street, Newington, Paddington, Vauxhall… Across the Mersey in Birkenhead there’s a Charing Cross, too; up the road in Manchester there’s a New Islington, too, come out that. 

Some of these may be a coincidence. Whitechapel, the name of one of Liverpool’s main shopping streets, may simply refer to the colour of a church, just as the Whitechapel in London did. Liverpool’s Wapping Dock took its name from a street named Wapping, which likely comes from the Old English word “wapol” – marsh – in both London and Liverpool alike. But surely not all of them. That would be a lot of coincidences, enough to fill a whole Monopoly board.