What makes a city worth visiting?
I attempt to work out why Liverpool (and Newcastle, and Barcelona) are so great.
It may have been the sunshine, glinting off the docks. It might have been the fact I was having a genuinely interesting, mind-expanding week in which my job was, basically, chatting to people. Then again, it might have been the fact I’d just drunk two pints of strong beer. Whatever it was though, one evening in June I found myself exhausted, halfway through a work trip to Merseyside, and thinking: This feels like a holiday.
Work trips to Liverpool often do, I’ve found, even when it isn’t blazing sunshine: there’s something about the place that makes it feel like a plausible destination for a minibreak, in the same way that Lyon or Ljubljana do but Leeds or Leicester do not.1
I’m clearly not alone in this: over the last 15 years or so, Liverpool’s tourism sector has boomed.
And so, because I’d been talking about the city for three days straight, I started to think about why this might be. The most common answer I received when I asked what made Liverpool different was: the people. That may well be a factor – I’ve found nights out there to be both friendlier and fight-ier than nights out in other places, and suspect those to be two sides of the same coin – but it’s a pretty subjective measure, and anyway there are plenty of friendly places that don’t feel like holiday destinations and just as many unfriendly ones that do.
So let’s leave that to one side, and focus instead on factors which the people who build and run cities have at least some hope of controlling. Here are a few things which, it feels to me, make somewhere feel like a place you should go:
Set piece architecture or views. Can be natural glories, great old buildings, even a particularly good bridge. But the vast majority of British cities I can think of which either attract tourists in significant numbers (London, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge, York, Bath) – or which feel to me as if they should (Newcastle, Halifax; no, really, it’s terrific) – have something about them that feels worth “seeing”, in a very literal sense.
High quality water. Can be a natural or manmade, river or coast. Liverpool, sort of, has all of those, though the water that feels most central to the life of the city is that of the docks. (Tyneside, of course, has both, too: a river in the city, and beaches in the suburbs, reached by metro trains promising “THE COAST” in a manner I find almost unbearably romantic.)
But I think the water has to be some combination of substantial, central and picturesque. Fine rivers though the Rea and Irwell undoubtedly are, nobody is travelling to Birmingham or Manchester to see them.
All that said, a city doesn’t absolutely have to have that, I think: but if it doesn’t that places a lot more pressure on...
High quality parks. Cities need lungs, people in them need space. I think a place can get away without either green or blue, but I don’t think you can do without both. Madrid, for example, was deliberately built in the middle of Spain and, while it has a river, it doesn’t feel like a central feature in the way the Seine does to Paris: the presence of El Retiro park feels like it matters more.
Interesting restaurants, clubs or bars. Because one of the points of going somewhere is to sample the nightlife.
Interesting galleries, museums or other visible heritage. Because on a minibreak you want stuff that makes you feel clever and virtuous during the day, too.
(Another way of putting this is “culture”, which sort of overlaps with both those previous sections by providing stuff to do by day or night. This of course explains why titles like “European Capital of Culture”, which in 2008 helped to kick off Liverpool’s ascendancy, are so sought after. It also explains why every council in Britain has at some point or another attempted to introduce some kind of performing arts festival: because rounding up some artists for a few weeks is easier to achieve than a vibrant scene or world class series of museums and galleries, not to mention a damned sight cheaper – and anyway it might just be a way of phrasing the above, which is why I’ve put it in brackets.)
Pedestrianisation. I was tempted to put “metros” here, on the grounds that I like them and, let’s be honest, a lot of people reading this do, too. But if I’m being absolutely honest, while I think they matter to making cities beyond a certain size function, I’m not sure how much they matter to tourists, who are likely to be in the centre of town anyway.
What does matter, though, is that there is a sizable stretch, or at least portion, of the city centre in which you don’t need to interact with cars. This, it took me an embarrassingly long time to spot, is why I have fallen in love with basically every Spanish city I have ever been to – because they basically all have pedestrianised old cities and plenty of plazas. By the same logic, it may be why a fair few British cities don’t feel like places for tourists: they’re not built around people, but cars.
Experience shopping. I’ve been umming and ah-ing about putting this in, but sorry, I do think Liverpool One – work of monstrously profit-hungry developers though it undoubtedly is – has been transformative. And I don’t think that’s just about it creating more pedestrianised space, because almost every city break I have ever been on or heard tell of seemed to involve a trip to a shopping district/covered market/souk.
So: I think people like to spend money in places where it feels fancy to spend money. If you want to bring in the hordes, you need that, too.
I’m not sure how many of these you need for a place to feel like a holiday destination, exactly. But one of the big differences between Liverpool now and Liverpool 30 years ago is that it 30 years ago it arguably had a couple of those (some peripheral neglected docks, some grand but neglected buildings) and now it has all of them – honestly, the museums are worth a trip, all on their own – with the possible exception of parks (Sefton Park is great, and I’m sure there are others, but it’s a bit out of town).
The same can be said of other cities which re-invented themselves as destinations. Bilbao, like Liverpool, was a city of waterfront industry. Getting the Guggenheim changed that, but so did the redevelopment of the entire riverfront; the fact there’s a moment, on the drive in from the airport, where you come out of a tunnel through a mountain to see the entire valley of the city laid out before you surely helps, too. Barcelona is one of the largest cities on the Mediterranean but, though it seems incredible now, it spent most of its history ignoring the fact it had a beach: the sea was just where the port was. But today there, too, you can find everything on my list, and the city has become so attractive to tourists that it’s actually becoming a problem.
If I’m right, then where else should be on the UK tourist trail, but isn’t currently getting the attention of, say, Edinburgh? I think you can make strong cases for Glasgow, Bristol and my beloved Newcastle (all of which, coincidentally, were port cities); Cardiff I’m not sure is quite there yet but I can see a path. My wildcard suggestion is Halifax (honestly, the Piece Hall, the covered market, the views of the Pennines... if it wasn’t off all the main transport links I reckon it’d be another York).
Other cities, which I’m far too polite/scared of infuriating people who are literally paying for this newsletter to name, lack too many of the things on my list to get over the line. I think. But I could be wrong. If I am, just hit reply.
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Please note that I have never visited either Ljubljana or Leicester so may have just libelled both.