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Eric took us on a tour that lasted one and a half hours.
He began on the slopes of Mount Pleasant, now a busy thoroughfare
in the heart of the city but in the 1700s a "pleasant" wooded area,
rising above the grimy fledgling city, anchored along the shores
of the river Mersey. (1) Half way up Mount Pleasant
is a little park, closed by the council, on the grounds of vagrants
using it as a drinking hole. But in the centre of the park lies
buried one William Roscoe, who fought in Liverpool for the abolition
of slavery. Roscoe came from a middle class family who owned an
inn further up Mount Pleasant, on the corner of Hope St, opposite
the Catholic Cathedral. His campaigns were to bring him into conflict
with the merchants of Liverpool, but more of that later.
(2) Further up the Mount stands a blackened
building with a dome and Greek Corinthian columns, an imposing monument
to the wealth of the city. Recently under rooftop occupation in
protest at its closure, the Wellington Rooms, (latterly the Irish
Centre) was built in 1720, a physical testimony of the expanding
wealth of the new bourgeois. In this building the newly developing
merchant classes would dance and carouse, arriving in their hand-carried
sedan chairs or horse and carriage to celebrate the growing wealth
of the city. The question is, where did this wealth come from? Mount
Pleasant and its surrounding areas were the 1700s equivalent of
the suburbs. Annoyed by the unpleasantness of life in the rapidly
expanding inner areas, the new rich began to move out.
(3) In Rodney Street, nowadays referred to as
the North's Harley Street, the buildings give daily testimony to
the riches and affluence of 18th and 19th century Liverpool. To
this day the upper balconies with their fine wrought iron craftsmanship
convey a past age of excellence. In the middle of the row stands
a grand house with a doorway so wide that it alone commands attention.
Yet stand back and imagine the house standing by itself two centuries
ago and you get some idea of the massive amounts needed to create
such magnificence. This, as the blue plate on the wall describes,
was the birthplace of William Ewart Gladstone - four times Prime
Minister. His father John (1764-1851) made the family money from
plantations in Jamaica. Paddy Ashdown MP visiting Liverpool praised
this former leader of the Liberal Party, conveniently forgetting
that such a "democrat" rested on the system of slavery. So the rich
in colonising the then outer reaches of the city, built themselves
fine houses and magnificent social centres to ostentatiously display
their wealth.
(4)
 But
that wasn't all. Perhaps their human frailty and the realisation
that one day they would have to face a wrathful maker then obliged
them to use part of their wealth to build churches. At the top of
Bold Street stands the bombed out shell of St. Lukes church preserved
as a monument to the second world war. But the church was built
partly by donations from a slave trader. Bold Street itself stands
as a testimony to the former wealth of the city. Though the worse
for wear and the blight which has hammered the city over decades,
if you look up above the shop fronts you can see the former affluence
of the town houses. And at its foot lies another link with slavery.
(5) In times past the Lyceum Club stood on this
site, today it is the trendy Lyceum cafe and the Post Office and
a plaque on the wall tells you when the Lyceum Club was established.
However, the plaque does not tell you that the club arose out of
violent splits caused by William Roscoe's campaign for the abolition
of slavery. So is it that history is being hidden? It is now commonly
acknowledged that Liverpool was central to the slave trade as part
of the triangle of trade between Africa, Liverpool and America.
Does this mean that the slaves as commodities were simply transported
straight to their destinations and there were no slaves as such
in Liverpool? Many seem to suggest so. Historical evidence suggests
otherwise. In fashionable Bold Street, in its eighteenth century
heyday, high class prostitutes paraded slave boys with gold and
silver collars. Plantation owners fresh back from visits, brought
back child slaves and threw onto the streets black males when they
reached an age of sexual threat. In London in the 1770s it was estimated
that there were 14,000 freed black slaves on the streets.
(X)
A rooftop view over the "ropewalks" area of Liverpool.
Seel Street is on the left.
Continue The Tour
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