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Authors: Niall Griffiths
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fluttering shredded curtain of flaming money falling, landing with an extinguishing hiss in the bloodpuddles and the chest cavity itself minced and shattered and torn apart. For the animate grave that trails it all even the old man with the still-smoking gun and the drifting spots of fire reflected in the lenses of his leaning spectacles these imperfections of age of existence itself, all for this the slowing heart, all for this the arteries and their gush. For the woman in the hospital bed who once stood upright and the thwart of all urge redemptive and real. For the deceleration of the pumping muscle and the sluggish thin blizzard of burning money and the shop and the distant mountain and the high squealing in the sky
.
It was once just a muddy pool a bit brackish from the estuary’s salt. Irish monks preached and prayed on the slimy banks which caught the attention of King John who granted a city charter in 1207 to this small fishing hamlet which for more than four centuries had only seven short streets and a population that fluctuated between 500 and 800 only. What sea trade there was was conducted between the mud-dwelling fishermen and similar types from Eire, Mannan, Cymru. Exchanges of fish and boat parts and some strange faith, this channelled chandlering storm-smacked and salty.
Then it was a port in the early seventeenth century, importing New World cotton goods and exporting textiles from the burgeoning mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Then inevitably it became a centre of shipbuilding and engineering and by 1750 it was the world’s first wet dock with a population of 20,000. By the mid nineteenth century it was home to more millionaires than London and home also to the worst poverty and mortality rates in Europe. By 1900 the population reached over 700,000 but then a global Depression appeared and containerisation of shipping destroyed jobs numbering in the tens of thousands. By the mid twentieth century with Britain’s membership of the EU, this once-just-a-muddy-puddle place was seen to be on the wrong side of the country away from the main European markets and since 1961 has lost 43 per cent of its jobs and 34 per cent of its population.
It has turned its back to the land. Turned away from the country it barely inhabits and which it is nominally part of and looked seawards to other lands. So if this city has a soul …
And from oozing pool standing stagnant to world city major mercantile metropolitan capital built on triangular trading of what commodity? Transformation affected by what wet goods? Raw materials of cotton and hardware sent to West Africa for a barterable product carried to the West Indies and Virginia and exchanged for sugar, rum, tobacco and other stuffs and people were the fulcrum for this triangular transaction. People the poor and perishable commodity measured against stimulants and cloth. And the traders in them honoured now by Elder status and statuary and street name, carved and noble profiles bespeckled with the shite of pigeon and gull.
So if the city
has
a soul …
And after abolition in 1807 came the occurrence of more people-moving, exodi converging from England Ireland Wales and Scotland and the Scandinavian countries and the Balkans and Jews from Russia and the Pale of Settlement, a movement nearly ten million strong in less than a century less than the numbered dead of four years of war, of mechanised slaughter. Travel to Australasia and the Americas was the aim but many of these pilgrims went no further than the Goree or the Pier Head as if arrested by the stink of greasy sea and engine oil and that locomotive lotion too that exudes from human glands . And from the western shores of a close country came those escaping that which could not at that time be seen, phytophthera infestans, and that which could, the bulging greed of landlord and corralled clergy and came those too from remote colonies in Asia or the Caribbean or Africa or the subcontinent this influx
.
It was once just a muddy pool a bit brackish from the estuary’s salt. Irish monks preached and prayed on the slimy banks which caught the attention of King John who granted a city charter in 1207 to this small fishing hamlet which for more than four centuries had only seven short streets and a population that fluctuated between 500 and 800 only. What sea trade there was was conducted between the mud-dwelling fishermen and similar types from Eire, Mannan, Cymru. Exchanges of fish and boat parts and some strange faith, this channelled chandlering storm-smacked and salty.
Then it was a port in the early seventeenth century, importing New World cotton goods and exporting textiles from the burgeoning mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Then inevitably it became a centre of shipbuilding and engineering and by 1750 it was the world’s first wet dock with a population of 20,000. By the mid nineteenth century it was home to more millionaires than London and home also to the worst poverty and mortality rates in Europe. By 1900 the population reached over 700,000 but then a global Depression appeared and containerisation of shipping destroyed jobs numbering in the tens of thousands. By the mid twentieth century with Britain’s membership of the EU, this once-just-a-muddy-puddle place was seen to be on the wrong side of the country away from the main European markets and since 1961 has lost 43 per cent of its jobs and 34 per cent of its population.
It has turned its back to the land. Turned away from the country it barely inhabits and which it is nominally part of and looked seawards to other lands. So if this city has a soul …
And from oozing pool standing stagnant to world city major mercantile metropolitan capital built on triangular trading of what commodity? Transformation affected by what wet goods? Raw materials of cotton and hardware sent to West Africa for a barterable product carried to the West Indies and Virginia and exchanged for sugar, rum, tobacco and other stuffs and people were the fulcrum for this triangular transaction. People the poor and perishable commodity measured against stimulants and cloth. And the traders in them honoured now by Elder status and statuary and street name, carved and noble profiles bespeckled with the shite of pigeon and gull.
So if the city
has
a soul …
And after abolition in 1807 came the occurrence of more people-moving, exodi converging from England Ireland Wales and Scotland and the Scandinavian countries and the Balkans and Jews from Russia and the Pale of Settlement, a movement nearly ten million strong in less than a century less than the numbered dead of four years of war, of mechanised slaughter. Travel to Australasia and the Americas was the aim but many of these pilgrims went no further than the Goree or the Pier Head as if arrested by the stink of greasy sea and engine oil and that locomotive lotion too that exudes from human glands . And from the western shores of a close country came those escaping that which could not at that time be seen, phytophthera infestans, and that which could, the bulging greed of landlord and corralled clergy and came those too from remote colonies in Asia or the Caribbean or Africa or the subcontinent this influx
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