In the winter of 2020, a four-letter slogan appeared in five-foot-tall pink neon letters on the front of a former nightclub – ‘THE FUTURE IS BIRKENHEAD’.
“We came up with the slogan originally because we thought it was tongue-in-cheek,” its architect, Craig Pennington says now. “But then we put it on a t-shirt we thought no-one would wear, and we sold 100 of them. Sometimes the world wants to tell a different story about Birkenhead. But that underdog story is part of us – the ugly cousin over the water. The confidence is the point.”
Just six years later, it may not be written in pink neon, but the future *is* Birkenhead. The town on the left bank of the Mersey has just been shortlisted for UK Town of Culture. “We used ‘The Future is Birkenhead’ as the strap-line on the pitch,” Craig says. “And now we can say we are a town of culture. We are to Liverpool what Brooklyn is to New York, where all the most interesting things are happening.”
Birkenhead’s original ambitious entrepreneurs, the Laird family – whose boilerworks and shipyards once generated the wealth that built the handsome Hamilton Square, and the world’s first municipal park, with Europe’s first street tramway running between them – would recognise the spirit of the new community builders.
The former site of Rocky’s nightclub has been transformed by Craig and his team into the Future Yard, a state-of-the-art, carbon-neutral live music venue and arts hub, which draws bands from around the world and punters not just from across the water but all over the North-West.
“To make this work, Future Yard has to be better than Liverpool,” Craig says. “For people to bother to get on a train, it’s got to be truly amazing.” Future Yard would be remarkable enough, but it’s only one of scores of ambitious creative projects aimed at turning culture on its head in a town both built and scarred by the looming shipyards.
The Left Bank Collective – which led the culture bid – is a good guide, including Start Yard, which provides start-up space, Make CIC which runs community creative hubs, and Make It Happen, which leads sustainable regeneration via everything from social supermarkets to ‘citizen stewards’ who help with planters, litter picks and community picnics. “We want to be the golden thread that connects people in the local area,” says CEO Amy Butterworth.
A short walk away, Craig’s fellow iconoclast brother Lee and his colleagues have transformed an old tenement block into ‘Joy’. A joyful, soulful building that wouldn’t be out of place as a boutique hotel, it’s actually aimed at rebuilding the mental health of local people who, too often, are at the bottom of every one of the indices of deprivation.
Joy bills itself as “a mental health support, social action, arts and culture third space” that fosters “love and human connection”. “Our aim is to build the most progressive mental wellness space in the country, changing the NHS in a positive way and setting a national example of how we can work differently,” says Lee, who runs Open Door, a charity reimagining mental health through belonging.
When I visit, Birkenhead has just been diagnosed as the most depressed constituency in England, with roughly one in four adults recorded as having depression. Nearby Wallasey came in third. Unsurprising, perhaps, when local clinicians say there’s a 12-year difference in life expectancy on different sides of the M53, which divides the Wirral.
Joy is about turning everything on its head and recognising mental health provision as it stands is not working. “We look different at Joy, because want people to think, ‘what on earth is this place’?” Lee says. “We want to intrigue people enough that they want to explore. That’s what retail does – why not mental health?
“People might come for a sound bath, for candle painting, the chatter cafe. We are all about health by stealth – and we aim to be more playful than services usually are. That’s not to say we don’t deal with very serious things – suicide prevention, self harm, disordered eating, trauma and young people in care – but we want to take a playful, colourful, relaxed approach where appropriate.”
Inside, Joy is host to a whole range of mental health provisions from NHS services to art therapy to counselling, while offering a community cafe, and a place for weddings, afternoon raves and local events. “By all moving in together, we don’t know what will happen,” Lee says. “But we know if things live together new things and new impacts happen.”
Central to Joy’s offer is a pioneering mental health triage project called ‘Branch’, an online mental wellbeing hub for children and young people in Wirral. Most of all, Lee says, “we are bringing people on a journey. We can’t just land here and not speak the language of the things around us, but also we want to challenge the experiences of the place.”
Tomorrow, the Mirror will be part of a special event in Birkenhead, ‘Connected Places, Stronger Futures’, celebrating the renaissance of the Merseyside underdog – as part of a collaboration with UCL Policy Lab, Open Door Charity and Future Yard. The event, connected to the Labour Party Conference across the water, coincides with a new report from UCL Policy Lab, Demos and the ‘Nation of Neighbours’ advisory group, of which Lee is a member.
‘Becoming a Nation of Neighbours – The political story for neighbourhood renewal, told from the ground up,’ tells a compelling story of how community organisations can rebuild trust and connection in civic space. Community organisations, it says, are not just an informal welfare system and a space where people get a genuine say, but provide “the everyday, face-to-face connection that underpins a healthy, trusting information ecosystem in an age of division and disinformation.”
The way to start a “hope loop”, the report says is for the state to “invest in, listen to, and share power with the people and organisations already doing the work of holding local life together.” From the top of Joy, where counselling rooms made from shipping containers will soon sit in the rich canopy of the local plane trees, it’s possible to see most of Birkenhead unfolding under the rain clouds.
“That’s the largest concentration of grade-one listed buildings in one area outside London,” Lee says, looking down. In the near distance is the Priory on which Birkenhead was founded by canny monks who spotted a business proposition ferrying people across the Mersey.
“All of us in the Left Bank Collective do genuinely have the spirit of 150 to 200 years ago, looking for gaps and opportunities, and building a future that gets us back to where we should have been if we’d kept on going,” says Chris Lee, from Start Yard, which re-inhabited a former Camel Laird transport depot.
For everyone in the Collective, the mantra is experiential change – that by going out and spending time with people, and experiencing something new and different, people and places can change their futures. “At Future Yard, we believe that by using the power of music, we can fundamentally change what a place means,” Craig says. “We can reimagine what our town actually is.”
