downtown Liverpool: Lessons from Barcelona.

Lessons from Barcelona

Barcelona is a city that invites comparison with Liverpool. Of all the cities of Europe, it seems to be the nearest to our own.

Why should that be? Maybe it is something to do with the ease of travelling there. Twice daily easyJet services and a daily Ryanair flight from John Lennon Airport see to that.

The similarities between the two cities are quite well known. Both are seaports, both are football crazy, both have a wealth of great architecture and both are regional cities with a strong identity and a rather uneasy relationship with their respective countries. However, differences can be instructive as well.

At the end of June, my wife and I took advantage of the cheap flights to spend three days in the city.

Barcelona’s Mediterranean climate announces itself the minute you get off the plane. Clear skies, blazing sunshine and temperatures well into the nineties. Of course, we have that sort of weather in Liverpool as well - only not quite so often.

There is no denying that a Mediterranean climate is a great boost to the general feel of a city. You have to admit that the dull, drizzly days that we have too often back home are not one of our greatest selling points. However, we should not forget that most of us visit Barcelona as tourists. Living and working in such a climate is a different matter.

Another marked difference is the airport. Barcelona airport is expanding to a capacity of over fifty million passengers per annum and work is ongoing to runways, taxiways and terminal buildings.

To put this in perspective, Liverpool John Lennon Airport currently handles just over three million passengers per annum. This is a great improvement on the less than half million that went through only ten years ago and we can look forward to a doubling of capacity in the next few years. All the same, John Lennon is clearly not in the same league as Barcelona – yet.

We took the airport bus into the centre of the city. The first part of the journey was through the industrial hinterland, a kind of Runcorn in the Sun but then something quite interesting happened. Where we would have expected a few miles of suburbs with houses and gardens, we were suddenly plunged into Downtown – a densely built residential area with shops and businesses and a large number of people on the streets.

We were entering the Eixample (Extension). This is an area set out in the nineteenth century by the civil engineer Ildefons Cerda. Faced with massive population growth, Cerda prepared a plan for the future expansion of the city that consisted of a simple square grid.

Grid-iron street plans are one of the simplest and oldest forms of town planning and, arguably, one of the most effective. The rectangular forms reflect the common shapes of buildings and straight, regularly spaced roads simplify the provision of transport and other services. However, it is the interconnectivity of streets, which, in maximising the accessibility of homes and businesses, nurtures a vibrant and diverse economy.

Liverpool, like most British cities, has never had a comprehensive expansion plan and our street layout appears an unplanned jumble by comparison. Perhaps we should investigate the grid as a pattern for the future development of our city.

We got off the airport bus in the Placa de Catalonia. You do not have to be in Barcelona long to understand that the city does not consider itself to be Spanish but is in fact the capital of the semi-autonomous province of Catalonia.

Catalonia, in the North East of Spain is one of the country’s most industrialised and productive regions. It does invite comparison with the North West in that respect but it would be unwise to go too far.

Catalonia is a fiercely independent region with its own language (a cross between Spanish and French), a long and turbulent history and even its own folk dances. Then of course, Barcelona is the unrivalled capital of the province, with no Catalan Manchester claiming the title for itself.

The Placa de Catalonia is a large public square with gardens and sculptures. The people of Barcelona have given it the nickname of the Banker’s Square because of the number of banks that have their headquarters in the vicinity.

Banks may not feature on the tourist trail but they do help to prop up the wealth of a city. It is quite noticeable that, compared to Liverpool, Barcelona is a wealthy city and the presence of financial institutions such as the Bank of Catalonia must be a factor. The demise of institutions such as Martins Bank was likewise a factor in Liverpool’s economic collapse in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Is this a lesson for us in planning the regeneration of our city?

The Place de Catalonia also functions as a transport interchange and it was here that we got the Metro to our hotel in the Gothic Quarter.

The most notable thing about the Barcelona Metro is its extent with several lines and numerous underground stations. No doubt, the high population density within the city has helped its expansion. Liverpool may only boast a small number of underground stations but there is not the density of homes or businesses in the suburbs to justify expensive underground construction.

We got to our hotel by about midday and so we had plenty of time to look around. The Gothic Quarter is the oldest part of the city and has many churches and a magnificent cathedral. Unlike the Eixample with its wide, straight streets, the Quarter is a maze of narrow alleys and small squares. It has buildings that date back to the Middle Ages, including some palaces that now house a museum to the painter Pablo Picasso.

Not surprisingly, part of the Gothic Quarter has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was whilst we were in Barcelona that the announcement of the Liverpool WHS was made, so perhaps we can learn from it.

Many European cities have an area known as the ‘Old Town’. This is the historic centre of the city, the part that attracts tourists but which the townspeople, generally avoid. The most extreme example of this is the island of Venice that is kept alive by the tourist industry whilst the Venetians tend to live and work in the less picturesque mainland parts of the city.

Most British cities, including Liverpool, do not have an ‘Old Town’. The historic centre is now the modern centre. This creates conflict between the needs of modern living and the desire to preserve the great buildings and streetscapes of the past. The declaration of the World Heritage Site has brought this conflict out into the open in our city.

Barcelona seems to have got around this problem simply by locating the extreme forms of modern architecture, such as tall towers, away from the historic Gothic Quarter. However, a large part of the Quarter remains as a business and residential district. It may be that this is much easier in a city laid out in a grid plan, as it does not have an obvious centre. However, it may indicate the way that Liverpool needs to develop in the future.

One of Barcelona’s claims to fame is that it is where Christopher Columbus returned after discovering the Americas. His statue stands on top of a tall column near where he landed and it is here that we got a boat to take us on a trip along the waterfront.

Coming from the city with the ‘most famous ferry in the world’, it was only natural to compare this experience with our own Mersey ferry. The comparison is a bit unfair, as the boats are just small vessels designed only for the tourist trade. However, you need to make use of them if you are to see the Barcelona waterfront.

The waterfront consists of the historic harbour, with long sea walls dividing it from the Mediterranean. The city has gone to town in re-establishing its links with the water and this is evident in the marinas, bridges, public artworks and tourist facilities such as a giant Imax cinema. On the sea side of the walls there is even a beach, which is evidently well used in summer.

To the North of the Gothic Quarter are symbols of the modern Barcelona - the forty plus storey Hotel Arts and Torre Mapfre, which are fronted by a giant gold fish sculpture by Frank Gehry. Further north are the towers of the 1992 Olympic Village that are now part of a large entertainment complex and a new bullet shaped tower – the Torre Agbar, which is very reminiscent of London’s Swiss Re building.

Barcelona has an impressive natural setting with high hills flanking the western edge, one of which hosts the city’s tallest building, the Norman Foster designed TV tower. However, I still believe that Liverpool has the edge as far as waterfronts are concerned. Barcelona simply does not face the waterfront in the way Liverpool faces the Mersey. Then there is nowhere ‘over the water’ to provide a fixed vantage point.

Where Barcelona certainly does lead is in its cruise liner market. During our trip round the harbour we counted no less than four of them tied up at the quayside, some of them dwarfing the QE2. So when do they start on our landing stage extension?

The waterfront also boasts a large and very modern World Trade Centre. These centres, which started with the famous one in New York, are places where private and public organisations engaged in international trade share one building to pool their collective expertise. There is one in London, near Tower Bridge, and I believe that the only other one in England is in Milton Keynes. Surely, a city with Liverpool’s trading background should be in the running for one of these. Do we not have a suitable waterfront site?

The next day, we boarded an open topped tourist bus to do a tour round town. As with most major cities, Barcelona has a wealth of great buildings and other tourist attractions and the top of a bus is one of the best ways of seeing them.

The tour was an opportunity to take a closer look at the Eixample district.

The Cerda plan divided the Eixample into 300 metre squares bordered by 20m. wide roads. The wide roads permit tree-lined boulevards and wide pavements with their attendant outdoor café society. The heights of the original buildings appear to have been around six storeys, being the maximum height in the days before the passenger lift. Newer ones tend to be taller.

Critics of the grid-iron plan often point to the interminable, boring vistas along long, straight streets. This problem does not appear to arise in Barcelona. Fountains spring up at the more important intersections and avenues of trees soften the long views.

Cerda improved on the conventional rectangular grid in one other way - he cut the corners of each block off at 45 degrees. This was a purely functional measure to permit a large turning circle for trams but it has some aesthetic advantages. Each intersection becomes a square public space and the diagonal facades allow some architectural flourishes at each block corner.

The building that symbolises Barcelona to the outside world occupies one of the Cerda blocks - Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral. The construction of this building commenced in the 1880s and its completion is anything from 50 to 200 years from now. Work is now well advanced but the great central towers that will complete the building are still far in the future. As Gaudi said, ‘my client is not in a hurry’.

The Sagrada Familia looks more like a natural rock formation than a conventional building. It has an incredibly free form that attests to its architect’s skill as an engineer and craftsman. Though often thought of as one of the first of the Modern Movement architects, Gaudi’s remarkably unconventional buildings seem a world away from the straight lines and bare surfaces of Modernists such as Walter Gropius and Mies Van der Rohe.

This building inspires massive interest in people who are unlikely ever to see it finished. It does make you wonder if Liverpool should have pressed on with the grand Lutyens design for the Metropolitan Cathedral, which had a similar timescale.

It is always good to meet people who live in the city and I was fortunate that my cousin lives there with her partner and two children. They have a pleasant fifth floor apartment in the north part of the centre.

Having lived in the city for two years, they had some mixed views on the advantages and disadvantages. Barcelona is a relatively safe city and easy to get around with cheap taxis and the Metro. However, one drawback was the prevalent Catalan culture, with its unique language, which can make outsiders feel excluded.

One other disadvantage for my cousin was the traffic, which is very intense and less respectful of traffic lights than in Britain. I had noticed that traffic seems to flow freely in the city, with little pedestrianisation. However, it would be wrong to assume that Barcelona motorists have everything their own way. Roads are slow moving and drivers seem to use their horns as much as their brakes. Traffic is also stopped at lights more often than in a British city.

I did not notice any of the continuous pedestrian barriers that disfigure the streets of Liverpool and obstruct free movement. Pavements are relatively wide and lines of bollards separate cars from people and prevent parking on footpaths.

We spent the last full day of our holiday visiting some of the tourist attractions in the Gothic Quarter. The Picasso Museum is extensive and well worth a visit whether or not you have much of an interest in art. I suppose our equivalent is the Beatles Museum and you can argue for ages about who had the greatest impact on the modern world. One thing that John, Paul, George and Ringo have in common with Pablo is that both left their hometown to seek fame elsewhere. In Pablo’s case, it was to another country, France.

The medieval cathedral in the Gothic Quarter is a marvellous building with lattice towers added in the nineteenth century. It includes a beautiful cloister garden complete with wild geese.

You can take a lift up to the cathedral roof, which has expansive views over the city. From this vantage point you see how relatively small Barcelona is with most of its main buildings quite close to one another. This is not the impression you get at ground level and must have something to do with the sheer density of the city.

On our final day, we had time to visit another of Gaudis famous buildings, La Pedrera, an apartment building in the Eixample district. La Pedrera is a nickname meaning ‘stone quarry’ and this is understandable as the building does have something of the Fred Flintstone look with massive overhanging stone balconies. However, the use of large light wells ensured that even the lowest apartments are bright and airy, an important condition in Gaudi’s day, as it remains today.

The roof of La Pedrera is a must see and has a terraced layout with massive Gaudiesque stone chimneys. The building occupies the corner of one of Cerda’s blocks (or urbanisations to give them their correct name) and it is possible to see the large internal courtyard formed within the square.

Liverpool does not have an architect with the international status of Gaudi (well not to date anyway). However, we seem to be very modest about the great architecture that we do have. This ranges from the mid-nineteenth century modernism of the architect Peter Ellis, designer of Oriel Chambers and 16 Cook Street to the Art Deco masterpieces of Herbert Rowse that include India Buildings, and the Philharmonic Hall.

La Pedrera was restored in the 1990s. Before that, it was a rather run down building that did not attract much attention. We have some marvellous architecture in a similar condition. Maybe Oriel Chambers has done its duty as an office building and the time is ripe for it to be restored and converted into a cultural centre.

We did not have time to see all of Barcelona’s attractions, which I think is a good thing as it means we will have to go back before too long.

My general impression was of a lively, beautiful and well-planned city that is essentially liveable - one of the best cities of Europe.

It was not my first visit to the city. That was back in 1989, when work was ongoing for the 1992 Olympics. Those Games, often thought of as the best ever held, were the turning point in the city’s fortunes. Liverpool has European Capital of Culture coming up, will that have a similar effect for our city?

Not that long ago, Barcelona was a run down city in an almost third world country. Remember Basil Fawlty’s apology for the luckless Manuel ‘I’m terribly sorry, he’s from Barcelona’? That would sound very hollow nowadays.

Like Liverpool, Barcelona is not a national capital but its standing on the international stage rivals the national capital, Madrid. It shows that a city does not have to be some megalopolis like London or Paris to be one of the greatest cities of Europe. It is a city from which we can learn a lot.

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