![]() ![]() #Arwr conversations professional#Birkenhead Town Hall houses the biggest stage with a coalescence of projection and professional lighting crafting a brilliant atmosphere for the headline performances. Instead, Future Yard aims to bridge the River Mersey.Īs a festival Future Yard is spread across four unique venues. Future Yard celebrates the creative energy that is alive throughout Birkenhead and across the Wirral, but it does so without turning its back on its twin over the water. ![]() “But”, as Ryder-Jones mumbles during his Friday night headline set, “no divisions”. As Bill Ryder-Jones suggested in a recent tQ interview, "if the musical identity of the Wirral was more celebrated, perhaps people wouldn’t feel the need to just move you over to the nearest city.” The aim of Future Yard is to refocus the spotlight onto Birkenhead. Yet the town also lays claim to the second highest concentration of Grade-I listed buildings in the country after Trafalgar Square, an 800-year-old Priory founded by Benedictine monks, and is home to England’s first tramway system. One cabbie tells me that Birkenhead is“dead and buried”, another simply shakes his head when I talk about how the festival could impact the town. Crime is high in Birkenhead, and poverty is rife. The tourists who come to Liverpool will cross the river to Birkenhead, but only to get a better snap of the Liverpool skyline. The result would be a booming Liverpool and a neglected Birkenhead.ĭespite the frequent protestations made by local musicians during their sets at new Birkenhead festival Future Yard, a divide between the two sides of the Mersey is evident. It was a relationship fraught from the beginning: Birkenhead would build the ships at Cammell Laird, but the industrial docks were in Liverpool. The estuary is all that separates the two places, yet the absence of a connecting bridge grants the distance a symbolic weight. On one side of the River Mersey is the city of Liverpool, on the opposite side is Birkenhead. ![]()
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