Who Saved The Mersey?

Gritty, big mouthed and occasionally full of crap; the Mersey doesn’t run through us, it is us. And, as we return to the river for a series of festivities this summer, we take a look at the changing course of our river.

Salmon are leaping upriver. Otters are breeding in the shadows of Fiddlers Ferry. The Mersey is cleaner than it’s ever been since the Industrial Revolution.

But, within a generation, the river could see changes the like of which it’s not witnessed since the world’s first commercial docks were built, nearly 300 years ago.

As you read this, Peel Ports are digging down into river bed; gouging out a trench 52 feet down into the sandy sediment. They’re clearing a channel to make way for the world’s biggest supertankers and containers - floating suburbs four football pitches long (or 47 Arriva busses if that’s your unit of choice).

As the Panama Canal is widened, so too is the world’s shipping fleet. And, if we’re to keep up, we need to accommodate these new, Post-Panamax leviathans.

The supersized docks, Liverpool2, will be ready for business next year. Peel Port’s Managing Director, Gary Hodgson is in no doubt, the Port of Liverpool is on the up again.

“It’s crucially important if we want to remain internationally competitive. ‘Post Panamax’ allows much larger vessels and so create new trade routes. At the moment, we are constrained by our docks and locks from handling the world’s largest vessels,” he says, “but Liverpool2 puts that right. The benefits will be around £5 billion to the local economy.”

When Peel talks about opening Liverpool up to new routes, they stop a little short of revealing exactly what routes may come.

For there is another, altogether more lucrative future in store for the Mersey. It’s one no-one dare sound too triumphalist about. But it’s a very real possibility.

Dr Kevin Horsburgh is Head of Marine Physics and Ocean Climate at the Liverpool-based Proudman Oceanographic Institute. No-one knows the world’s seas like they do.

“In twenty year’s time, by all serious calculations, the Arctic Ocean will be completely ice free for the summer months,” Horsburgh says, showing SevenStreets computer modelled simulations of clear routes from the tip of Siberia to the docks at Seaforth.

Pity the polar bears. But the inconvenient truth is this: within a generation, there’ll be a direct shipping passage from Liverpool to China across the top of the world.

Forget the slow boat to China. Liverpool and its twin city of Shanghai could join hands across the top of the world.

Horsborough estimates that traveling from Liverpool to the Bering Strait across the roof of the world would take almost a week less than traditional routes - or even the route along Siberia’s frigid northern coastline - a route which Russia charges heftily for. The cold heart of the Arctic Sea, however, is considered to be ‘international waters’.

The consequences for the city are mind-boggling. We’ve all seen the shots of the Christmas-gift stuffed container vessels plying the Indian Ocean en route for the UK. China’s economy, while not completely recession proof, is the one to watch. And, with 7,000km shaved off northerly routes between Liverpool and Tokyo too, an ice free pole could well place the Mersey (further north than Europe’s busiest port, Rotterdam) in a very fortunate position.

Liverpool’s links with China are deep and strong. Our trading relationships with the country - bolstered by our recent (well received) showing at the Shanghai World Expo - have never been better. Our city’s shipping heritage owes much to the trade routes set down in our mercantile trading heydays. What would happen to us if history repeated itself?

Meanwhile, further upstream from the docks, Liverpool’s new turnaround cruise facility is welcoming a record 36 cruise liners to the city this season, with 50 already booked in for next year. Survey after survey shows visitor satisfaction to be higher here than in most other ports of call. No wonder Southampton’s getting jittery.

Make no mistake, the Mersey is changing course.

Thirty years ago, the River was a toxin-filled cocktail of raw sewage and chemicals: the most polluted river in Western Europe.

Now, from Media City in Salford (part of the Mersey system) to the spruced up Liverpool waterfront, it’s teeming with life: on, in and alongside its banks.

But in following the river’s return to good health upstream, you arrive at a startling discovery.

For it was Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for the Environment sent to a city still smouldering after the Toxteth riots, who was the catalyst for the regeneration of the river.

“Alone, every night, when the meetings were over and the pressure was off, I would stand with a glass of wine, looking out at the magnificent view over the river and ask myself what had gone wrong with this great English city,” he says of his time here. “Untreated sewage, pollutants, noxious discharges…the river was an affront to the standards a civilised society should demand of its environment.”

In other words, he saw something that we’d perhaps overlooked. He saw that we had a river running through us that we’d forgotten about. A river that originally gave us life, and one that could do again.

Despite earlier protests from the Daily Post (which believed that a river clean up would only benefit salmon and a ‘few eccentrics who wanted to swim in the river’) Heseltine saw the relationship between environmental improvement and economic regeneration.

The Mersey Basin Campaign sprung into action: a 25 year project to work with a myriad of different stakeholders. Its aim, to improve the quality of the water in the Mersey and spearhead the regeneration of derelict land beside the river, encouraging the waterside investment that would help bring jobs and prosperity. Its legacy? Chances are you’ll experience it this summer, as the city stages a series of summer festivals along the riverbank.

“Heseltine was told it would take at least 25 years, and cost £4000m,” says Liverpool RSPB’s Chris Tynan. “He was also repeatedly informed that he couldn’t simply clean up the Liverpool end of the river, as there would still be pollution coming into the system upriver.

“The scale and complexity of the clean up was clearly too great for any one authority or agency to tackle alone,” he says.

A complex web of issues including shipping, economic regeneration, physical regeneration, recreation, tourism and nature conservation were tackled in a never-before-seen model of cooperation. Over its quarter-century lifespan, the MBC saw an estimated £10 billion spent on cleaning up the river.

In 1987 the 28 pipes discharging raw domestic sewage from liverpool into the Mersey were diverted to a huge (£300m) purpose-built treatment plant at Sandon Dock. Every day since then, 950 million litres of untreated sewage are cleaned before being oxygenated and returned to the estuary.

Now, with extensive wildlife habitats, such as the Speke and Garston Coastal Reserve and the North Wirral Foreshore, the Mersey Estuary is a staging post for large numbers of wildfowl and wading birds and has been designated as a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest).

This spring, the Albert Dock and Tate Liverpool will be celebrating their 25th anniversary with event-packed weekends in June. The Battle of the Atlantic anniversary will be commemorated, and the Mersey River Festival returned. But as you head towards the river, it’s worth pausing to look out at the water. The Mersey Basin Campaign’s work is done, and we’ve got our river back - at the heart of the city again.

These days, you won’t see the ‘Mersey tadpoles’ - huge balls of grime-blackened fat from the margarine works. But you might just see the arched back of a porpoise break the surface of the water, the world’s largest cruise liners, and kayakers from the Watersports Centre gingerly heading out into the open water.

Quietly, and without fanfare, the Mersey has shown the city that there is life after death. Where the next chapters of this curious river’s course takes us, no-one’s quite sure yet…

David Lloyd

Pics 1, 3: Pete Carr