Stepping into a no-go area

By Laurie Taylor

Mother never told me about the adventures that await in disorderly neighbourhoods... only not too disorderly.

We were always warned about College Road in our house. I can still remember the night that my sister came home and told mother that she'd missed the last L1 Ribble bus to Crosby, and instead of waiting for the L3 had decided to walk back along College Road.

"Don't ever do that again," she was warned. "The Tarletons live down there and you never know what sort of trouble they might cause."

Even at the time I thought this was a gross slander. The Tarletons were a famous boxing family - Nel Tarleton had been British featherweight champion and I even slightly knew and liked one of the Tarleton daughters.

But as far as my mother was concerned, boxing was an intrinsically rough business and she did her best to instil in her children the danger of walking along a street which in her view could at any time be infected with the noxious influence of the Tarletons and degenerate into the sort of urban mayhem which characterised the South Side of Chicago.

But College Rd was only one of the disorderly neighbourhoods in close proximity to our house.

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Mother also warned us about the danger of encountering sexual maniacs near the beach end of South Rd, the strong possibility of having drugs forced upon us in the vicinity of the Liver Hotel, and the virtual certainty of being stabbed to death if we were ever so foolish as to alight from the electric train at Seaforth Sands.

So thoroughly did I imbibe the notion that there were disorderly places all around where I could be infected with crime (much in the same way that one contracted chicken pox) that some of my childhood rambles around Crosby came to resemble World War I reconnaissance missions in which I was constantly on the alert for enemy positions and ever ready to duck away from hostile fire.

It was only when I made friends in my early teens with two boys from Bootle ("Don't even consider going there," said mother) that I realised one person's dangerous area was another person's adventure playground.

With Dave and Jim leading the way, I began to spend evenings in parts of Liverpool which almost revelled in their bad reputation: the dock road, Toxteth, Scottie Rd, the back streets around the central post office. These were accidental urban treasures. Disorderly, even dangerous, but full of excitement and surprise.

I thought nostalgically about such areas when, as a grown-up academic, I was attending a conference in Toronto.

After spending a dull day shopping in one of the hygienic underground malls, I asked my hotel receptionist if there was any part of this city which was a little less ordered, a little less arranged.

She promptly gave some instructions to a taxi driver and I was taken for a 15 minute ride down-town. "Here we are," said my driver. "Is this what you're looking for?"

I glanced out of the window and saw to my horror that the array of streets at which we'd stopped carried a big sign. Red Light District. I asked my driver to take me straight back to my hotel.

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