It's some time in the 1960s, and I'm ‘in town’, as always on a Saturday morning, in and out of bookshops, the Bluecoat, the Museum, the William Brown Library, and the like. I'm in my teens, and enjoying the bustle of the place. But around one o'clock, when the bookshops close, I'm glad to make for the Pier Head, getting that airy, opening-out feeling as the river is glimpsed from the top of Water Street, always with a cargo ship at anchor in mid-stream – Blue Funnel, Harrison's, Pacific Steam, or whatever – the superstructure glaring white in the sunshine, and the familiar blue line of the Welsh hills beyond. There is constant movement on the river – tugs, ferries, and the miscellaneous small craft that do chores for the ‘MD&HB’. All that bustle seemed the epitome of a city whose job wasn't to make things, but to move them from one side of the world to the other.

That Liverpool scene, as many of its older citizens say, is now transformed, and so is the ‘Liverpool Scene’ of poetry and performance celebrated in the 1960s era by Edward Lucie-Smith. The change of cultural scene is no surprise, of course, for the city itself is now being transformed yet again, and a corresponding transformation of its poetry is only to be expected. Like so many other UK cities, Liverpool has long been de-industrialized, and many inner-city parts of it have been ‘ruralized’, for there are trees, suburban gardens, and grassy embankments on Scotland Road, and green hills round Everton Valley, producing a rather confusing mixed visual message, at least to my exile's eye. Above all, the city's core business has changed, with the docks tidied away down-stream, leaving a place that is tourist-centred, geared to the requirements of massive ‘visitor attractions’, and dominated by the leisure arts, by sports and entertainment, and by the education industry, with three universities as well as various other forms of further and higher education.