A Will to Connection

In 2006 a musical comedy called ‘Brick Up the Mersey Tunnels’ was performed at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre. The plot centres around a fictitious terrorist organization called the ‘Kingsway Three’ who decide to brick up the tunnels in response to the snobbish attitudes towards Liverpool and Liverpudlians they encounter among people from the other side of the Mersey. The play was inspired by a letter in the Liverpool Echo from a woman in the Wirral who was complaining about the Liverpool accent, despite the fact that, like many from across the river, she actually worked in the city. In a sequel to the play, ‘Brick Up: The Wirral Strikes Back’ (2010), the ‘aliens’ (‘Wirralites’) find themselves completely cut off from the Liverpool side of the river; both tunnels are bricked up, the Runcorn Bridge has been destroyed, and the ferry boats sunk. A businessman from Heswall hatches a plan to set up a new river crossing by building small boats in an attempt to re-establish cross-river communications.

These playful constructions of otherness between Liverpudlians and Wirralites have their roots in myths and narratives that stretch back a long way in the cultural history of Merseyside. Unsurprisingly, this is also reflected in some of the more well-known feature films made in and around Liverpool. For example, in Ferry Cross the Mersey, as with the Ealing comedy The Magnet before it, the river marks a symbolic boundary between two very different articulations of place. In The Magnet, the bourgeois and genteel environs of 1950s New Brighton (home to William Fox's character Johnny) represent a stark contrast to the altogether more gritty urban landscapes across the water (where Johnny unwittingly ends up at one point in the film). In Ferry Cross the Mersey, which stars Gerry and the Pacemakers playing themselves, it is a vibrant popular culture rather than class that marks the symbolic divide (Liverpool has it in spades, unlike the rather staid and conservative Birkenhead where the young Gerry lives).