At a time when Liverpool's culture is being acknowledged and celebrated, we should ask whose culture and what sort of peoples have created the modern city of Liverpool. Arguably, it is the working-class ethos of the city that has contributed most significantly to the city's image and its growth. This is particularly noticeable in the wide attention given to a number of working-class voices that have emerged from the city in recent decades and gained national prominence. What has received less attention, however, are the writers’ groups that have fostered some of these authors. It is the aim of this chapter to address this. Drawing on material from the archives of the Federation of Working-Class Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP), and on correspondence and interviews with founding members, I will explore the precise reasons for the inception of one of these groups, Scotland Road Writers (Scottie Road), and its ability over two decades to bridge Liverpool's race/class divide.

In 1958 Raymond Williams published ‘Culture Is Ordinary’ in which he argues that the need to create, record and share experience is a common impulse. Williams restores the notion of cultural growth as being intrinsic to all groups, not just the middle class or those with a university education. He is helping us to recognize an important thesis that underpins this chapter: working-class people express their own forms of cultural and political growth in various creative and dynamic ways and their expression can to be driven by an all-too-often bitter life experience.

In June 2000 I visited the Phoenix Adult Education Centre in Liverpool 8 to meet with founding members of Scotland Road Writers. I had heard that the writers’ group had forged an alliance between activists and black migrants who joined Scottie Road in the early 1970s. I wanted to explore how, in a city with a reputation for social division, recent black arrivals to Liverpool joined with descendants of Irish immigrants to create a forum for creative expression. This alliance between black and white working class in Liverpool might be considered unusual given the city's troubled history of racial tension. In 2000, the same year as my visit, Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound, in which he described his journeys within the Atlantic slave trade ‘triangle’ of the Caribbean, Britain and North America.