The Bridewell: State-Apparatus to Grassroots Art-Space
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Figure 1 - West view of The Bridewell from ‘sniffers’ car, Royal Liverpool University Hospital visible to the left (still from Boys from the Blackstuff) |
“This used to be a Bridewell didn’t it? It’s not gonna be a police station again is it? ‘cos I have certain moral objections to working on—”
“No! It’s not going to be that. But you could say it’s going to be another growth industry. One of the few.”1
— Episode 1, Boys from the Blackstuff
Today Liverpool’s ‘Bridewell Studios’ hosts 35 artist studios, an art gallery2 as well as semi-frequent fundraising club-nights3. Over it’s near-two-hundred year lifetime however, it has also served as a police & fire station and a location in the first episode of Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 television series, Boys from the Blackstuff4. This essay aims to chart the history and use of ‘The Bridewell’, providing commentary surrounding its relevancy to Bleasdale’s production and the building’s political positioning during significant changes to its use — from apparatus of state-control to grassroots-led art-space. Politics here, both societally and locally, provide the definitive method of analysis for the building’s architectural history.
Situated on Prescot Road opposite the, now soon-to-be-demolished5, mid-century Royal Liverpool University Hospital, The Bridewell is a Grade II listed building6 built around 18467. Beginning life as a police and fire station, the building was purchased by the Liverpool Constabulary in 1853, continuing to be used as such into the twentieth century with extensions made in 1899. Shortly after, in 1921, the station ceased use as a fire station, serving instead as a divisional police headquarters. The formation of Liverpool and Bootle constabulary in the late 1960s led to a downsizing of the station and saw the end of cell usage. Following closure and left unoccupied, the Bridewell fell into dereliction into the early 1970s8.
In 1976, seeing opportunity in the abandoned building, a collective of artists rented the building as an art space. This was the most drastic change to the building’s use yet and something which was formalised by the collective through the formation of Artspace Merseyside, a non-profit which secured a loan to purchase the property in 19819. The Bridewell, now ‘Bridewell Studios’, remains under the ownership of Artspace Merseyside at time of writing and hosts a number of artist studio spaces as well as art exhibitions and fundraising events. One such semi-regular event, is ‘Red City Solidarity Disco’10, a loosely left-wing club-night from which profits have been donated to trade union strike funds, local tenants unions and accessible legal support as well as being for used for The Bridewell’s own maintenance works.
It’s important to note here that the most significant change in The Bridewell’s lifetime occurred during a period of great political upheaval following various economic crises and the ‘Winter of Discontent’, resulting in the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Thanks to Thatcher’s policies of privatisation, the early 1980s saw mass unemployment in Britain, reaching a peak rate of 11.9% in 198411. Compounded by the institutional racism of the period12, these high levels of unemployment almost certainly played a part in the 1981 riots across England, most notably in Brixton and Toxteth (in which the rate of unemployment amongst men was 39.6%13). Given The Bridewell is approximately a mile from Toxteth, it likely served the area as a police station during its operation, and therefore cannot escape the political and historical weight of police control and aggression, particularly against the working-class and black Liverpudlians who will have occupied its cells.
One exploration of this politically volatile era, specifically its impacts on working-class culture, is Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 television drama Boys from the Black Stuff. The series views this dire political landscape through the lens of five unemployed Liverpudlians, with the first episode seeing the group work cash-in-hand (unofficially) on a renovation job whilst still claiming unemployment benefit. A former police station, the renovation job in- hand is The Bridewell on Prescot Street, and given the time at which the series was aired and that in which Artspace Merseyside purchased the property, it seems likely this fictional renovation was simultaneously a real-world one. The building plays a vital role in the episode, acting as a conduit for discourse around the polices of Thatcher’s government and policing in an increasingly authoritarian state. More specific to the building itself, though, and something on which the plot depends, is commentary around the building’s quality workmanship. Snowy Malone, the most revolutionary and politically- driven of the characters, comments on the quality of the building’s interior tiles; showing around his unimpressed workmate, he says:
 Figure 2 - Snowy shows Chrissie The Bridewell’s ‘beautifully made’ brown tiles (still from Boys from the Blackstuff) |
Snowy: “See?”
Chrissie: “These are tiles, Snowy. Lotsa tiles! Brown ones!”
Snowy: “I know, I know! Nothing special, just beautifully made and position-laid a hundred years ago, and still like new! Apart from those that have been cracked to buggery by the idiots who put the new bannister up!”
“But don’t you see? ...We’re all capable of work like that. Craftsmanship doesn’t die out in people, Chrissie! We can all do good jobs, but we’re not allowed to! I don’t get jobs just because of me politics ya know. There’s times where I’m not taken on because I’m too good, and because I’m good and I do the job proper, I refuse to skimp on the stuff and I’m slower than the bosses want me to be and then I’m not a profit margin anymore, I’m a liability!”14
Now in the shadow of a series of high-rise student accommodation blocks and luxury flats15 of the same vein as those which cost Liverpool its Unesco World Heritage status16, Snowy’s commentary rings truer today than when the series was first broadcast.
Throughout the episode Snowy acts as a vessel through which Bleasdale can lay out the political terms on which the series is predicated, with the remaining characters reflecting the country’s widespread apathy and exhaustion. With this reading, it is all the more impactful when Snowy dies at the end of the episode. Fleeing from the ‘sniffers’ (Department of Employment investigators), Snowy climbs out the window down a rope he’d attached to the aforementioned shoddy new bannister which gives way leaving him to fall to the pavement, the last slither of radicalism lost, and at the hands of ‘profit margins’ and poor workmanship. Given the themes and emotion present throughout the series, it’s difficult not to feel as though Bleasdale is is speaking directly to the audience as Snowy says:
“That’s the main reason Toxteth went up, Chrissie. And for every fella who dies in a police station and gets his name in the papers, there’s hundreds more that get a quiet little hammering down a dark alley and crawl home to bed. I’ve been worked over too many times myself not to know that ... Be warned: the way things are going with this government — the swing to the right, tax-relief for the rich, redundancies for the poor, mass unemployment, poverty, curtailing of freedom starting with the unions — it’s all heading for one thing and one thing only: a fascist dictatorship and a police state.”17
There exists a strange dichotomy here in that during the country’s great slide to the authoritarian right, change in ownership of The Bridewell, from a former institution of state control to an effectively community-owned arts centre, could be said to represent a shift to the libertarian left, the shade of which is present in the character of Snowy Malone. Even in spite of the bleakness that pervades Boys from the Blackstuff, the real-world represents a more optimistic tale than the series, with characters discovering with humorous irony that their renovation efforts are in service of a soon-to-be Department of Employment building. In reality The Bridewell was, for the first time, outside of state control and now the property of the local community, being put to much better use than in its previously unoccupied state; and arguably its former positioning as an oppressive state institution, too.
In spite of the building’s ideological reconfiguration, the simple fact of the its prior abandonment may speak to the waning power of the state and local authorities into the 1970s; the revisionism of a post-war consensus by Labour politicians18 and an outright rejection of it by Conservatives. It could be said that the building’s proximity to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, itself visible during Boys from the Blackstuff, also presents a contrast in ideology, particularly as it is torn down. If the construction of such modernist public service buildings in the post-war period (of a similar time to that in which The Bridewell was left derelict) represented an improvement in the form of the welfare state, their demolition, especially when replaced by chaotic PFI monstrosities19, signal the stake in the heart of any inkling of the period’s political radicalism.
Figure 3 - A Department of Employment sign is revealed at the site of the renovation job (still from Boys from the Blackstuff)
Today, besides the art on the walls, The Bridewell looks very much like it would have done during its time as a police station. Following its Grade II listing in 200720, it still features those glazed brown tiles, “beautifully made and position-laid a hundred years ago”21, in fact, Bridewell Studios make reference to the tiles’ edging pattern in their logo22. As of 201223, the building also still housed its original station cells, shower rooms, urinals and fireplace, with one of the more obvious markers being the presence of an original ‘Detective Office’ sign pointing upstairs. It’s intriguing that so much of the building’s original material has been preserved over the forty years in which it hasn’t processed any inmates. Perhaps it is an attempt to reckon with the building’s history as a place of institutional power, not to shy away from lives that will have been changed within its walls.
It’s unlikely the police officers who will have worked in The Bridewell during the tail-end of the nineteenth century could have predicted that a hundred years later their police station would be host to a party of drunk creatives and left-wingers. The Bridewell, even in maintaining its history, has been totally ideologically transformed. Perhaps in a concerted effort to spite the surrounding political climate — the shift to the right and weakening of the state — The Bridewell has become a safe haven for expression and a conduit for discourse around working-class culture, from Bleasdale’s work in Boys from the Blackstuff to the present-day platforming of artists of many disciplines. From state- apparatus to grassroots art-space, The Bridewell is a progressive exception to societal individualisation and privatisation.
Figure 4 - Original ‘Detective Office’ sign still present (September 2023)
Figure 5 - ‘Red City Solidarity Disco’ is held in the hall of The Bridewell (September 2023)
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(2,055 words incl. footnotes, excl. bibliography, captions, image credits)
Image Credits
Figure 2 - “Jobs for the Boys,” 33:12.
Figure 3 - “Jobs for the Boys,” 47:32.
Figure 4 - author’s own image, September 29, 2023.
Figure 5 - author’s own image, September 30, 2023.
2 “About,” The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, accessed January 5, 2024, https:// www.bridewellstudiosliverpool.org/about.
3 “Red City Disco,” Facebook, accessed January 5, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/redcitysolidaritydisco/.
4 The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, “About.”
5 “Demolition of the old Royal Liverpool Hospital,” Liverpool University Hospitals, last modified August 7, 2023, https://www.liverpoolft.nhs.uk/about-us/our-stories/demolition-old-royal- liverpool-hospital.
6 “Bridewell Studios , Non Civil Parish - 1392282,” Historic England, accessed January 5, 2024, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392282.
7 The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, “About.”
8 Brian Starkey, “Prescot Street Bridewell,” accessed January 5, 2024, https:// www.liverpoolcitypolice.co.uk/photo-galleries/prescot-street-bridewell/.
9 The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, “About.”
11 “Unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, seasonally adjusted): %,” Office for National Statistics, last modified December 12, 2023, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/ peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms.
12 Andy Beckett, “Toxteth, 1981: the summer Liverpool burned — by the rioter and economist on opposite sides,” The Guardian, September 14, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/ sep/14/toxteth-riots-1981-summer-liverpool-burned-patrick-minford-jimi-jagne.
13 Matthew Thompson, In Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 201.
14 “Jobs for the Boys,” 33:12.
15 “Student Accommodation Liverpool,” True Student, accessed January 8, 2024, https:// www.truestudent.com/liverpool.
16 BBC News, “Liverpool stripped of Unesco World Heritage status,” BBC News, July 21, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-57879475.
17 “Jobs for the Boys,” 16:52.
18 Stephen Haseler, The Gaitskellites: Revisionism in the British Labour Party 1951–64 (London: Springer, 1969), 141-142.
19 Liam Thorp, “Carillion ‘repeatedly tried to sue’ Liverpool NHS Trust over stalled Royal hospital,” Liverpool Echo, March 13, 2022, https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/carillion- repeatedly-tried-sue-liverpool-23337707.
20 Historic England, “Bridewell Studios , Non Civil Parish - 1392282.” 21 “Jobs for the Boys,” 33:12.
22 “Bridewell Studios & Gallery,” The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, accessed January 8, 2024, https://www.bridewellstudiosliverpool.org.
23 Starkey, “Prescot Street Bridewell.”
Bibliography (in alphabetical order)
Beckett, Andy. “Toxteth, 1981: the summer Liverpool burned — by the rioter and economist on opposite sides.” The Guardian. September 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/14/toxteth-riots-1981-summer-liverpool-burned-patrick-minford-jimi-jagne.
Bleasdale, Alan, writer. Boys from the Blackstuff. Episode 1, “Jobs for the Boys.” Directed by Phillip Saville, featuring Michael Angelis. Aired October, 10, 1982, in broadcast syndication. UKTV Media Limited, 2024, online streaming platform.
The Bridewell Studios & Gallery. “About.” Accessed January 5, 2024. https://www.bridewellstudiosliverpool.org/about.
The Bridewell Studios & Gallery. “Bridewell Studios & Gallery.” Accessed January 8, 2024. https://www.bridewellstudiosliverpool.org.
Facebook. “Red City Disco.” Accessed January 5, 2024. https://www.facebook.com/redcitysolidaritydisco/.
Haseler, Stephen. The Gaitskellites: Revisionism in the British Labour Party 1951–64 (London: Springer, 1969).
Historic England. “Bridewell Studios , Non Civil Parish - 1392282.” Accessed January 5, 2024. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392282.
Liverpool University Hospitals. “Demolition of the old Royal Liverpool Hospital.” Last modified August 7, 2023. https://www.liverpoolft.nhs.uk/about-us/our-stories/demolition-old-royal-liverpool-hospital.
Office for National Statistics. “Unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, seasonally adjusted): %.” Last modified December 12, 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms.
Starkey, Brian. “Prescot Street Bridewell.” Accessed January 5, 2024. https:// www.liverpoolcitypolice.co.uk/photo-galleries/prescot-street-bridewell/.
Thompson, Matthew. In Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).
Thorp, Liam. “Carillion ‘repeatedly tried to sue’ Liverpool NHS Trust over stalled Royal hospital.” Liverpool Echo. March 13, 2022. https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/carillion-repeatedly-tried-sue-liverpool-23337707.
True Student. “Student Accommodation Liverpool.” Accessed January 8, 2024. https://www.truestudent.com/liverpool.