Jackie Reviews: Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay by Jeff Young

Books are full of echoes – of other times, other places, other writers – as are the cities which we inhabit, and which inhabit us. Reading Jeff Young’s Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay has reminded me of other books I have read recently about wandering the city – Olivia Laing’s Lonely City, about her time living in New York, Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, where she focuses on the women who have walked the cities of London, New York and Paris, and, perhaps most significantly, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a work which all three of the preceding authors make reference to and quote from. Solnit’s question ‘How do you go about finding those things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?’ appeals to Jeff Young. Liverpool is his home, his ‘muse’, as he puts it and his work as a writer for theatre, TV and screen has been deeply influenced by his experiences of growing up in the city in the 1960s and 70s and the profound changes to the urban landscape he has witnessed since his childhood.

The first line of the book introduces us to Young’s mother, who had been secretary to celebrated city architect Sir Alfred Shennan and liked to take the children on exploratory wanders around Liverpool – they would find their way into the Corn Exchange or the Oriel Chambers or clamber up fire escapes for a view out over the rooftops. It was the ‘thrilling dissonance’ of the city which Jeff grew to appreciate most – the contrast between the faded splendour of the Victorian buildings and the ‘Viennese-style tenements, bang next to the 1960s science-fiction eyesore of the shopping precinct’. And this was a place which was ‘always more beautiful in the rain’.

Intensely personal memories of Jeff Young’s happy family life, along with wonderfully evocative family photos, are interwoven with stories about his exploration of the city, his discovery of his love of books and, subsequently, of writing. We learn that Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, lived on Everton Terrace in the early 1800s, the poet Arthur Rimbaud visited Liverpool in 1877 and American poet Allen Ginsberg made a pilgrimage there in the 1960s, believing he had found the spirit of William Blake’s Albion in the city’s vibrant music scene (and, indeed, on Albion Street itself).

Ghost Town is beautifully written, poignant and nostalgic – at its heart it is about the importance of keeping memories alive. ‘Liverpool is the haunted place of remembering’ for Jeff Young, as he says, and the book conjures up the ‘spell’ of the city perfectly. It is wonderful to read and thoroughly recommended.

You can request a copy of this book here.