The <i>real</i> capital of culture

Liverpool, Europe's Capital of Culture? Who says? Surely London is that, and by miles. Only a Government sated on political correctness could so patronise the North-West, with a title, a certificate and £1 million if it is lucky.

Liverpool is not a cultural capital, more a place Tony Blair wants to reward for good behaviour, like a vicar patting a boy on the head in the Poor House.

Anyway, what do these baubles mean? Nobody can seriously hold that Liverpool has more "cultural assets" than London, Edinburgh, Manchester or Birmingham.

Its theatres, galleries and museums do not outrank theirs. Liverpool had The Beatles, the beat poets, a river front and fine buildings which the city fathers have so far failed to demolish. But everyone has left who was not screwed to the floor.

Liverpudlians are legendarily cussed and given to drinking. That is not culture. Nor can London's army of Scousers talk: why are they reading this and not back home saving their city and reading the Post?

Don't worry. This is not me talking, only a smug London reaction to yesterday's announcement of Liverpool's accolade for 2008. But there is some truth in the gibe. Either the words culture and capital mean something or they do not.

Brian Sewell last week tore into another Northern institution which I rather admire, the Bowes Museum in Durham. It had lent some of its paintings to the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. The paintings, said Sewell, were a load of second-rate provincial rubbish. How dare the Bowes bring them up to London and expect us to take them seriously?

I am sure the poor Bowes was devastated. But Sewell was right to judge London's culture by the highest standards. If you purport to be championing cultural excellence, you cannot patronise the second rate. You say what you think. The American writer, Gore Vidal, said that whenever he came to London he raced to the Zoo to pay his respects to the Gabon Viper - before reading the London critics. London does not give an inch. Quite right, too.

I love visiting Liverpool. It is a sad place, Britain's Trieste. Built on the wealth of the defunct transatlantic trade, it is certainly Europe's capital of lost souls. Two vast cathedrals are mostly empty, emblems of a divided community.

In the 1970s and 1980s acres of Everton and Toxteth were simply destroyed by the council, their inhabitants dumped miserably on new estates in the countryside.

In their place came rotting tower blocks and wildernesses. Nobody should be permitted to seize greenfield England "to meet housing need" when so much of brownfield Merseyside lies empty. Liverpool's economy is so flat it does not even attract asylum seekers.

It lost its soul with The Beatles and the bulldozer, and has since found only public expenditure. The Government's decision is undeniably bold. Liverpool is still a beautiful woman, desperately in need of a facelift. The Albert Dock and the Mersey waterfront are disjointed and bleak on all but the sunniest days, and the area round Stanley Dock is still derelict. But the raw material is there.

Liverpool's architecture is fine. The downtown district is reviving and the restored Georgian terraces above the Anglican Cathedral are handsome. The best buildings in Liverpool are its churches and a handful of fine houses, such as Croxteth, Sudley and Speke.

When Liverpool's recent benefactor, Michael Heseltine, arrived in 1981 after the Toxteth riots, he tried cosmetic. The city received every imaginable help: government offices, renewal money, historic building grants, a garden festival, even Heseltine himself one day a week for a year. Nothing did the trick. Neighbouring Manchester boomed. Liverpool's old garden festival site reverted to lifelessness.

The fact is, that "culture" is not an investment, like a car factory. Its essence is buzz. No titles or public money have gone into London's culturally vital neighbourhoods such as Soho, Camden, Islington, Clerkenwell or Bermondsey.

Theirs is just the informal economy that flourishes in saved Victorian streets, warehouses and courtyards, the true infrastructure of cultural renewal. They appeal to artists, designers, photographers, clubowners and film-makers, who in turn draw in the yuppies and innovators. It may seem a cliché ¢ut it is true.

Such neighbourhoods do not need Liverpool's promised investment of £35 million in "world-class cultural features". They just need a planning department that knows how to create a Latin quarter. Probably Liverpool's best cultural raw material is its transient influx of 50,000 students. They must somehow be stopped from fleeing the place on graduation. Immigration is the surest sign of economic revival.

Last week, the London University Leverhulme lecture was given by the American historian, Kenneth Jackson. His subject was the vitality of New York. He argued that booming cities needed to be "free but not too free", deregulated but not anarchic.

They had to attract immigrants and young people to keep innovation flowing, but not be so crime-ridden as to drive them away when older.

Cultural appeal - and economic growth - depended on getting this balance right. London and New York fitted the bill. Geneva and Frankfurt were too uptight, while Mexico City and Buenos Aires were too anarchic.

Whether Liverpool's year of culture can capture some of this urban magic will be the test. The claim is that the " cultural multiplier" will mean 14,000 new jobs. All I can say is, I hope so. I cannot imagine the Government setting any city a tougher challenge. But if it works in Liverpool, then cities are truly on the mend.