The View From the Train (6 page)

Robinson's interest in manufacturing, however, is rooted in his quasi-Surrealist practice. Whereas
London
set out to transform appearances through a more or less radical subjectivity,
Robinson in Space
addresses the production of actual space: the manufacture of artefacts and the development of sites, the physical production of the visible. Both films attempt to change reality with a heightened
awareness in which ‘I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it'
³
– the words of the Situationist text quoted in the opening sequence of
Robinson in Space –
but in the second, the initial interest is in the production of (at least some of) this
anything
. In the history of the modernist avant-gardes, the transformation of appearances by the poetic imagination preceded the design and construction of
new things
, and the identification of modernity was the bridge between the two. In a letter from Ethiopia, Rimbaud imagined a son who would become ‘a famous engineer, a man rich and powerful through science'.
⁴

An early motive for making the film was a curiosity about how imports of cars, electronics and other consumer goods reached the shops (apart from the cars, one hardly ever sees them in transit), and what, if any, were the exports that paid for them; so there is a lot of material dealing with ports.

In the Department of Transport's 1994 edition of
Port Statistics,
⁵
based on figures for the twelve months of 1993, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company was the most profitable port authority listed. Associated British Ports, which was not listed, declared a higher profit for 1993, but it operates twenty-two ports in the UK, including Southampton, Immingham and Hull. The MDHC bought the profitable Medway Ports in October 1993, and operates a ferry service and a container terminal in Northern Ireland, but it seems nonetheless that Liverpool was (and still is) ‘the most profitable port in the UK'.

Reading these figures, I imagined there might be some exceptional reason for the MDHC's profitability – a one-off land sale, perhaps; commercial rents, or grant aid from the European Union. Like many people with a tourist's familiarity with the waterfronts of Liverpool and Birkenhead, I took the spectacular dereliction of the docks to be symptomatic of a past decline in their traffic, and Liverpool's impoverishment to be a result of this decline in its importance as a port. In fact, in September 1995, when the images of Liverpool in the film were photographed, Liverpool's port traffic was greater than at any time in its history.

In modern terms, individual British ports are not very large: Rotterdam – the world's biggest port – has an annual traffic of about 300 million tonnes. The UK has a long coastline and its traffic, though greater than ever, is divided among many ports. Since 1960, the tonnage of exports has quadrupled, increasing most rapidly in the 1970s, when North Sea Oil was first exploited. The tonnage of imports has fluctuated, and has risen overall by more than 20 per cent.

London is still the largest port in the UK (sixth-largest in the EU),
⁶
with a total of about 52 million tonnes in 1994. ‘London', however, consists of the Port of London Authority's entire jurisdiction from Teddington Lock to Foulness – more than seventy miles of the Thames estuary. The largest single location of port activity is at Tilbury, where the docks are now owned by Forth Ports, but Tilbury itself is not a large port. Much of the traffic in the Thames is to and from other UK ports, especially that in oil. The total in
foreign
traffic for London and the Medway (which is a separate entity) is exceeded by the combined total for the Humber ports of Grimsby and Immingham, Hull, and the rivers Trent and Humber.

The second-largest total tonnage in 1994 was in the Forth estuary – 44 million tonnes, 68 per cent more than in 1993 – which is as fragmented as the Thames, and where the traffic is mostly oil. Next are the port authorities of Tees and Hartlepool, and Grimsby and Immingham, each with about 43 million tonnes. In these pairs, the Tees greatly exceeds Hartlepool and Immingham exceeds Grimsby, though to a lesser extent: Grimsby handles imports from Volkswagen and exports from Toyota. The traffic in the Tees estuary is largely bulk – imports of iron ore and coal for the steelworks at Redcar, exports of chemicals from the plants at Billingham and Wilton, and oil and petroleum products. A large figure for oil exports arises from the re-export of the product of a Norwegian field in the North Sea, which comes ashore by pipeline. There is not much container or semi-bulk traffic (timber, for example). The traffic at Immingham is also largely bulk – imports of iron ore and coal (3 million tonnes a year, the equivalent of 10 per cent of all the UK's deep-mined coal), imports of oil for the Immingham
refineries, and chemicals into and out of quayside plants – KNAUF has an automated plasterboard plant at Immingham. In addition, there is some container and conventional traffic, and BMW, Volvo and Saab import cars.

The fifth- and sixth-largest tonnages are at Sullum Voe, an oil terminal in the Shetlands, with 39 million tonnes, almost entirely outgoing crude oil, and Milford Haven, with 34 million tonnes, again almost all oil. Southampton and Liverpool each handle about 30 million tonnes. Both have large container terminals – Liverpool has a large traffic in animal feeds, a new terminal for Powergen's coal imports and most of the UK's scrap metal exports. Southampton has a vehicle terminal – Renault, Rover, General Motors, Jaguar – and considerable oil imports.

The other two big ports in the UK are Felixstowe, which has the second-largest
non-oil
traffic (after London) and handles 40 per cent of
all
the UK's container traffic (50 per cent of its
deep-sea
container traffic), and Dover which, despite the Channel Tunnel, still handles 50 per cent of international roll-on-roll-off traffic (i.e. road goods vehicles) which in the last twenty years has become such a large part of international freight.

It is presumably a mistake to assess a port's importance solely by the tonnage of its traffic – a tonne of Colombian coal is worth about £28 at the destination port; a tonne of Volkswagens, say, £12,000; a tonne of laptop computers probably not less than £250,000. Container and road vehicle loads probably always represent considerably greater monetary value than bulk materials. On this basis, Felixstowe probably handles the traffic with the greatest value. However, given that other large ports are either fragmented (London), aggregates of two or more sites (Tees and Hartlepool, Grimsby and Immingham), or specialist in particular types of traffic (Sullum Voe is
all
oil exports, Felixstowe is
only
containers, Immingham and the Tees largely bulk), Liverpool can now be described as ‘the UK's largest conventional port'. If Liverpool's relative importance is not what it was a hundred years ago, it is not because its traffic has declined, but because there is now much more port traffic, and there are more big ports.

Certainly, Liverpool's traffic did decline. In the early 1980s, it was down to about 10 million tonnes per year, but it is now about the same as it was in the mid 1960s. What has vanished is not the working port itself, even though most of the waterfront is derelict, but the contribution that the port made to the economy of Liverpool. Of all the United Kingdom's maritime cities, only Hull, which is much smaller, was as dependent on its port for wealth. Liverpool's population in 1994 was estimated at 474,000, just 60 per cent of the 789,000 in 1951. At its peak, the port employed 25,000 dock workers. The MDHC now employs about 500 dockers (and sacked 329 of these in September 1995). Similarly, a very large proportion of the dock traffic is now in containers and bulk, both of which are highly mechanised and pass through Liverpool without generating many ancillary jobs locally. The Channel Tunnel enables the MDHC to market Liverpool as a continental European port for transatlantic traffic, so that the ancillary jobs it supports may even be outside the UK. Also, like any English city outside London, Liverpool is now largely a branch-office location, and long ago lost the headquarters establishments (White Star, Cunard) that made it a world city – the point of departure for emigrants from all over Europe to the New World.

Berkley Street, Liverpool 8, from
Robinson in Space
(1997)

Another influence on Liverpool's economy and culture has been the virtual elimination of the UK's merchant shipping fleet. According to Tony Lane, of Liverpool University's Sociology Department, although there were never more than about 250,000 seafarers in the British merchant fleet (about a third of whom were of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent), seafarers were once the third most numerous group of workers in Liverpool.
⁷
The typical length of a seafarer's career was about seven years, so that a very high proportion of men in Liverpool had at some time been away to sea. Most of the few remaining British seafarers work on car, passenger or freight ferries, on which the majority of jobs are in catering. Apart from the decline in UK-owned ships and UK crews, modern merchant ships are very large and very sparsely crewed: there are never many ships in even a large modern port; they don't stay long, and crews have little – if any – time ashore, even assuming they might have money to spend. The P&O's
Colombo Bay
, for example, a large UK-registered container vessel, has a crew of twenty and a capacity of about 4,200 teu (twenty-foot-equivalent units) typically a mixture of twenty-foot and forty-foot containers,
each one of which
is potentially the full load of an articulated lorry. Presumably, jobs lost in port cities and on ships have to some extent been made up by expansion in the numbers of truck drivers.

Not only do ports and shipping now employ very few people, but they also occupy surprisingly little space. Felixstowe is the fourth-largest container port in Europe, but it does not cover a very large area. The dereliction of the Liverpool waterfront is a result not of the port's disappearance, but of its new insubstantiality. The warehouses that used to line both sides of the river have been superseded by a fragmented, mobile space: goods vehicles moving or parked on the UK's roads – the road system as a publicly funded warehouse. This is most obvious on summer evenings, when busy trunk roads on which parking is permitted become truck dormitories: south of Derby, an eighteen-mile stretch of the
A42, lined with lay-bys, that connects the M42 with the M1 is one of these, the nine-mile stretch of the A34 between Oxford and the M40 another. Many of these trucks are bound for the enormous warehouses of inland distribution estates near motorway junctions – Wakefield 41, for example, at junction 41 of the M1, next to its junction with the M62. The road haulage – or
logistics –
industry does not typically base its depots in port cities, though it is intimately linked to them: the road construction battlefields of Twyford Down and Newbury were the last obstacles to rapid road access to the port of Southampton from London (by the M3) and from the Midlands and the North (by the M40 to the A34). The relative insubstantiality of industrial development in the modern landscape seems to be accompanied by very high levels of energy consumption.

Despite having shed the majority of its dockers, the Liverpool port employer's attitude to its remaining workforce is extremely aggressive. In September 1995, two weeks after telling
Lloyd's List
that it had the most productive workforce in Europe,
⁸
the MDHC sacked 329 of its 500 remaining dockers after they refused to cross a picket line. Five employees of a contract labour firm had been sacked in a dispute over payment periods for overtime, and this led to the picket line that the MDHC workers refused to cross. Liverpool dockers were supported by secondary actions in New York and elsewhere, so that the giant US container line ACL threatened to move its ships from Liverpool unless the lockout was ended. In other countries, even employers were shocked by the MDHC's unrestrained determination to be rid of most of their last few dockers. In July 1996, ACL carried out their threat and moved their ships to Thamesport, an independently owned container terminal within the MDHC-owned Medway Ports in Kent (ACL later returned to Liverpool). Medway Ports, which had been privatised in 1989 as a management-employee buyout, was bought by the MDHC in 1993 in a transaction that made Medway's former chief executive a multi-millionaire. Medway had previously sacked 300 of
its
dockers for refusing to accept new contracts. On dismissal, the dockers were obliged to surrender their shares in the company at a valuation of £2.50 per share, shortly before MDHC bought them for £37.25 each.