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Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay
Liverpool is a city of ghosts. Through the centuries, millions have lived here or come to find a new life, and found safe harbour. More than any other city in Britain its history resonates in the buildings, landscapes and stories that have seeped into the lives of its inhabitants. n Ghost Town, Jeff Young takes us on a journey through the Liverpool of his childhood - down back alleys and through arcades, into vanished tenements and oyster bars, strip tease pubs and theatres. We watch as he turns from schoolboy truant into an artist obsessed with Kafka, Terence Davies and The Fall. Along the way he conjures ghosts and puts hexes on the developers who've ruined the city of his dreams. Layering memoir, history, photography and more this is a highly original approach to this great city.
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First published February 1, 2020
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About the author
Jeff Young
5 books3 followersJeff Young is a writer for screen, stage and radio. A former senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, Jeff lives in Liverpool.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
March 29, 2020
Near me are landscapes that have hundreds and hundreds of years of history draped across them, if you know what to look for and where to look it is fairly straight forward to find Roman or Bronze Age features in the landscape. Things do disappear though given enough time, either by erosion or human influence. Cities though are another matter, things can change in less that a generation, buildings are knocked down and replaced with another badly designed eyesore.
But if you know where to look in a city, especially one that you grew up in, a form of your past life can be found. Even though it may have been a while since you last walked down them, a walk down a little-used back alley that you last saw 20 years ago can fire those memory neurons in the brain in unexpected ways. Jeff Young’s stamping grounds as a child were the streets of Liverpool and in Ghost Town (does anyone hear the song that The Specials sung with those two words?). Beginning with a pile of photos that are spread out over the kitchen table, of his past life, he sees faded images of buildings that might still be there and smiling relatives who almost certainly aren’t now.
It brings back memories of sitting in his grandparents home, seeing the Christmas decorations around a room with no ceiling, but it was hardly surprising because the house was more or less derelict. His grandfather was a butcher by trade and one of those hard men who had spent a lifetime with horses and lived by his own rules. Just thinking of him bought back happy memories of sitting in the kitchen learning swear words.
He talks of the time he fell off his bike and on arriving home, was not allowed in the house as his dad had had an accident. He could still remember finding dead animals, playing truant and days spent down by the canal after they had moved from the city to Maghull. By the age of 16, he had flunked school and ended up as a packer in a warehouse. He manages to avoid the casual violent episodes that were taking place, drinking in back street pubs and wandering the streets supposedly delivering post to other offices.
Returning to those streets many years and a lifetime of experience later brings all these fragments of his past back, but time is messing with his memory and the significant events were blurring and moving on the timeline. He walks the streets of his past with Horatio Clare, fighting the bitter wind by fortifying themselves with rum and Guinness trying to locate the ghostly presence of Thomas de Quincey.
The cobbled streets still framed the emptiness, but there was no one left to walk through the flames, no photographer to capture the city as it once was. Just grandad walking through a city that is no longer there.
I am slightly ashamed to say that Liverpool is a city that I have been past many times and not ever visited. Yet from the beautiful prose in Young’s book it sounds a really dynamic place, that oozes history from every crack. His memories of past events are quite distinctive and in his writing, they have retained their sharpness without being softened by time nor coloured by nostalgia. It was seeing the photos that prompted Young to go out and walk around the streets of Liverpool that meant so much as he was growing up. The book does jump back and forwards in time, as he stands in front of a building in the present day he is immediately taken back to a memory from three decades ago in the same spot, and he doe it in a way that you don’t feel disjointed. The buildings in Liverpool are quite spectacular, and the photos in the book add to the atmosphere of the place.
But if you know where to look in a city, especially one that you grew up in, a form of your past life can be found. Even though it may have been a while since you last walked down them, a walk down a little-used back alley that you last saw 20 years ago can fire those memory neurons in the brain in unexpected ways. Jeff Young’s stamping grounds as a child were the streets of Liverpool and in Ghost Town (does anyone hear the song that The Specials sung with those two words?). Beginning with a pile of photos that are spread out over the kitchen table, of his past life, he sees faded images of buildings that might still be there and smiling relatives who almost certainly aren’t now.
It brings back memories of sitting in his grandparents home, seeing the Christmas decorations around a room with no ceiling, but it was hardly surprising because the house was more or less derelict. His grandfather was a butcher by trade and one of those hard men who had spent a lifetime with horses and lived by his own rules. Just thinking of him bought back happy memories of sitting in the kitchen learning swear words.
He talks of the time he fell off his bike and on arriving home, was not allowed in the house as his dad had had an accident. He could still remember finding dead animals, playing truant and days spent down by the canal after they had moved from the city to Maghull. By the age of 16, he had flunked school and ended up as a packer in a warehouse. He manages to avoid the casual violent episodes that were taking place, drinking in back street pubs and wandering the streets supposedly delivering post to other offices.
Returning to those streets many years and a lifetime of experience later brings all these fragments of his past back, but time is messing with his memory and the significant events were blurring and moving on the timeline. He walks the streets of his past with Horatio Clare, fighting the bitter wind by fortifying themselves with rum and Guinness trying to locate the ghostly presence of Thomas de Quincey.
The cobbled streets still framed the emptiness, but there was no one left to walk through the flames, no photographer to capture the city as it once was. Just grandad walking through a city that is no longer there.
I am slightly ashamed to say that Liverpool is a city that I have been past many times and not ever visited. Yet from the beautiful prose in Young’s book it sounds a really dynamic place, that oozes history from every crack. His memories of past events are quite distinctive and in his writing, they have retained their sharpness without being softened by time nor coloured by nostalgia. It was seeing the photos that prompted Young to go out and walk around the streets of Liverpool that meant so much as he was growing up. The book does jump back and forwards in time, as he stands in front of a building in the present day he is immediately taken back to a memory from three decades ago in the same spot, and he doe it in a way that you don’t feel disjointed. The buildings in Liverpool are quite spectacular, and the photos in the book add to the atmosphere of the place.
Read
May 24, 2021Highly recommended if you are interested in Liverpool or memoir generally. Wonderfully poetic sense of place and personal history.
January 14, 2021
God this is beautiful.
February 13, 2022
Erm..............
Ok so this book concerning my home city felt like a self-indulgent, name dropping reminiscence of a time when "everything was better when I was a lad"!! Was it though?
Young bangs on about how much better, richer and wholesome the city was in the 60's when he was growing up, but he spends a lot of his own childhood chasing history, retracing the steps of writers like Ginsberg and Burroughs, artists and singers, following Ken Dodd round shops in the town!
I always feel that people doing what Young is doing, searching round a city in the present for ghosts of the past, will always be disappointed. Places of childhood are always superior in the mind precisely because they were present in childhood- the epitome of good times, freedom to roam, time to explore and discover (depending on the childhood of course). Places move on and so do we. The world turns, and cities become parodies of themselves, modernising into retrospectives of what people expect from a place. People think of Liverpool as "The Beatles Experience" or Matthew Street or Cavern Walks, but the city of childhood is whatever your experience of it was.
The only passage I resonate with in Young's book is this:-
"I'm convinced that the city is suffering from geopathic stress, from the negative energy of 'black streams'. The city is depressed because its immune system is broken, and while it is slumbering in a kind of chronic fatigue syndrome that afflicts neglected cities, the warlocks and hobgoblins move in and ransack the place, which leads to blindness, paranormal activity and a surplus of wedding hotels"
I agree with this but the city has always had negative energy and chronic fatigue syndrome, it's just evolved from a fag smoking, phlegm spitting, flat cap wearing, heavy drinking city into a metropolitan, skinny jean wearing, shoes without socks, man bun amalgam of not so responsible responsible drinking! And there will always be old men like Young (and my dad), propping the bar up, denouncing modernisation and lamenting the days of yore and how superior they were!
Ok so this book concerning my home city felt like a self-indulgent, name dropping reminiscence of a time when "everything was better when I was a lad"!! Was it though?
Young bangs on about how much better, richer and wholesome the city was in the 60's when he was growing up, but he spends a lot of his own childhood chasing history, retracing the steps of writers like Ginsberg and Burroughs, artists and singers, following Ken Dodd round shops in the town!
I always feel that people doing what Young is doing, searching round a city in the present for ghosts of the past, will always be disappointed. Places of childhood are always superior in the mind precisely because they were present in childhood- the epitome of good times, freedom to roam, time to explore and discover (depending on the childhood of course). Places move on and so do we. The world turns, and cities become parodies of themselves, modernising into retrospectives of what people expect from a place. People think of Liverpool as "The Beatles Experience" or Matthew Street or Cavern Walks, but the city of childhood is whatever your experience of it was.
The only passage I resonate with in Young's book is this:-
"I'm convinced that the city is suffering from geopathic stress, from the negative energy of 'black streams'. The city is depressed because its immune system is broken, and while it is slumbering in a kind of chronic fatigue syndrome that afflicts neglected cities, the warlocks and hobgoblins move in and ransack the place, which leads to blindness, paranormal activity and a surplus of wedding hotels"
I agree with this but the city has always had negative energy and chronic fatigue syndrome, it's just evolved from a fag smoking, phlegm spitting, flat cap wearing, heavy drinking city into a metropolitan, skinny jean wearing, shoes without socks, man bun amalgam of not so responsible responsible drinking! And there will always be old men like Young (and my dad), propping the bar up, denouncing modernisation and lamenting the days of yore and how superior they were!
September 13, 2021
A book that accompanied my insomnia and took me wandering through the dreams of the past and my own memories. This is an elegy and ode to reminiscence and a psychogeographic capture of the city, a reification of ghosts in shadows, dark corners of the mind and dark corners of a lost city illuminated and preserved in the sentiment of prose. Sometimes familiar, even though it’s deeply personal, as it etches the poignance of the past and sorrow of its passing into the subconscious, where we recognise its tones and pangs. I find this also a kind of antidote to the present culture, where memory is cheap and disposed in archives that will never be fully investigated or processed. Reflection here is an act of defiance against the ever progressing sickness of develoment and change that makes us aliens of our own ecologies. Cultural footnotes are expanded and forged into words, but also being. I have learned so much from reading this - of obscure Nigerian boxers and superstitions about paintings, Joe90, Mingus soundtracks as solace to poverty, De Quincey whoring down town, Peter O’Halligan and the Liverpool School of language music and Puns, of Victorian markets that were flattened in the mania for the modern, Jung’s mad impossible dreams, art sculptures that show the mind the trick of optical reality but are only found by looking up, the grandfather who rides blind in a cart around the slums, abandoned trinkets reclaimed and hidden in trees and chimneys, derelict relics that are loved and lost, from people, to imagined characters, rooms with out roofs to streets that change names, the visions of Futurism disappointed and the evocation in the sanctuary of an imagined past. A really important book that asks us to think about ‘what time is’. Marvel at the treasure trove of the mind.
September 15, 2020
'Liverpool is the haunted place of remembering'. I loved this book so much. It made me homesick and nostalgic for a Liverpool I'm slightly too young to remember but recognise. The writing is so beautiful and evocative and heartfelt. A beautiful love letter to city and a reminder of what it's lost and what we're in danger of losing.
February 7, 2024
Wandering through the streets of memory we encounter Liverpool of past, present and imagined…
February 11, 2022
This is a book of reflection and imagination. Negatives of the past draped over the present. The ghosts of yesterday, people and place, real but unreal, gone for ever yet here before us. And for the author, the quest to creatively recreate this past as a worthier alternative to pointless excess, continues.
February 16, 2021
You don't have to be from Liverpool or know much about the city to love this book, you'll probably recognise the disappearance of what give cities and towns their character - "Strangeness, eccentricity, secrecy and wonder are constantly being erased". The author weaves his own personal 'reminiscences' into this making a great read.
August 11, 2020
An aching, dreamlike journey through Liverpool as it is pulled down and rebuilt. If you aren't familiar with our city's 20th century history, Jeff's book would be a brilliant place to start, to feel the pain of uprooted communities and the art that came out of the rubble. Emotional, poetic, truthful and heart-rending by turns, I read it in almost one go and immediately started buying it for other people.
March 6, 2021
A personal journey through the streets and hidden places of Liverpool. A tribute to the author's mum who liked to 'trespass' around the City and find the many secret patterns and places hideen in the City.Beautiful.
January 15, 2022
In this memoir, Jeff Young takes us on a journey through Liverpool where he grew up, and the many memories it evokes of people and places long gone. I enjoyed the stories and also the writing which often felt poetic, almost ethereal. I kept thinking how much my dad would have enjoyed this book if he was still alive. He was born and raised in Liverpool, as were his parents, and whenever I see pictures or read about places I can’t help wonder if they had ever been there. I guess they form my own shadow play about Liverpool. If you have a connection to the place, or just love beautiful writing, then I can recommend this memoir.
January 25, 2021
A moving, mystifying love letter to the city of Liverpool, mingling personal memories with the wider history of the city. The book explores memory and how we remember, and also laments the homogenisation of cities across the UK. A beautiful, thought-provoking book.
January 1, 2022
I absolutely adored this book. I started to read it as part of the research for my PhD research proposal but quickly became engrossed. It is a wonderful tribute to the social history and collective memories of the city of Liverpool, its buildings, residents, streets and docks. It is also an insight into the family life of those growing up post war in a city which took more than its fair share of hard knocks.
August 10, 2021
Liverpool is the city of my childhood and reading Jeff Young's intensely moving memoir took me on my own trip down memory lane as I read his reflections on those parts of the city I know well. He also 'introduced' me to aspects of the city's history which were new to me. I share his view that much of the recent redevelopment has resulted in a loss of some of its idiosyncratic heart - it came as no surprise that the city was recently stripped of its World Heritage status because of the threat new development poses to the historic waterfront.
I was captivated by Jeff Young's lyrical, reflective writing style which had, at times, an elegiac quality to it which moved me to tears. I'm not often tempted to re-read a book but know that this will be one of those few exceptions.
I was captivated by Jeff Young's lyrical, reflective writing style which had, at times, an elegiac quality to it which moved me to tears. I'm not often tempted to re-read a book but know that this will be one of those few exceptions.
May 7, 2021
I've always suspected the city of my birth, Liverpool, is a magical place. Full of ghosts, locked away forgotten places, half-remembered people, and sad stories -> this book is the proof that I am not alone in this belief. If you know Liverpool, this was written for you, your family, your recent ancestors. I've only read the first chapter and seen a Q+A with the author and Frank Cotterell-Boyce and I am hooked.
Jeff Young writes in a way I really appreciate, he's an orator, an expert, a dreamer and archaeologist of memories.
Jeff Young writes in a way I really appreciate, he's an orator, an expert, a dreamer and archaeologist of memories.
March 31, 2020
Beautifully written, spectral evocations of a city and its past.
January 9, 2021
Lyrical, elegiac. A eulogy for Liverpool's heart. Beautifully written. Tears for the Futurist which I never visited and for Val his sister I never knew.
January 24, 2021
What an incredible book! I devoured it in a day but I know it’s one of those books I will revisit. It took me back to my childhood, evoking so many memories.
June 24, 2025
I chose to read this as it's a memoir of a guy brought up in Liverpool at roughly the same time as I was. I expected to find references to places and events I could relate to. And I did. Certain streets and bus routes, certain popular cultural icons made me smile in recognition. Parma violets and Grundig TVs, Billy Cotton and Alma Cogan, Great Homer Street and Philip, Son and Nephew, listening to The Laughing Policeman and reading The Eagle ... all brought memories I could share with Jeff Young. I loved his description of his grandparents and their houses. I smiled at the mentions of David Bowie and Franz Kafka as great influences. These were the aspects of his memoir I enjoyed.
However, I like to think I don't look back on life in the late 1950s and early 1960s through such rose coloured glasses. Jeff moans about modern buildings and development whereas I really like the balance of old and new, especially on the waterfront. He talks of the demolition of the old Futurist cinema [an awful fleapit in my memory] as a tragedy. He remembers Mathew Street as a wonderfully authentic area which has been ruined by tourism whereas I remember it as a dump. Interesting.
Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this and not only for pointing me to the books of Malcolm Lowry and imagining life living so close to the Grand Old Lady of Goodison Park which I had to travel to by the special football bus. Cheers, Jeff.
However, I like to think I don't look back on life in the late 1950s and early 1960s through such rose coloured glasses. Jeff moans about modern buildings and development whereas I really like the balance of old and new, especially on the waterfront. He talks of the demolition of the old Futurist cinema [an awful fleapit in my memory] as a tragedy. He remembers Mathew Street as a wonderfully authentic area which has been ruined by tourism whereas I remember it as a dump. Interesting.
Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this and not only for pointing me to the books of Malcolm Lowry and imagining life living so close to the Grand Old Lady of Goodison Park which I had to travel to by the special football bus. Cheers, Jeff.
August 30, 2022
In this shadowplay, the first I believe I have read, Jeff Young takes his reader on a journey through his own past. Through haunted places of memory and loss, he summons the ghosts of loved ones and long departed heroes who somehow occupy the places that have disappeared or are disappearing in the rebuilt city of Liverpool. On this journey, he remembers where Malcolm Lowry drank in various saloons, the Everton Hills where Thomas de Quincey once roamed, the doorway on Dublin Street where Bob Dylan once sat.
Ghost Town is to me a personal book of remembrance and forgetting, yet when I cross his threshold, I discover a labyrinth of someone who is a master storyteller, whose characters are unforgettable, and seem to gather in my imagination like moths around a light, or wasps around a bit of jam.
Ghost Town is to me a personal book of remembrance and forgetting, yet when I cross his threshold, I discover a labyrinth of someone who is a master storyteller, whose characters are unforgettable, and seem to gather in my imagination like moths around a light, or wasps around a bit of jam.
August 1, 2023
A beautiful look into the city, its edges, art, and memory. This struck so many notes with me, geographically, in similarities between the author and my dad (and myself), and it seemed to serve as a way to read my own family's memories even though they belong to someone else. I'd perhaps have liked more about the city as in more facts about it, maybe more about the 70s/80s landscape, but otherwise this was a sweet and honest little book that gave me all the same feelings about Liverpool that seem to ooze from the pores of so many of its residents of a similar age to Young.
January 26, 2024
A song to the Liverpool of the 20th Centuries. Memories and reality twisted around each other as fact and folk-lore create another tribute to a fine and fascinating city. A book that opens and attempts to make sense of the past rather than one that heralds an exciting future - which is a pity.
Often I felt like I was reading a history disappearing through the mist and then I saw that the sub-title to Ghost Town is 'A Liverpool Shadow Play'. Perhaps a book can be judged, or at least understood, by its cover.
Often I felt like I was reading a history disappearing through the mist and then I saw that the sub-title to Ghost Town is 'A Liverpool Shadow Play'. Perhaps a book can be judged, or at least understood, by its cover.
August 31, 2023
Really wonderful book - exploring memory, childhood dreams and a city that (may) no longer exist.
One of the best books about place I have read in the last couple of years.
Very, very highly recommended.
Only negative comment is that by the end of the book the nature of the chapters becomes a little predictable - but the subject matter is so good, that it does not really matter at all.
SM
One of the best books about place I have read in the last couple of years.
Very, very highly recommended.
Only negative comment is that by the end of the book the nature of the chapters becomes a little predictable - but the subject matter is so good, that it does not really matter at all.
SM
December 10, 2024
I loved the atmosphere evoked by Ghost Town. There's a grainy black and white, super 8 cam feel to the stories of family, childhood and the places we remember slowly disappearing into the shadows. It's beautifully written. I think it would appeal to anyone interested in being transported to the '60s / '70s underbelly of a working class northern town.
April 20, 2020
Tragic, beautiful and moving, Jeff Young revisits not just his lost home town but his childhood and youth. Written in a lyrical prose, this book doesn't easily fall into a specific category. Buy it to read after 'lockdown' as it is so sad for this time but it is one to make sure you get to read.
October 5, 2020
This kind of memoir was perfect for a Sunday. Young's memories and stories Real and imagined) of growing up in Liverpool trigger memories I didn't know I had. Music by Wild swans needed.
June 12, 2021
If I could write this would be the book I would want to produce.
March 12, 2023
This is the most beautiful book—an elegiac vision of a vanishing Liverpool, offered as though filtered through the prose of Malcolm Lowry and the lens of Terence Davies. It’s a memoir charting out the lived experience of a city street by street as an antidote to cultural entropy and the seemingly inevitable change for the worse and the loss that are symptomatic of modern life.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews