As per Laura’s recent post about Bold Street tales, it seems so many people have stories to tell about this famous Liverpool thoroughfare. However, we now have a growing community of Liverpool writers (and story tellers) online and you can find local blogger Stuart Ian Burns either at Liverpool Blogs or at his personal blog Feeling Listless. We wanted to get a blogger’s opinion of Bold Street so we asked Stuart to tell us what he thought…
“It’s only recently I’ve considered how indispensable the Bold Street area has become, at least to me. At present, each Thursday, I have a routine. Before the weekly shop at the Tesco Metro, I get off the bus outside of St. Luke’s Church then stroll or rush down Bold Street depending upon how late I am. I’ll pass through Forbidden Planet looking for Joss Whedon written comic books and magazines about a certain timelord who travels in a police box; to Oxfam next in case they’ve something new about Shakespeare; on then to The Works to see if there’s a sale and to the shop formerly known as Home & Bargain to check if they have anything worth buying too; new arrival HMV perhaps on the rare occasion that a decent record that been released and possibly Waterstones if I’m looking for something to read and through to Church Street for WH Smiths and …
I also usually end up passing through too if there’s a special day to prepare for, a birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Easter. It could be to find a card a Rennies or a bottle of red at Oddbins but sometimes I’ll be looking for something unusual which you simply can’t find anywhere else, in which case Utility is the place to go and when the recipient has told me what they want, there is Argos and the wait within for the opening of the hatch. But incredibly Bold Street also serves my entertainment and caffeine needs with the FACT Centre and its cinema and exhibition spaces and café and restaurant and further down the road Starbucks if I’m in a corporate coffee mood (with Costa Coffee opposite on the rare occasion when I want a change of place). I even booked my last holiday there, three days in Paris, at STA Travel.
I can’t remember when I first visited Bold Street, but I know I must have been young. I was brought up in Speke through the seventies and eighties and in those days a trip to the city centre was a special treat, let alone Bold Street. When you’re very young geography doesn’t mean much to you — there’s just shapes and colour and then toys and games. So whilst I remember visiting the Medici Gallery to buy a birthday card and the 50p shop for a colouring book or Star Wars toys it’s only now that I realise they were on Bold Street (especially since they’re both gone now). Something I definitely have memories of is Penny Lane Records, an outpost of a shop actually on the street from which is took its name; that was were I fanned the flames of many a teenage pop star crush but also discovered that Louis Armstrong recorded more than just ‘Wonderful World’.
But the time when I was most grateful for Bold Street just being there, was when I was working in the city centre and wanted somewhere to disappear to at lunch time. Even after all these years, the place has a strange mystique particularly at the ’top end’ — it’s really not like anywhere else in Liverpool which means that after you’ve passed the Rapid Hardware Furniture shop you could be anywhere, which in that empty daily hour helped to drag me out of the mess I was in even if it was for a few brief minutes and could pretend I was somewhere else, which was good therapy in the job I was doing in which I had to greet the people of my own city hard-on. Popping into Café Tabac for some soup, buying a sandwich in the Soul Café, a drink in that newsagents just down the way from Mattas or …
Thank you Bold Street. For everything, it turns out.”
Thank you indeed Bold Street, and thank you Stuart!
- Oh, and thanks also to Pete Carr for this amazing Bold Street image recently uploaded to the Bold Street Flickr Group!
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title You Bold Street (by Stuart Ian Burns) at The Bold Project Blog. Thanks for informative article