Muck And Brass Can Fuel
The Glamour Game
Dougal Paver of PR agency Paver Smith examines the impact of the region’s manufacturing sector
port development is being heralded as a game-changer for the local economy. And as if that were not enough, there’s
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more metal bashing, muck-dredging and jobs in play across the river in Birkenhead as shipbuilder and engineer Cammell Laird ramps up its operations in anticipation of up to 2,000 new engineering jobs making huge wind turbines for installation in the Irish Sea. Tell some folk and it’s as if they’d forgotten
Liverpool was a port. Te head-long rush to leisure, retail and tourist Nirvana had dulled some people’s recollection of the city’s original purpose: to shift things that other people had made and to use its maritime assets to make things, too – from ships to shoes, margarine to marzipan. Tere’s more, besides, and it’s a telling statistic that for a city built on commerce it has a remarkably robust manufacturing sector – one, in fact, that is greater as a proportion of our economy than for the country as a whole. To anyone aghast at the notion of muck and
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t’s mucky, messy and some may say distinctly unglamorous – but with 7,000 jobs in the offing in the wider city region, construction of Peel’s Liverpool2
brass, remember this: the wages that such industries pay tend to be a good deal higher than the regional average. Pen-pushing in a plush office block might be more comfortable than a buffeting from the elements on a windy quayside, but it doesn’t pay as well. Whilst the average wage on Merseyside is around £21,000 the engineers making big turbines and the skilled workers on Halewood’s production line can be expected to earn more than that. Not for nothing, then, did Liverpool’s
remarkably vibrant dining and leisure scene survive the recession more or less intact. It’s why the city’s retail offer marched ever up- market and outperformed all but its biggest rivals in the teeth of a recession. And, as a betting man, it’ll be why our housing market begins a long-term climb back up to parity as Merseyside’s population increases as workers migrate back here in search of opportunity. Making things is as much a part of our
DNA as anything else, but we tend to keep quiet about it, as though muck and brass don’t fit with our narrative of post-industrial creative and tourist hot-spot. But the two can co-exist quite happily and cities are, in any
event, far more organic and diverse than the advertising headlines may suggest. Te critical mass we have in certain manufacturing sectors has its appeal, too, helping us attract new players to build on what we’ve already got. Witness racing car manufacturer BAC, soon to open its gleaming new manufacturing facility in Speke making Top Gear’s favourite ever car, the Mono. You could eat your dinner off the factory floor and at a cool ninety six grand a go it oozes class and sophistication. Glamorous enough for you? I’d have thought so.
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