A City Goes To Sea
Jenny Steele, 2019
The publication ‘A City Goes To Sea’, 2019, included this text by Jenny Steele, and writing by Sara Jaspan, as well as drawings and research by Jenny Steele. Published on the occasion of The Maiden Voyage installation at Georges Dock Plaza, Liverpool 8-22 September 2019.
A busy, bustling port. Queues of people line the docks,
cheering for miles,
waving us off
Anticipation as we climb the gangway to this gigantic ship,
water looming out before us
Paper streamers flail and soar in the wind,
joining us, and then separating us,
from the land,
leaving on our Maiden Voyage.
In the 1929 promotional film, A Day in Liverpool, we see the busy port between 9am-5pm, people rushing to work, handling incoming and outgoing cargo. The port had a daily schedule, with ferries and transatlantic liner’s arriving and departing.
Between the 1860’s and 1930’s, Liverpool was the main UK port for transatlantic travel, predominantly for emigration and cargo between the UK and North America. US immigration acts of 1917 and 1924 made entry considerably more difficult so emigration customers significantly dwindled. Shipping companies such as Cunard and White Star needed to attract a new clientele for transatlantic travel, and focused on creating high end travelling palaces during the 1930’s to travel to North America in style, embracing forward thinking and optimistic ‘art deco’ style.
Through research at the Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool Special Collections, I viewed original promotional material for Cunard’s high end liners that created ‘luxury afloat’, such as the Mauretania and Aquitania. In 1936, Cunard topped their previous designs with the elaborate ‘art deco’, and still intact Queen Mary ocean liner, now docked at Long Beach, California.
Although this impressive ship departed on its Maiden Voyage from Southampton, the ship was a national symbol of hope and ambition, and a welcome commission to the dwindling shipbuilding industry in Clydebank. The promotional material talks equally in depth about the ornate and glamourous modern interiors, as much as the joy and care with which the artists and shipbuilders took to create this floating palace. Artists commissioned included Doris Zinkeisen and MacDonald Gill. The Queen Mary was nicknamed ‘The Ship of Woods’, as it’s detailed marquetry panelling featured over fifty kinds of wood from all over the world, questionably from British colonies.
Thousands of people would gather to see any Maiden Voyage depart, and hundreds for the ocean liners leaving port on a weekly basis. Liners were the most desirable way to travel. A feat of engineering, they stirred the population’s imagination and people wanted to witness the liners sailing off to lands they hoped to visit one day.
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The journey on board, it’s like no other! Like a city on the sea.
Everything is available to us, every kind of food from Mutton Fillet to Christmas Pudding; we can eat from morning until night.
The passenger list acts like a who’s who, but everyone is here for a good time.
Shuffleboard, deck tennis and swimming, drinking tea under blankets on deck chairs, looking out to sea….
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The passenger’s experience on board was carefully considered to create the most comfortable and luxurious experience. All needs were catered for on board, from a doctor to a daily newspaper printed on board. Shops were provided to promenade along, in addition to multiple opportunities for exercise, a fashionable past time of the 1930’s.
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A floating architectural monolith, travelling between two continents
We walk through palatial rooms,
extravagant furniture like you have never seen before.
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The Cunard Shipping Company advertised her ships using the language ‘strength and power’, with an emphasis on high speed and safety. One booklet in the Cunard collection from 1930’s demonstrates the mammoth scale of the ships placing them against buildings such as the Coliseum in Rome and the British House of Parliament, which the liners eclipse. Other statistics explain the scale of the ships operation – 50 cooks, 350 stewards, 390 engineers and 70 members of the sailing department on one ship alone.
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We can see her in the distance, Lady Liberty, and behind, the zig zagged skyline,
this unfamiliar yet much talked about land.
Anticipation and nervousness and excitement in our stomachs, we funnel into the Arrivals Hall of Ellis Island
Through its half-moon windows, we can see the waters and buildings beyond this Island of Hope and Tears, hoping to make it to shore.
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Ellis Island, also named the ‘Island of Hope and Tears’ was the immigration terminal that hopeful emigrants, mainly from lower and middle classes, would arrive at before entering New York. Every person would be inspected thoroughly and sometimes people would be detained on the island due to illness, and very occasionally returned home.
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And finally here we are, in a city like no other
Buildings the height of the ships bow loom upwards,
Tiers on them like fancy, expensive birthday cakes
A city energy, mixing of voices, languages, and patterns
In 1925, US President Calvin Coolidge made the journey via ocean liner to the Paris Industrial Arts Exposition, where he viewed forward thinking ‘art deco’ architecture and design for the first time. Impressed by its optimism and modernism, he encouraged the construction of high rise buildings in New York City within this style, incorporating the engineering of shipbuilding. During the 1930’s, New York saw the creation of The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center, amongst many other skyscrapers, employing elaborate interiors of art deco marquetry and ornate patterned exteriors.
This ebullient architectural style further spread to leisure, municipal architecture and residential buildings, across the city in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and afterwards to cities across the US such as Chicago and Miami, employing it in their own version appropriate to their locale.