National Museums of Liverpool: Waterfront Transformation

Date: 2021

A cultural economy of exchange on Liverpool’s historic waterfront

Concept (Images and Text): Adapted from Stage 2 competition entry led by JA Projects, BIG and Harrison Stringfellow

JA Projects alongside BIG and Harrison Stringfellow, led a multi-disciplinary team for the National Museum Liverpool’s (NML) two-stage international placemaking competition to transform the city’s historic waterfront landscape. 

In response to this invitation to reimagine the public realm that serves the Museum of Liverpool, Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum, we saw an opportunity to deliver a new cultural ‘economy of exchange’ built on the back of contemporary wealth building principles and community empowerment.

Liverpool and its docks ebb and flow with a heritage of trade that connected the city to the wider world, its institutions and its treasures. It was a trade built on the back of people buying and selling goods, but it was also a trade built on the back of people themselves – Liverpool playing a critical role in the transatlantic slave trade. But the unification of the National Museums Liverpool through a new waterfront transformation, that encompasses the raw material of culture, enterprise and leisure, could foreground a new type of commercial transaction – a contemporary mode of wealth building that has the care of people at its centre, a transition from ‘trade’ to that of ‘exchange’, whereby there are only winners and all can share in the profits of development. 

Realising this ambition for an economy of exchange, our installation, Sankofa Docks demonstrated our co-creation practice through physical construction, community engagement and performative activation, collaboratively reflecting on Liverpool Waterfront’s physical and social history. Sankofa Docks was not only a vehicle to encourage discussion but was the direct result of multiple, meaningful conversations that led to its physical form.

Our team, alongside local community groups, that are doing much to improve the lives of Liverpool’s descendants of slaves and, in-turn, remedy the wrongs of the city’s past, thought, talked, made, sang, planned and performed together. Sankofa Docks takes its cue from museum artefacts, text and interpretation while referencing a history of bondage and restriction, embodied in the figurative chains that adorned its facade. Yet, these chains also spoke to the resilient connections that are formed when communities come together through common, cathartic endeavour.

Watch ‘The Things We Make, The Stories We Tell, The Way We Exchange’