A shopfront to be proud of

There is a particular kind of midweek morning on Victoria Road. The shutters go up one by one. Somebody is out with a broom. The light comes in low off the river and finds every colour on the street at once, and for a minute the whole quarter looks freshly painted, even the bits that haven’t been. This morning, one bit had.

Cllr Mary Jordan, Mayor of Wirral joins In The Loop for the inauguration of Celebration Station shop front.

At 125 Victoria Road, outside a small card and party shop called Celebration Station, a group of us stood on the pavement with the Mayor of Wirral, Councillor Mary Jordan, and looked at a shopfront. Not a mural, exactly. A sign. A frame. Three panels reading CARDS, PARTYWARE and GIFTS beneath a wordmark, in colours that don’t apologise for themselves, sitting under the geometric piece that was already on the wall above as if the two had been planned together. They hadn’t. But this street has a way of making things fit.

Paula Rogan runs Celebration Station on her own. Like every independent on this road, and every independent in every town like ours, she is trading in a market that keeps moving underneath her: business rates going one way, footfall going another, and the slow, hopeful return of people who have decided that shopping local is worth the walk. A shopfront is where all of that meets. It is the first thing a customer reads, before the window, before the door, before hello. A chain builds a refresh into its marketing budget without blinking. A sole trader looks at the quote and puts it on the list for another year.

This is where Katy Elliott comes in. Katy founded Wirral In The Loop, a networking community for small businesses across the borough, the sort of group where people actually turn up for each other. She heard about the shop. She decided In The Loop would fund the work, and the money came from the members themselves: the proceeds of the monthly raffle, and the £25 a year each member pays to advertise on the In The Loop website. Small sums, put in by people who know exactly what a quiet week feels like. And then she did the clever thing, which was to bring it to us, because what NBCF has, after these years in the Victoria Quarter, is the relationships: the artists, the access equipment, the knowledge of which paint survives a winter on this coast and which one won’t.

So we made a call to Andrew Wolfenden.

Andrew is a Liverpool graphic artist and mural painter with nearly twenty years behind him and a client list that runs from local start-ups to Nike, Adidas, Levi’s, Eurovision and Tate. He already had work in the OpenAIR Gallery, his NEWBO piece, so he knew the street and the street knew him. What he told us on Wednesday surprised me a little. He has painted plenty of shutters over the years. This was the first time anyone had asked him to do the whole front: the sign and the surround, the frame that holds the shutter rather than the shutter itself. A first, on a road that has hosted internationally known artists for the best part of a decade. I like that. It means the gallery is still handing out firsts.

NEWBO by Andrew Wolfenden

We worked on it together, Andrew and I, on the design, the concept and the rhythm of getting it done. I want to be precise about that, because credit matters in this town. The piece is Andrew’s. The authorship is his. What NBCF brought was the partnership on the creative side and the unglamorous rest: materials, permissions, prep, the ladder, the access. Dan Davies at Rockpoint gave it the practical backing that makes saying yes on Victoria Road straightforward, the way he has been doing since 2017.

The @hello_new_brighton post of Andrew up the ladder mid-paint reached around seven thousand people. The day after he finished, Paula put the shopfront on Facebook herself and called it “a shopfront to be proud of”. That’s the review that counts.

Cllr Mary Jordan, Mayor of Wirral & Katy Elliott, In The Loop.

Then Wednesday. The Mayor had spent her morning, she told us, listening to small businesses explain how hard it is right now, and she came to Victoria Road to see what one answer to that looks like. Katy thanked everyone and then, quite rightly, handed the star billing to Andrew. Paula thanked Katy, Danny, me and “especially Andrew, for this absolutely superb sign”, and then said the thing every trader on the road would say if you gave them the microphone: keep going, hang on in there, and shop local. Dan did what Dan does, which is to point at the buildings. Look at that one. And that one. These aren’t being built again. The art makes you see the street you walk down every day.

Here is why we do this, and I said a version of it on the pavement.

New Brighton Creative Futures is a not-for-profit community interest company. Every donation, every pound that comes in, goes straight back out into the town: into supporting the independents, into bringing local, national and international artists here to make work, into growing the OpenAIR Gallery so that anyone who walks down Victoria Road gets free art whether they came for it or not. Celebration Station is that model in miniature. A shopkeeper. A working artist. A network of people with reasons to help. Materials paid for. Credit kept where it belongs. One more painted frame added to a gallery that keeps drawing people to this street.

This one belongs to Katy and the In The Loop community. They funded it; they are the reason it exists. It also belongs to the wider truth of this quarter, which is that none of it happens without the generosity of residents and organisations who decide to put something in. We still hope Wirral Council will see the value of what is being built here and get behind it properly. A Mayor on the pavement on a Wednesday morning is a start, and we mean it when we say we welcome it.

Go and see it. 125 Victoria Road. Buy a card while you’re there. Then look up at the wall above, and along the street either side, and count how many people have decided this town was worth painting.

We’re not finished.