Breaking the Bank of Love

THERE it is again, the trilling bell.

“Excuse me,” John says, “I’ve just got to get the door.”

And for the umpteenth time he breaks off from the high-ceilinged room and a conversation with a hundred questions, keys to the kingdom jangling their way down the spiral staircase.

We have been really, really vigilant about graffiti and removing any we see. Make no mistake, we’re not about  wrecking this beautiful building, we’re not about pointless, cheap gestures

But for an oak fire surround, squatting uncomfortably under one of its many windows, this is a room that has not seen the light of much for decades. Nevertheless, its dusty white walls and carpets won't take much priming, should the call to business action ever again arrive at the former Bank of England, on Castle Street.

Or as the commercial lettings blurb declares, with unintended irony: “Ready to occupy immediately”.

Today it resembles a jumble sale. Bags of laundered shirts, dresses, jumpers and trousers strewn across its premium square footage.

“People haven’t stopped bringing stuff,” John gestures at the sprawl. “When you let their conscience be their guide, people are very kind.”  

The now familiar spectacle on Castle Street

Behind him are three new arrivals, clean cut young men, one in Bermuda shorts and a South Park T-shirt, another bespectacled, in grey, pinstripe suit. Their flushed faces betray excitement, arms laden with lashings of lemonade, crisps and Scotch eggs. Enid Blyton in the austerity age.

“We’ll come back later with more,” one pipes up. “Where do you want us to put all this?”

“We’ve set up a field kitchen, I’ll show you,” John replies, and off we march for an impromptu tour of one of Liverpool's last  - interior undocumented - Victorian glories.

Through glass doors there is a glimpse of the cavernous, tunnel-vaulted banking hall, then up the stairs and into the opulent first floor drawing room, buzzing HQ of the newly coined Bank of Love.

It’s a class act for the classless, once the over-the-shop residence of the bank’s Liverpool agent. French windows are flung open, the cries of gulls pierce the air. At least 40 people are milling about, some in deep discussion, others crowded around laptops or just shooting the breeze on the balconies of Charles Robert Cockerell’s forgotten Grade I masterpiece.

A sprawl of donated clothes on the floor of an office-in-waiting

They range from middle age down to teens. Prominent Merseyside activist Juliet Edgar is spotted among them. Seen as something of a hero, elsewhere she has already successfully campaigned against the Bedroom Tax, leading the lifeline benefits appeals group Reclaim.

One man, cheerfully tossing crumbs down to the grateful pavement pigeons is upbraided by John, Hull-born and new to the city.

“Oh don’t do that. Please, no,” he sighs wearily. “It just pisses people off. We have to try to get along with everyone around here.”

Crowds of supporters on Sunday

Word quickly got around Liverpool when the Love Activists, serial occupiers of empty buildings for the good of the homeless, swept into the city a fortnight ago.

The mood is upbeat this sunny Thursday evening, almost a week since someone  “found a door open” to this 1848 fortification for British Empire wealth. 

Already the occupants are bedding in nicely. The water has just been turned on (the electricity was apparently never off these many empty years) and the “guests”, as they are termed, have been given a place to sleep, full sets of new clothes and food for their bellies.

"We’re not just giving people dinners and a roof,” John goes on. “We’re giving them a reason.

John: Talking anarchy in its purest form

“Think about how people on the streets are forced to spend their days, weeks, years. They fight just to exist on the planet. They are denied the right to plans, they have no right to purpose, no right to dreams. The structure of our society has taken all their humanity away.

“But when people are given chance to step away from that, to be in a community again… we see how they start to flower as beings.

“And the good in people who do have luckier lives… that shines out too. They want to do something, and what we have here is a new community that has come about with its own values and rules.”

John is talking anarchy in its purest form and on Day Six the frequently maligned ideology is still working its charm.

Mostly.

“In just these last few days we’ve had hundreds of people  coming in here, from every walk of life,” he says.

“More like a thousand,” interrupts an earnest twentysomething chap who quickly goes on to explain how that is not always a good thing. 

“I’ve just torn down some neo-Nazi stickers," he tells him, before turning to me: “Most of the public who’ve passed through have been brilliant. But stuff like this… it’s the downside of what happens when we ask no questions."

John chimes back: “We have been really, really vigilant about graffiti and removing any we see. Make no mistake, we’re not about wrecking this beautiful building, we’re not about pointless, cheap gestures.”

As expected, on Tuesday April 28, five days after our visit, the court order came for them to leave. The building, built to securely store gold bullion, has gone into lockdown and is holding fast. Anyone who didn’t think they could deal with the long game has walked.

The aim had been to directly give the dispossessed a reason; now a new validation was needed.

So the Love Activists have come up with a list - a meeting with near neighbour Mayor Joe Anderson among them, to demand he reinstate finances for homelessness provision in Liverpool.

With around 20 people left, it is far from quiet.

On Thursday metal barricades are erected outside by police. No one can presume anything other than it is a bid to stop the public from passing food to those left inside (via their sophisticated rope and pulley system).

On Sunday, a Facebook-led event “Let Them Eat” sees around 150 well-wishers piling outside Brazilian restaurant Viva Brazil.  The Liverpool Green Party has lent its official backing.

A worker in Caffe Nero, directly opposite, is less impressed: “It’s all people want to talk about. I am sick of it now.”

As for the police, who now surround the Bank of England, are they doing their job or are they demons? It seems individual Love Activists, many of whom didn’t know one another personally before they entered the “house”, haven’t formed a cohesive view.

Juliet is on the balcony. She talks into her mobile phone, occasionally addressing the crowds to calmly state the activists’ demands. A woman next to her, in her late 20s instructs curious passers-by not to trust the police or anything they say. 

In for the long haul: Bedroom Tax campaigner Juliet Edgar, right

There have been accusations that the force has denied them water; the bottles on the Union Court doorstep are in tantalising view should anyone care to open the door and retrieve them - an unlikely scenario.

A day earlier the force had been criticised for arresting two people under the fading light of a Section 38 dispersal order – a young woman called Amanda who had thrown a sandwich over the barricades is widely filmed: whenever the police move into the crowd, the cry goes up to “get your phones out!”

By Sunday there is a change of shift and heart, with one officer saying there would be no repeat. Any food thrown across the barrier would not be removed. “We’re not here to provide street entertainment.

“They are trespassing, unfortunately,” he says. “And it’s up to them, whether they come out of their own free will after negotiating with us, or whether they hang on and the appointed bailiffs decide to take their own sort of action.” 

How it ends will depend, to some degree, on whether those on all sides succumb to the seduction of conflict, or have the willpower to resolve it, and how.

As the goading, by a few, continues on Sunday, it’s John, still hanging in there, who implores the gathering to give the cops a hug.

Just two respond. Love Activist supporter Dave Wilson (full video below) strides across Castle Street, and beams as he takes the same officer (he’s beaming too) in a tight embrace. The little girl closely following him, however, is swiftly rebuked by another PC.

“If you take the uniforms away, the police are as human like the rest of us,” believes Wilson. “A lot of them realise that they have a job to do, but they realise that we do too.

“I don’t want to get anyone into trouble but a lot of them (the police) are doing this job half-heartedly and the half that’s doing the job half-heartedly is the good half of them.”

Let's not forget the other half, then, nor the trilling, open house doorbell of a week ago.

“The corrupt bullying tactics of Merseyside Police will never work,” Love announced on Sunday morning.

“The police tried to head fuck us last night with the doorbell, so the bell went out the window.”