Boston & Liverpool build ties
Source: Boston Globe 10th September 2011
Cities form kinship with opportunities for businesses
Liverpool, England - Last year, after the owners of the Boston Red Sox bought Liverpool Football Club, this city’s storied soccer team, Phil Budden had an idea.
Budden, the British consul general in Boston, believed there were great similarities between the cities in size and sentiment, and that Liverpudlians and Bostonians were kindred spirits. The cities’ images also are tightly wrapped in their respective teams, which play in the shadow of bigger, richer rivals: for the Red Sox, it is the New York Yankees; for Liverpool FC, it’s Manchester United.
So why not tap into that kindred spirit when it comes to business opportunities?
In the spring, the consulate led a delegation of Boston-area business people here to explore opportunities to forge partnerships and other affiliations. On Monday, a Liverpool delegation is scheduled to arrive in Boston to do the same.
Much of Liverpool, including its huge, distinctive docks, has been revitalized in recent years, changing the city’s reputation for the better.
Hazel Williams, mayor of Liverpool, said it has come a long way.
“In the last 15 to 20 years, Liverpool has changed beyond all recognition,’’ she said. “The city did not have the best reputation. We’ve moved beyond that.’’
The city opened its own “embassy’’ in London to attract investment that normally - and Liverpudlians would argue, uncritically - goes to the British capital.
With 436,000 people inside the city limits, Liverpool is smaller than Boston. But Mike Taylor, deputy chief executive of Liverpool Vision, the city’s economic development agency, said the metropolitan Liverpool area, with nearly 2.5 million people, is similar to Greater Boston in size.
Liverpool is also a college town, with about 50,000 students spread among three universities.
Jack Stopforth, chief executive of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, said there are already business and familial connections between Boston and Liverpool, because so many people immigrated to the United States on ships that left from Liverpool. (His son worked for Reebok in Canton for a time, too.)
But it took sports to boost the idea of business relationship, Stopforth said.
“I don’t think we were able to spark much interest in Boston until after the takeover of Liverpool Football Club by John Henry and the Fenway group,’’ he said. “But now, I think people are seeing natural connections and opportunities.’’
The city’s designation as European capital of culture in 2008 was a huge boost for regeneration, both physical and psychological. Cracked sidewalks, once common, were gone. The waterfront was cleaned up.
Besides the physical changes, the citywide cleanup and new investment made Liverpudlians begin to believe they could do anything, again, which is how many of them would have felt at the end of the 19th century, given the dominance of their docks and engineering.
Liverpool One, a downtown retail, residential, and leisure complex, opened in 2008. At more than $1 billion, the investment was the biggest in Europe in the last decade.
And earlier this year, the British government made Liverpool one of 10 initial enterprise zones in the United Kingdom, which offer tax breaks and simpler planning rules for new companies.
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