This project explores the relationship between music and place. The focus is on cities, Liverpool in particular, and how music characterises urban environments but is in turn influenced by specific urban environments and by urban change, such as changes to physical urban environments brought about by urban decline and regeneration. In order to explore this relationship between music and urban environments the project has conducted research on groups of musicians in Liverpool, particularly those involved with rock and hip hop music. The project team traced the journeys and routes of these musicians as they engaged in regular music-making activities. They also explored the real and imagined sites connected to their music-making, including buildings and neighbourhoods. The aim was to gain a better understanding of how musicians inhabit and experience such sites and how they interpret them, associating them with particular ideas and emotions.

The team therefore interviewed and hung out with musicians, as well as consulting archives for relevant information on local music-making. In addition, they used maps as a research tool. This involved collecting maps and showing them to musicians but also getting musicians to draw their own musical memory maps. It also involved analysing the spatial, geometric patterns that emerged from these maps and what they might tell people about music, landscape and environment, the positioning and clustering of music sites, for example, as well as musical trails, boundaries and edges.These maps helped to prompt the telling of stories about music and the city of Liverpool, and their spatial, geometric patterns raised questions about music, landscape and environment.

The project challenged established understandings of music heritage in the city in two ways. First, it moved beyond the narrow focus on particular places and times, such as those connected to the Beatles, revealing the city’s many diverse and changing places of music. Secondly, it highlighted differences between established understandings of the city’s music heritage and musicians’ perspectives, revealing the places that matter to musicians, how and why they matter and how this changes over time. Moreover, the project showed how musicians create musical land- and soundscapes that characterise cities, but how these ‘musicscapes’ are in turn shaped by changes to the city’s landscape and environment, as well as by music genre and relations of class, ethnicity and so on.

The hand-drawn maps and stories collected by this project inspire questions, such as how something as intangible as popular music is mapped upon the landscape of the city by musicians themselves, in different ways from public officials, planners, and tourists. These examples spotlight the varied music landscapes in Liverpool, differing across racial, classed, temporal, and other markers of difference. As in the other case studies, ‘whose heritage counts?’ and ‘what places are put on “the map”?’ remain important questions, not necessarily so that definitive answers are provided, but to invite broader participation in the processes of mapping musical heritage and valuing popular music landscapes.