When Paul Melia set about converting the former Linacre pub in Bootle into a new community centre, he couldn’t believe how bright the lights were inside the dilapidated building.
Two weeks into the project early this year an electrician found The Linacre hooked up to an external power source in the street, a legacy of the £4m cannabis farm that was uncovered in the basement of the abandoned pub in 2019. “The electrician nearly had a heart attack,” Paul says, thinking back to the moment the building was immediately “de-energised” and made safe.
It was a moment that also left Paul and a team of volunteers literally in the dark through the depths of winter. Filled with abandoned furniture, rubble and even missing an entire external wall, the task of bringing a new community centre to heart of one of the most deprived wards in the UK, aided only by a diesel generator, revealed its enormity. No light was seemingly at the end of the tunnel.
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Ten months later the doors have finally opened and a new era “going the Linacre”, as Paul puts it, is about to begin. It’s one he hopes will be more synonymous with community growth than millions of pounds of cannabis.
The journey towards opening The Linacre Community centre has its roots in 2017 when Conquer Life was set up by Paul and a group of friends and volunteers. The organisation works with around 250 local children a week via youth clubs, early intervention groups and school workshops, but it coincidentally emerged out of nothing more than a conversation down the local.
Paul, 34, who has a background in youth work, told the ECHO: “[In 2017] a group of us were in the pub putting the world to rights. There’d been a few gang incidents at the time, a few shootings
“It was a grim time for young people growing up in Bootle.”
In seven years of austerity, a range of provisions had been taken from the town and little put back in its place, Paul said: “It wasn't one issue. It was a lot over a period of time.
“With gangs, [the children involved] were getting younger and younger. It was shocking and a case of wondering where that [the age] was going to stop.”
The problem was being made worse after a number of high profile gang members were arrested, creating a power vacuum with younger people stepping into the void, according to Paul. The friends and volunteers, roughly in their mid-20s, therefore wanted to see more opportunities for young people in Bootle having seen so many key services stripped back. The idea to launch a youth club started in earnest as a means of diverting some children away from gang activity.
Run by Conquer Life, the ‘Vibe’ youth club nights started in November 2017. Unaware how it would be received, Paul says he and the team were “completely overwhelmed” when 70 children attended the first event - an indicator of how needed the initiative was in the local area. Despite receiving no funding to begin with, it gradually attracted more children between the ages of 12 and 18, with Paul cutting down his working hours to concentrate funding bids to expand Conquer Life services.
But there was a feeling that the need in Bootle was wider than that first thought. Paul told the ECHO: “At 8.30 at night, a young girl, only eight or nine turned up wanting to come on her own. We couldn’t let her in because we had 17-18-year-olds here [making up the group].
“We had to turn her away at the gate. We realised there was a real need for younger kids and that we needed to do some earlier intervention.”
The initiative now works with ages eight to 18 and has received support from the Home Office and Sefton Council for a number of its ‘stay safe’ workshops targeting knife crime. While the pandemic meant the organisation had to adapt its services, the demands only increased and larger space was sought in the local area.
Noticing The Linacre was for sale, the idea of seeing the iconic structure reborn as a community centre started to gather pace. A deal was struck with the landlord to take on a long lease in the hope it could be returned as a valued asset for the area - or eventually purchased with funding support.
After months of hard work the abandoned pub has been transformed into a brand new community space, somewhere people with “ideas can come and realise them”, according to Paul. Sitting in the ‘bar’ area of the building, he laments how quiet each room currently is, with a desire to have “the door open every day” and for familiar faces to come in and out - just like the old Linacre.
Paul said: “We've got a home now as a community centre. It was important that we kept The Linacre name because everyone knows it as the Linacre. It’s now multi-generational - going to the Linacre.”
While the mountain of reopening the Linacre has been climbed in many ways, the strains on south Sefton’s services haven’t been alleviated - with Derby and the neighbouring Linacre ward still suffering high levels of deprivation. And yet Sefton remains categorised with areas like Windsor and Cambridge when it comes to levelling up funding support - seen as the least in need.
It’s a frustration that weighs on Paul, but it serves as motivation in equal measure. He told the ECHO: “We're either defeated by these statements or we get angry about it and we do something. I think the ethos of our organisation is that we stand up and we stand up and be counted and if we see an injustice we want to stand up and address that injustice.
"If we see a need we want to do everything in our power to meet that need. Opening this place there's so many reasons why we shouldn't have done it and so many why we couldn't have, but if we'd listened to that we'd never be where we are.
"That's got to be the inspirational message to young people who come here that actually you don't need to be defined by what you can't do. You look for reasons why you can. "
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