Songs for the Ford Road

This playlist was created in collaboration with Neil Charmer, who worked for many years at HMV Music at Speke Retail Park — the New Mersey Shopping Centre, a short distance from the Mersey Wave on the Ford Road. He was working there in 2006, the year Reg Bird completed the George Henry Bird biography at his home in Hunts Cross.

The songs are chosen to evoke the atmosphere of Speke, Hunts Cross and the wider Northwest of England during the period Reg was writing — music that was in the air, in the shops, on the radio. An attempt to place Reg's act of remembering inside its own era, alongside the era it was remembering.

The Ford Road — the A561, Speke Boulevard — runs from Liverpool into Cheshire and beyond, past the Mersey Wave, toward Runcorn and the bridge over the Mersey to Widnes, and on to Frodsham. It was the road the Charmer family travelled every Saturday as children to visit their grandmother in Speke. It was Neil's daily commute for much of the 2000s. It is the road that runs through the heart of this project.