Liverpool. Heritage, conservation and growth

A recent visit to Liverpool raises all sorts of questions about heritage, conservation and growth.  As a result of its historical importance, “an example of a world mercantile city port”, Liverpool is a World Heritage Site (WHS). Its wealth was built on the operation of the transatlantic trade routes, but as well as commodities, people also left the port to start a new life in America. And not always out of choice.  Liverpool was a transit hub for slave traders on route to the USA.

The result was a mercantile city that thrived on trade not manufacturing.  Its wealth was expressed first with some fine Georgian architecture, and this was followed by the Victorian and Edwardian expansion of the docks. The result is a city with an abundance of great buildings, but no industry to support it. Shipbuilding and the docks are a pale shadow of their glory days; Liverpool now survives on students, (some 50,000 or 10% of the total population), and shopping. Grosvenor’s Liverpool 1 regeneration has pushed it to 5th in the UK chart of busiest shopping cities.  As a result, and combined with a continuing interest in The Beatles, tourism has increased too, and there are a proliferation of hotels in the city centre to service these visitors.

It is perhaps not surprising then how may empty heritage buildings there are, often listed and expensive to refurbish and convert.  How many five star hotels can a city of this size accommodate? Rather like Venice its historical fabric is its burden. The WHS status is at risk, and it seems that the politicians and planners are prepared to let it go to enable the development that they believe the city needs.

This is worrying; there is no evidence of any coherent planning strategy or master planning in the city centre. Liverpool 1 is the exception, and BDP are to be congratulated on their masterplan, which knits the new development into the historic framework of the city. The same cannot be said for the majority of the developments of the last 20 or 30 years. The twee “Brookside” style of Derek Hatton’s era has given way to a bombastic bravura style built on the cheap judging by the amount of cladding failures on display.

If Liverpool loses its WHS status, and this looks increasingly likely, conservationists will need to be on their guard, as it seems there is no civic desire to protect the fragile heritage of the city. This was demonstrated recently on Lime Street by the consent granted to demolish the Edwardian Futurist Cinema and replace it with a woefully poor scheme by the same team that delivered Mann Island, Broadway Malyan and Neptune Developments.  Lime Street is the gateway to the City of Liverpool, and what is being built would make a plausible gateway to a retail park in the suburbs. In a nod to the conservationists the scheme has been redesigned and the facades are now enlivened with a graphic representation of the buildings they replaced. (Far worse than façade retention).

Mann Island, the Museum of Liverpool and the Mersey Ferry building are adjacent to the Three Graces, The Liver, Cunard and Port Authority buildings that represent the splendour of Liverpool at its height.  This trio of new buildings seems to have been designed without a masterplan, without any consideration of each other, and most importantly with no deference to their listed neighbours. Indeed Hamilton Architects Ferry Building is so bad it won The Carbuncle Cup in 2009 and the other two developments were both shortlisted. (Museum 2011 and Mann Island 2012). It would be tempting to call them the three disgraces. It reminds me of Melbourne, another great Victorian City that has wilfully adopted a decorative form of deconstruction with similarly disappointing results.

Liverpool is a wonderful City, with a rich past and a resilient and humorous population. It has some great Twentieth Century buildings, not least those designed by the City Architect Herbert Rowse. But it also has a lot of empty office blocks and swathes of derelict docks and cleared sites that need to be developed. The people of Liverpool are being let down by their political leaders, desperate to allow development at any cost. The result is more often than not a cheap outdated and unplanned form of modern architecture that has no place in this great city.