Liverpool Landscapes

Sep 23

The Mersey and its Banks – Regeneration

Liverpool Garden Festival by MC =), from Flickr

Two stories come together this week which conjure up memories of Liverpool in the 1980s (limited memories for me personally, as I was two when the Garden Festival was on!).

The Garden Festival site is finally beginning the last segment of its journey of regeneration. The company Langtree are the developers, who hope to begin work in November with the site being completed in a year. The £250 million redevelopment will include restoration of many of the gardens, and the building of homes. The BBC story seems to suggest that the site has been derelict for the 25 years since the Festival, which I would suggest cruelly overlooks Pleasure Island, scene of many an exciting Bank Holiday in the mid-1990s. 😉

The related story is that Lord Heseltine gave a speech yesterday to a conference celebrating 25 years of the Mersey Basin campaign, an effort to clean up the River Mersey. Lord Heseltine warned against resting on our laurels. The river is cleaner now than it has been since the Industrial Revolution, but this should be “the platform to leap forward, not the opportunity to congratulate ourselves on a job completed.”

Those who know their recent Liverpool history will be aware that Lord Heseltine was the initial force behind the 1984 Garden Festival, although the then ‘Minister for Merseyside’ was often criticised for ignoring the deeper problems of Liverpool, and settling for this rather ‘cosmetic’ and temporary fix. However, it has been pointed out that the festival raised the spirits of the region, and showed what a co-ordinated effort with the Merseyside Development Corporation could produce.

Of related interest is the fact that Otterspool Promenade on which the festival site stands was created from the dumping of household waste and debris from the Queensway tunnels from the 1930s, a process which clearly had some detrimental impact on the river, and meant that the natural features of Otterspool and Dingle Point were lost beneath the concrete which later capped the promenade.

It also goes to show that even recent history is constantly impacting on the landscape, shaping the city we live in! Feel free to share your Festival memories, or your views on the site in general!

Note: The photo above is from a collection of photos of the derelict Garden Festival site by MC =) on Flickr. This is a great collection of photos, though tinged with a slight spookiness and desolation. Plus an abandoned typewriter. It’s full of Creative Commons goodness too, so have a look!

Sep 21

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Uses for Liverpool’s Listed Buildings

The Observer reports on a survey by McBains Cooper which suggests that giving Grand Designs-like makeovers to Britain’s vacant listed buildings could help with the shortfall of up 1 million homes.

The suggestion is that the hundreds of listed buildings which are currently out of use could be converted to flats and houses. However, the main objection is the red tape and hassle that owners expect to have to go through to get plans accepted.

Stanley Dock by Paul Holloway, via Flickr

Having seen, and mapped, the listed buildings most at risk in Liverpool, according to English Heritage, I know that a great many of them lay dormant, without use and without any plans for the future. My favourite is the tobacco warehouse at Stanley Dock. This is a colossal building, and identical to all intents and purposes to the warehouses at the King’s Dock which are now plush and expensive footballers’ homes, and which ensure the preservation of these globally important structures. There seems no reason why the Stanley Dock warehouses couldn’t be put to similar use. New flats are also found all along Waterloo Road, occupying former derelict buildings. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before Stanley Dock is converted. Maybe the owner has been waiting for the best time. But these kinds of projects need to be started sooner rather than later. How many flats could you fit in that warehouse, plus shops, parking and maybe offices on the ground floor? Granted, at the moment these buildings are a tad out of the way of the city centre, but the location must be attractive to many who would save on transport costs to the offices and shops in town.

There also has to be the one project which starts the regeneration of the entire area all the way up Waterloo Road to Nelson and Huskisson Docks. The main thing to remember, however, is that the housing shortfall is not with the wealthy King’s Dock flat owner types. It’s with the thousands of families who can’t afford a house, so it would be no good to create another ‘exclusive’ gated community. Could a Stanley Dock scheme both ensure the preservation of the warehouse structure and provide a more accessible housing scheme than Kings or East Waterloo Docks?

Of course, there are other vacant listed buildings in Liverpool, crying out for regeneration. What buildings in your area could benefit from such a scheme?

Sep 4

Secret Life of Smithdown Road

National Museums Liverpool are putting on an exhibition at the Oomoo cafe on Smithdown Road, showcasing the way in which the road has changed over the years, reports Art in Liverpool. The exhibition, which runs throughout September, will consist of photographs and stories – the memories of old and young who live and have lived in the area – to build a picture of Smithdown Road over time.

This is precisely the thing I’m trying to do with Historic Liverpool, and it just goes to show that there is an audience out there for this kind of history, this landscape archaeology of a single road! It’s incredibly important when writing about history in such a public arena that you connect with what the audience wants, and not what you want to tell them (unless you’re confident you have a new and interesting angle, of course!). That this exhibition actively involves the local residents is excellent; they are the main audience after all. It’s a shame I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, but hopefully I can learn something from this. I know my own site is quite one-sided at the moment (I’m trying the interesting angle, which hopefully isn’t covered by other similar sites), so in future I will try to add stuff more directly related to the people of Liverpool. After all, the aim of the site is to give you insight into the history of your area, help you explore and encourage you to get out there and see the place in a new light.

I’m still finalising the comments arrangements, but soon you’ll be able to hold forth on pretty much any page, so please do!

Historical notes: Smithdown, once known as Esmedune, was a manor mentioned in the Domesday Book, and was part of the royal forest of Toxteth, used for hunting.

Sep 3

Heritage at Risk in Historic Liverpool

Home page screenshot as built in Drupal

Yes, that’s a headline and almost a pun at the same time, for of course the ‘Historic Liverpool’ in the title is your favourite map-based exploration of Merseyside’s history, Historic Liverpool. I have spent rather a lot of hours over the last week moving the entire site from lovingly hand-crafted HTML to Drupal, an open source (Free) content management system (CMS). This wonderful technology means I can spend less time on moving bits of the site round, while having to copy all changes from one page to another, and simply let Drupal do all the work. For anyone who’s used a blog this will be familiar territory. You simply type what you want into the CMS, and the pre-set design will take care of all the menus, sidebars etc. on all the pages. On a technical note, unfortunately MapServer, which I use to create the maps, doesn’t play well with Drupal (unless I upgrade my hosting package), so the mapping pages are done the old fashioned way – by hand. There are a few more stylistic tweaks to make (the article text is a bit small at the moment) but the site should be easier to maintain from now on.

Which brings me to my main point, which is that I now have more time to add stuff to the maps, and I’ve started with the Buildings at Risk in Liverpool, which can now be found on the Liverpool Explorer map (have a play around with the other layers while you’re over there). Clicking on one of the diamonds when takes you to a summary of the state of these buildings, from where you can click through to the main English Heritage website for more details and a photo. When I get a chance to, I hope to be adding my own photos to the site, as the ones on english-heritage.org.uk are a bit small.

I hope you enjoy this first of many new layers (hoping to add other ‘At Risk’ sites soon), so please do send feedback!

Liverpool’s Award-winning Architecture

Terminal, by light_arted via Flickr

The Echo reports that Liverpool’s Pier Head ferry terminal has beaten off strong competition – including Liverpool’s own Grosvenor One Park West – to win the Carbuncle Cup, a prestigious acknowledgment by Building Design Magazine’s three judges of the terminal’s exceptional design. Unfortunately, of course, this award is for Britain’s ugliest new building.

Despite a Merseytravel spokesperson’s assertion that: “We are proud of the Pier Head Ferry Terminal and have received widespread support for the building from the community here on Merseyside,” a snap poll on the Liverpool Echo’s website suggests that three quarters of Scousers hate the thing.

Two of the problems facing the ‘carbuncle’ are the fact that it sits smack bang in front of the rightly-adored Three Graces, and in a World Heritage Site, and also that it looks like the new Liverpool Museum building’s wonky little brother.

Update: Two more articles talking about the ferry terminal buiding: straight from the horse’s mouth at Building Design Magazine, and analysis in the Daily Telegraph.

Aug 26

Liverpool sites get £3.3m funding, listed building to be auctioned, and history going missing

Update: The BBC has reported that the Main Bridewell was sold at auction for £450,000 to a developer. Though the article mentions that ‘In 2004 developers discussed turning the building into a luxury hotel’, I will be waiting with bated breath to see what they actually do.

One of those days when several interesting stories come along at once!

Lowlands, the Grade II listed merchants villa in Hayman’s Green, West Derby has just reopened following a £1.2m restoration project. The villa was designed and constructed by Thomas Haigh (architect also of Marks & Spencer’s building in Church Street) and was owned and occupied by a succession of wealthy merchants and financiers. Vast areas of West Derby were occupied by similar men in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The Inland Revenue occupied the buildings following war damage to the India Buildings on Dale Street in Liverpool city centre. Since 1957 it has been owned by the West Derby Community Association, and in the 1960s was a centre for the emerging Merseybeat scene, witnessing performances by the Quarrymen, Herman’s Hermits and Billy J. Kramer in the basement Pillar Club or the main hall upstairs. This history places it on similar ground to the Casbah, the more famous club and coffee house just along the road at number 8.

The Garden Festival site is a place filled with memories for generations of families who all descended on it over the space of five months in 1984 (I distinctly remember the Postman Pat exhibit being centre of my attention). After lying derelict for many years (with the exception of Pleasure Island which occupied the site in the 1990s) £2.1m has been released to allow the redevelopment of the site to commence. The North West Development Agency have put up the cash which will see a project to restore the Japanese and Chinese gardens and pagodas, as well as the streams, lakes and woodland which cover the site, which will become another green area for the people of Liverpool. Owners Langtree maintain their ambitions to build 1300 homes on the site, a plan which was approved after a public enquiry last year. A further £1.6m is being sought from the North West European Regional Development Fund. No real mention of Pleasure Island on the news sites though…

The Main Bridewell on Cheapside, just of Dale Street is going for auction and is expected to fetch up to £500,000. It’s proximity to the magistrates court on Dale Street means it was used to house defendants before trial, and was originally built in 1866 to hold petty criminals. The building closed in 1999.

for more information on why the Bridewell was so named, see the Encyclopedia.com question on the Bridewell.

Finally, in a mysterious and disturbing story, original Victorian features are going missing from the area of Kensington in west Liverpool. Cobbles, cast-iron railings and original street signs are disappearing from the streets around Edinburgh and Leopold Roads, but no one (residents or the Council) seem to know who is pulling up these features. Rumour has it that the items (including stone setts taken from ships which used them as ballast on voyages from Turkey) are being sold on the black market. Areas removed are being replaced with tarmac. Anyone with information is being asked to contact the council.

Aug 14

Local History on the Ground and The English Semi-detached House

A guide to overcoming barriers to amateur research, plus another on a common English house type.

Aug 12

Liverpool architecture under threat and under debate again

Liverpool One, by liquidindian, from Flickr

The Grade II Newsham Park Hospital building is under threat, reports the Echo, due to an increasing level of disrepair, and neglect on the part of the owners. Now councilor Steve Radford has stepped up to try to save the building, calling on the owners to take action. Comments on the Echo site reflect anger that the council is not doing enough, while also worrying that there is insufficient cash to do anything.

Newsham Park hospital began life as the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphan Institution, caring for the children of families lost at sea. The building was designed by Aigburth-born Sir Alfred Waterhouse, architect of Liverpool University’s Victoria Building and the latest Liverpool Royal Infirmiary building. The building was eventually used by the NHS, but closed in 1988 since when it has lain empty.

The building is not currently on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk register.

In other architectural news, two buildings are up for an award seen as the antithesis of the prestigious RIBA award. The new Pier Head ferry terminal, and the Grosvenor’s Liverpool One (ironically shortlisted for the RIBA award) are up for the prize.

Although quirky, the new ferry terminal is not all that bad, especially as it’s such a small building (compared to, say, the new musuem). As with any new development, Liverpudlians are rightly protective of their Three Graces, and luckily people are coming to the defence of the terminal. I really admire the Liverpool One development (with perhaps the exception of the Lego flats to the north of Chevasse Park). The place is colourful, bright, and includes a green area which so many modern cities (Swindon, I’m looking at you!) lack.

What are your thoughts on the new development, and the awards?

Jul 23

75th Anniversary of Queensway Tunnel

Coat of arms above the Queensway Tunnel, Liverpool. By Alli' Cat' (from Flickr)

This weekend was the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Queensway Tunnel. The National Museums Liverpool blog has an article on the topic, along with links to several online resources, mainly photos. There are some great pictures of the tunnel being constructed, along with other construction schemes (the Anglican Cathedral and ships’ engines). These are from the Stuart Bale collection owned by National Museums Liverpool. In addition, there is the Queensway Mersey Tunnel album which is reproduced page by page (use the links on the right hand side to read each page). A highlight is the ‘mystery figure‘ who climbs up the side of a nearby building for a better view – being caught on camera in the process!

In other news, the Liverpool One scheme has been shortlisted for the Sterling Prize of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The design won a regional RIBA award in May.

Jul 9

Conservation Areas Resources

I’ve recently mentioned English Heritage’s ‘Heritage At Risk’ campaign and project, so I thought I’d point any interested parties in the direction of some good resources to look at on the subject.

Liverpool City Council has some good conservation area information, including a map of all Liverpool’s Conservation Areas and the roads which are in CAs.
English Heritage’s main Conservation Areas at Risk pages are a natural starting point for info on this topic.
The News Distribution Service (NDS) has a good summary page of Liverpool conservation areas at risk. The whole page can be downloaded as a PDF (ZIP file).

If you know of any other places to find details of CAs at risk, let me know in the comments!

Liverpool history, online sources and local history on the web