Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘awards’

Oct 7

Liverpool History News Roundup

Screenshot of The National Archives' Domesday on a Map tool

The National Archives' Domesday on a Map tool

Having written about the bigger themes this week, I’ve had to skip past a few other interesting links related to the history of Liverpool. So here they are, just for you:

Firstly, as an excitable mapping/interactive/web geek, I was interested in the new Domesday on a Map tool from The National Archives.

This, as the name might suggest, is a map showing all the places mentioned in the Domesday Book.  You have to zoom in to see any detail, but once there you get markers indicate the places named in Domesday, with an outline of the rough extent of the manor.

Click on the markers to see the historic name of the place (in 1086) and the page of the Book on which its described.

Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer David Thomas tells us why the map was produced in his blog post on the topic.

Domesday Book predated Liverpool by about 200 years, but a couple of places in the area were very important at the time, and get an entry: West Derby, Woolton, Toxteth and Childwall amongst others.

Whether or not your local history research is in Liverpool, Domesday on a Map is definitely must-see.

Planning permission was submitted to Liverpool City Council last Monday, 4th October, for Liverpool Waters, a plan to develop 150 acres of Merseyside docklands.

The scheme will include the tallest building outside London (possibly to be dubbed the “Shanghai Tower“), and for better or worse will transform Liverpool’s skyline.

Permission has already been granted for Wirral Waters, a similar scheme for the waterfront on the south side of the Mersey.

Planning permission documents have also been submitted for a stretch of Edge Lane including the retail parks and industrial areas.

The scheme will cost £200m and include a new park in addition to ‘leisure and retail units’ (“shops” to you and me).

The Merseyside Civic Society have awarded 8 different projects in four different categories at its relaunched awards scheme.

The categories are best New Build, Green Space, Open Space and Refurbishment. Read the full article on the MCS Awards website.

As two of my regular reads collide, SevenStreets has an article on Colin Wilkinson’s Streets of Liverpool, a site of interest to anyone reading this post I should think.

As well as discussion of how the site started, Colin describes how he came to where he is now, via the Open Eye gallery on the corner of Whitechapel to the Bluecoat Press which he has run since 1992. There are also a couple of classic photos from Colin’s archives.

Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll have some more Historic Liverpool news sooner or later, as I’m trying to find time for more additions to that site.

May 24

More awards for Merseyside buildings

The Waterstones book shop in the Liverpool One development

Liverpool One by Eugene Regis, via Flickr

Liverpool has once again won a slew of architecture prizes in this year’s RIBA awards.

Awards were given to Liverpool One, Sites 1 & 7, the Pier Head Canal Link (which I personally love, and which is some consolation for the Carbuncle Cup awarded to the Ferry Terminal last year) and the John Moores Art and Design Academy This means that three out of the five North West winners are from Merseyside.

A lot of the awards went to educational projects (including LJMU), and it’s been noted that this may be the last time education has such a chance as this. A moratorium on new school buildings has since been announced as part of the new government’s cost-cutting measures.

Landscapes get Lottery windfall

The Heritage Lottery have announced that they are giving grants of between £250,000 and £2m for ten countryside areas, known for their historic natural landscapes. The aim of the Landscape Partnerships programme is to encourage communities to become interested and involved in preserving their local heritage. While none of the areas nominated this week are urban (or, indeed, man-made), it seems to fit with the Conservative’s ideas of ‘Big Society’, and it may only be a matter of time before this kind of scheme spreads to other heritage areas such as our own World Heritage Site.

Roundup

A few other bits and pieces… The new minister for Heritage and the Built Environment is John Penrose (Conservative), who is also the minister for gambling and horse racing! Make of that what you will.

As part of the BBC’s History of the World project, they showed The Tale of Two Rival Cities. This is the story of Liverpool and Manchester, and how the two most important cities in the north-west vied for supremacy during the Industrial Revolution.

In reality they relied on one another: Liverpool was the gateway for the raw material for Manchester’s cotton manufacturing. It was a symbiosis, but Liverpool gentlemen overtaxed the Manchester men, leading to the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal to avoid Mersey tolls.

It’s a great programme, hosted by Stuart Maconie (from Wigan, halfway between the two cities) and covers everything from slavery and steam engines to gentrification and the trade unions. It’s available on the BBC iPlayer for a short while.

The Financial Times has a special report on its website entitled The Future of Cities. Although I haven’t had a chance to look much into it, it appears to be a huge resource on architecture, business, planning and the environment. If you want to read anything on current urban thinking, then this is probably a good place to start.

And finally: I’ve had to disable trackbacks and pingbacks. These are similar to comments, where a paragraph of your blog will appear below a post of mine if you mention it on your own site. And, like comments, they’re open to abuse by the less salubrious parts of the web. It’s one of the risks of blog-writing, I suppose, but let me take this opportunity to let you know that you can still comment! Please do – I’d love to know your own views on what I’ve written about!

Nov 19

Awards Awards Awards for Liverpool

As you might gather, it’s all about the awards this week – bidding and winning.

First up, it’s the brilliant International Slavery Museum, which gained an honourable mention at the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence, awarded every two years. The museum achieved this through its ongoing work to commemorate the lives and deaths of millions of enslaved Africans, and also the legacies of slavery (racism, injustice, exploitation). François Houtart (Belgium) and Abdul Sattar Edhi (Pakistan), from Belgium and Pakistan respectively, shared the $100,000 prize itself this time.

The Black-E (formerly the Blackie) arts centre in the Great George Street Congregational Church has been awarded £50,000 of Heritage Lottery Funding to preserve its archive. The archive consists of 57,000 photos and slides and 22 filing cabinets of documents, and the project will take three years to complete. Of most interest to me, and I should think to you, is that at least some of these images and documents will end up online. As Wendy Harpe, a founding member of the team, puts it: “we’re not preserving this stuff just for the sake of it”. In addition, parts of it will be put on CD or DVD, although the article doesn’t say whether these will be available outside the Black-E itself. The physical archive will remain at the Black-E or somewhere else in the city. What’s notable is that the current Black-E website has a holding page for a ‘Museum’ section, which would be the natural place for the archive. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this!

The final award goes to the PR campaign which kept the phrase ‘Capital of Culture‘ ringing in your ears all last year. The campaign, a co-operation between Liverpool City Council and the Liverpool Culture Company, was awarded the Best Public Sector Communications Campaign at the How Do awards this week. I think it’s clear to everybody just how much coverage the event got, locally and nationally, and it’s even been hailed the most successful Capital of Culture programme ever by the European Commission! More facts and figures about how great it was on the ArtInLiverpool blog linked to above.

Liverpool is now bidding to become the first English UNESCO City of Music. Only four other cities can lay claim to the title, including Glasgow, Bologna and Seville. Councillor Warren Bradley pinned down the importance of music to Liverpool: “Music is in Liverpool’s blood… from the days of sea shanties and Merseybeat to classical and dance.” Not sure when the ‘days of sea shanties and Merseybeat’ were, but you get his point. The most exciting thing for me is that a four month long mapping exercise will show where music is being made and played, and submitted in support of the bid. To be honest, they could do worse than to have a look at the Popular Musicscapes project funded by the AHRC and mentioned in one of my own posts a couple of years ago. Hopefully they visited the excellent Beat Goes On exhibition at World Museum Liverpool.

Well, that’s quite a long post! Any other awards we should go for? 🙂

Jul 23

75th Anniversary of Queensway Tunnel

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

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.

Jun 30

Vote for the International Slavery Museum in the The National Lottery Awards

International Slavery Museum .1, by andy_j_crowther (from Flickr)

International Slavery Museum .1, by andy_j_crowther (from Flickr)

Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum has been shortlisted to win ‘Best Heritage Project’ in the National Lottery Awards along with ten other nominees. The Museum opened in 2007 and was funded by Lottery money. The museum is hugely important – it is the only museum which tells the whole story of slavery, including the continuing impact and legacy of slavery in the present day.

Voting is open until July 10th, so vote now! This is an amazing museum – I went there in 2007 shortly after it opened – so go along too, and show your support in person.

Feb 18

Truimph, Disaster and Decay the save survey of Liverpool’s Heritage

From www.savebritainsheritage.org:
“As Liverpool emerges from its year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, a new exhibition, mounted by SAVE Britain’s Heritage, takes a sobering look at the state of the city’s architectural heritage.” This exhibition is being held at the RIBA gallery in Liverpool from 16 February until 6 March 2009. Check out the SBH’s news pages for more details.
They also have a new publication, Triumph, Disaster and Decay, a survey of Liverpool’s heritage. It “shines a light on fine buildings suffering from long-term neglect”. It also covers new development in the World Heritage Site and clearance in the suburbs, and includes a gazeteer of buildings at risk in Liverpool. The book costs £12.50, or £10 for Friends of Save.

Also, the Echo Arena is one of four Liverpool buildings in the running for a top national architecture award, the Civic Trust Award.