The bars, the clubs, the violence and the whole sickening spectacle of Concert Square are symptoms of the problem, but Liverpool’s city centre should never have been allowed to get in this state in the first place.
Rattus Banksius
Apparently the people who bought the old Whitehouse Pub, on the corner of Berry Street and Duke Street, are going to paint over the Banksy-painted rat that has adorned it for the best part of a decade.
Lewis’s to make way for leisure/lifestyle/retail hub/haven/destination thing
Merepark’s Central Village, which will include the Lewis’s building, is set to redress the cash drain towards Liverpool One, but it’s not clear to me whether the city can support so many different retail/leisure/lifestyle hubs – is there genuinely enough cash being spent to go around Liverpool’s various city-centre areas?
Ground share moves a step closer
I hate to say I told you so but, as I predicted, Destination Kirkby has been thoroughly kiboshed by the government.
It was, financially, a good deal for Everton and an affordable way out of a crumbling ground badly served by surrounding infrastructure.
But it was also a good few miles away from Goodison and came with a bundle of other leisure and retail strings attached.
Communities secretary, John Denham, was apparently worries about the negative impact on surrounding areas of a vast out-of-town development.
It’s almost enough to make one what Liverpool One’s management team made of it all.
Tim Smit at Liverpool Philharmonic – Eden, Tony Bradshaw and positive liberty
I went to see Tim Smit last night at the Phil, part of a series of lectures arranged by the University of Liverpool as part of Liverpool’s Year of the Environment theme.
I’ve followed Smit ever since I read his book on Eden, an extraordinary, inspirational book about one man’s fight with nature, administrators, economics, common sense and received wisdom.
Tesco withdraws Hope Street application due to Facebook petition
In case it passed anyone by, Tesco withdrew its application to build a store on Hope Street, after a significant amount of protest emerged online, focussed around a Facebook group ,which ended up with over 4,500 members.
In a rare triumph of people power, Tesco’s indicated that it was prepared to acknowledge the level of public feeling and look elsewhere for a new site.
I think it’s fair to say that few people expected the supermarket megalith to heed any complaints, but heed them it did.
Someone who must be scratching his head over all of this is
08 Sep 09
Also posted in Life in Liverpool, Liverpool business
Comments (2)
Mersey Ferry building wins an award – for being awful
I’m feeling a little vindicated in my view that the new Merseytravel ferry terminal and Beatles Story outlet is badly situated and unsympathetic to its surroundings.
Others have been more forceful in their views, and now the building has won the Carbuncle Cup, an architecture magazine’s award for the worst new building. Incidentally, One Park West – a building I think may be worse – was also nominated.
The ferry building is described as ‘a shining example of bad architecture and bad planning’ on the Building Design website. As I’ve said before, what constitutes bad architecture is open to debate and not something I’m qualified to judge.
But it should have been clear all along that the siting of the building as it has appeared was problematic at best: in front of the three graces and slap bang in the middle of a UNESCO World Fricking Heritage site.
Calling Liverpool artists – design the new Top Shop/Top Man store
Any passing readers who happen to be artists (there are regular readers, right?) might be interested to know that the Liverpool branch of Top Man/Shop is offering the opportunity to decorate one of their walls.
Liverpool's waterfront – ruined or updated?
If you follow the view of the blogosphere, the Mann Island developments buildings, together with the new Merseytravel ferry terminal building (that also doubles as the Beatles Story’s second outlet) and Liverpool Museum, amount to nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Indeed, that’s what architects seem to think too.
Such judgements are necessarily subjective, and though I’m reserving judgement for now on the new Liverpool Museum, I can’t possibly see how the Mann Island Developments buildings or new ferry terminal can be judged to be sympathetic to the surrounding area.
In some ways I quite like the Mann Island buildings, but they seem to me totally at odds with the surrounding areas, as if two damaged Borg cubes have suddenly crashed down to Earth on the site of the ill-fated Fourth Grace.
The buildings, along with the museum, almost completely obscure the view of the Three Graces from the viewpoint of the Albert Dock, and add an intrusive full stop to the waterfront’s narrative from Birkenhead.
Merseytram off the rails – for good?
The Merseytram project to build a tram route from Liverpool city centre to Kirkby, of all places, is back in the new with Shadow Home Secretary and ‘Minister for Merseyside’ Chris Grayling apparently ruling out the possibility of a Tory government backing the plans.
Grayling, who once claimed that Gary Neville was a good role model for Liverpool youngsters, says that a tram network in the city would need to be based on a successful initial route – saying a South Liverpool route through the suburbs to John Lennon airport would make more sense.
The persistently-favoured first route is the Line One Kirkby route, which seems to amount to an FDR-style social engineering project.
The Tories have made a big thing under Dave Cameron of pretending to be interested in the environment, and Grayling has spent the last couple of years slamming Labour for not pressing ahead with Liverpool’s tram network, while saying the Tories would build trams, ooh, everywhere.
Grayling has probably had a look at the public finances, and at the rubbish plans for Liverpool’s trams network and decided that not backing the plans was probably a good idea on Alistair Darling’s part.