Welcome to Liverpool Waters, one of those developments with huge towers - on the dockfront at Liverpool, near to the Three Graces. It has been proposed by Peel Holdings.
The Architects Journal reports that the project, which covers 60 hectares (150 acres in old money, or around 2/3 of the area inside the Roman Wall at York), is under threat from UNESCO. Building Design have reported that UNESCO are threatening to remove Liverpool’s status as a World Heritage Site if it is built:
Unesco has threatened to withdraw Liverpool’s world heritage status in protest at a £5.5 billion scheme designed by Chapman Taylor.
At the 35th meeting of the international watchdog’s World Heritage Committee, representatives expressed “extreme concern” at the 60ha Peel Holdings-led Liverpool Waters project.
A Unesco delegation will now visit Liverpool to urge the city council to reject the controversial plans, which have been submitted for planning in outline form.
Liverpool Waters, a cluster of towers proposed on a stretch of the city’s docks, would include more than 9,000 residential units, 305,000sq m of commercial business space, 69,000sq m of hotel and conference space and a cruise liner terminal.
Here are two more photos:
Liverpool Waters - Three Graces on the Right
Liverpool Waters by the Sea
The Liverpool Waters bumf involves a huge volume of architectural bollocks:
Liverpool Waters will draw on the unique identity of the site and the city to define character areas, delivering a high density and accessible quarter, which is both economically and environmentally sustainable, and which will significantly reinforce Liverpool’s strong identity. Based on strong contextual and place-making principles, the area will be characterized by activity and diversity, providing public spaces that encourage formal and informal use. It will establish a stimulating and dynamic environment that re-vitalises the whole area, and responds to the needs of different communities.
(Fog Index = 25.42. A lot of fog, even for a cheeky PR chappie writing in Gibberish.)
which, when you translate it and take out the wibbly-wobbly bits, comes down to roughly:
Glurg !
and means, again approximately:
What was it we were supposed to say, Sebastian? Where was that paragraph from last time?
David Dunster, who is a Professor of Architecture at Liverpool University, thinks it is ‘pretty awful’:
“I don’t think it’s going to go ahead. It’s entirely down to people making a quick profit. However, you have to bear in mind that the council have said quite unequivocally that they will let anything through as long as it provides jobs, so from that point of view it’s certain to get planning.”
I’m in favour of modern developments where they pay detailed attention to the context, and to providing something suitable for humans, rather the Supermen and Robocops, to live and work in comfortably. Unfortunately, we only find that out whether a developent is successful after a number of years.
Two London examples I’d cite as successful large scale developments would be Broadgate, which integrates well with the traditional street pattern and Liverpool Street Station, and – having lived close by – the Barbican. Both are much smaller than Liverpool Waters, and the Barbican took a number of years to become established.
In the case of Liverpool Waters, I’m not convinced.
For me, that leaves two questions:
Large projects in smaller-scale older cities – do they work? And what makes the difference?
UNESCO as good taste Big Brother – good thing or bad thing?
What say you?
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Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon Arms. Follow me on Twitter.
{ 12 comments }
UNESCO as taste big brother not a good thing. Negotiation 101 says ‘name the game’ and UNESCO are using blackmail (or if you want it fancy – seeking to leverage their economic and PR influence to get the right result).
Big developments in small cities (or even big ones) – I would say don’t work unless the city is in a period of sustained economic growth but this is gut feeling. I remember the revitalising of Glasgow waterfront and Edinburgh Leith Docks (still ongoing) and they took years of incremental rebuilding. And my memories of London river front developments is the same. Some places were built and proved, after a while. successful. So another developer took a chance and some more places were built and this happened for a while, with increasing numbers of developers and companies and residents forming until a tipping point (identified in hindsight) was reached. Canary Wharf was mostly empty for years after it was built wasn’t it? Or is my memory shot?
With Glasgow, everyone thought the garden festival would do it – but it didn’t. It may have got some developers thinking but nothing happened for a few years because the economic position of the city wouldn’t support it. Who would buy the fancy flats and office space? Who would want to live in a nice oasis surrounded by a mess? It was only when the money started coming in and the traditional ‘cool’ areas of the city got too expensive that the merchant city and riverside got developed.
The councillers seem to think that if they build it the money will come (to paraphrase a movie). I’m not sure that’s the case. I think the inter-relationships between economic/business growth and developers is a bit more complex and interwoven.
The phrase ‘architectural bollocks’ is spot on; you could write exactly the same paragraph, with place names changed, about any largish development anywhere. Which rather makes you wonder why they bothered to print it. Who on earth is going to swallow it?
I think M Barnes has it right when he says that the pace of development tends to match what’s commercially viable. Liverpool originally developed ‘organically’ in response to trade, and would probably be wise to follow the examples of Glasgow and the London docklands. The ‘grand schemes’ have a nasty habit of hitting turbulence and ending up either half-completed, or as increasingly slum-like monuments to hubris.
Why the obsession with sky-scrapers? They don’t fit with Liverpool’s architectural heritage or history one bit. Horrible.
As with the war between NoTW and the BBC/Guardian axis, one can only look at the relative merits of relative compromises.
(I think Murdoch was less bad than the BBC/Guardian axis. In fact he had some very good points but he also inspired a lot of rotten compromise.)
Liverpool Waters and Wirral Waters?
Well I could hope that it will do good for the area and boost prosperity and that old and long forgotten concept: the feel-good factor.
I fear it could also attract a lot of the superficial selfish self-defeating artificial activity I have come so heartily to dread.
The London Docklands was a good idea as have been some of the various spin off developments around the world. They have tried to do imaginative things, and that is great.
If the fundamentals are sound then it can probably weather the storm of all the competing interests and conniving back stabbing..
If the Wirral/Liverpool schemes are rolled out with imaginative and creative design, and not just PC brain-death masquerading as such, it could be good.
But the residual economic and moral resilience that existed in the later 1970s has probably more or less been flattened?
I doubt if it would be enough to get the Saudis/Russians/Chinese/Indians to fund it because they all rely on vibrantly economically active people to buy their stuff. And that was us.
The world has kind of lost its way and sunk rather too effectively into moribund philosophies and structures, such as post modern acceptability, the EU, and all the other controllist ideas and mediocrity.
I wonder what Wirral First (http://wirralfirst.wordpress.com/the-plan/) thinks?
It is none of your business what Peel Holdings want to spend THEIR money on, on THEIR land.
By the way Matt, I don’t like the way your garden is arranged and order you to change it. Also your writing style has been vetoed by the Scholarly Heritage Institute To Scribling (SHITS). They will be visiting you to decide whether or not you may publish future blog posts.
I actually think it is my business what is to be built in my town or city, or indeed what will be built in the garden next door.
I am not an island; neither are Peel Holdings.
You’re free not to like the way my garden is arranged, but if I install a sound sculpture – eg a siren – which wakes you up at 4am, then I think you’re quite free to take an interest.
What planning and environental health law is properly for, no?
And those who may be removed to make way for the project (cf Dockalands) seem to me to have a slight legitimate interest.
I don’t think it’s UNESCO being arbitrators of taste, and they’re not stopping anyone building anything. What they are doing is saying “we gave this area a special designation because of it’s historical nature, if that nature is substantially changed then the designation is no longer apt”
Liverpool are quite free to decide that the UNESCO designation is worth less than the new development and tell UNESCO so. It’s surely not that much different from Ordinance Survey ceasing to mark an area as scrub after it’s been converted to a shopping mall?
A Unesco designation only means something to the people who care about it – the members of the council and other such nobs. I don’t think it means much to the man in the street.
As to whether the development will succeed. Check in about 20 years time. As M Barnes mentions, Carnary Wharf was pretty much empty for a long time.
In a free society people should be able to build what they want on their own land. Why anyone would lavish private money on an economic wasteland like Liverpool is beyond me.
At the the other end of the city the statists are pulling down swathes of victorian housing and replacing with cardboard living units.
Liverpool will stay what the majority living there want it to be – one of the world’s largest industrial museums.
I have to ask, has the UN and/or any of it’s tentacles actually done any good?
The WHO banned DDT and killed millions, they also regularly hype up scare stories, H1N1 anybody.
The IPCC are hyping the green tax take for no real reason other than they appear to want all countries at the LCD.
Their supposed ‘peace keepers’ don’t
They ship food to the poor nations and don’t teach farming methods so they can feed themselves.
UNESCO make a loud noise that amounts to nothing in the end.
As to the question of the development in Liverpool, why not, it just might be the making of the place. The fact the development isn’t modelled on the past can be a good thing. It’s all very well to look at past glories – just remember they were controversial at their time but we need to look to the future. Yes, I know it looks rather bleak at the moment but if people just wallow in the present how can we have a future.
Frankly, the threat of Unesco withdrawing Liverpool’s world heritage status is less worrying than a child being thrown out of the Tufty club. And Peel were repeatedly told by experts and others that their Trafford Park centre could never work. They were all wrong.
Peel holdings is a visionary company with a long term plan to divert shipping from the English Channel and secure for the North West a deep water container port and distribution centre using the current docks and the Manchester Ship Canal.
The above plan is complementary to the Wirral First movement, which plans to make Wirral the Singapore of Europe.
http://www.wirralfirst.org
Wouldn’t that be an economic threat, ie loss of tourism etc, and would have pull with the local Town Fathers.
My take on UNESCO is that here they may be applying pressure in the right direction here, but I’m not sure about:
a – that they are in a position to apply pressure.
. Especially if they got it wrong.
b – that I would always like it
OTOH if somebody proposed to demolish the walls at York, I’d want protection.
It does happen – consider what’s been lost at Stonehenge, or country houses knocked down in mid-century (my local County/City Councils were notorious).
“A huge volume of architectural bollocks!” Great!