A new central Liverpool

Michael McDonough

As a youngster I’d often be dragged kicking and screaming into ‘town’ by my mother, first from Aigburth and later Speke on the 82 bus for a day traipsing around central Liverpool.

The delights of these trips would include Solitaire, Dodo’s and Miss Selfridges (all high street names now consigned to the past) and we would start this bonanza at Lewis’ department store, jumping off the bus and into the throng of Saturday morning shoppers. We’d cut through Lewis’ giant store before heading to what was then the newly opened Clayton Square shopping centre and a supposedly refreshed green-glass clad St Johns Centre. From there the misery of shopping with your mum on a Saturday would commence.

For me it was my first introduction to a big city centre alongside the odd jaunt over to Manchester and it was where I began to really think about architecture and the built environment. I’d see the different building styles and the variety of scale and begin to understand what fundamentally makes a city centre feel vibrant and appealing. Of course, today I’m a bit more travelled but I still think central Liverpool retains a bizarre and unique mix of architecture and energy that few European cities can rival.

Sadly today, Liverpool’s optimistic 1960’s shopping centre architecture and MDF pre-fab station retail (Liverpool Central) is all looking incredibly tired, like a patched up old car that’s had multiple uncaring owners. It still functions but it doesn’t look too good aesthetically.

Let’s take St Johns Centre, the largest indoor shopping centre in the city, squatting as it does right next to Liverpool’s front door to the world - Lime St. It’s also directly adjacent to some of the world’s finest neo-classical architecture such as St Georges Hall. This shopping behemoth, designed by architect James A. Roberts, landed ungraciously on the city in 1969 and has suffered two fires and several re-clads, leaving us with a mish mash of hasty spruce-up’s from owners who have lacked the deep pockets to do anything truly worthwhile.

The Centre itself was actually a much smarter affair when it first opened, before it was mauled by those who, in the 1990’s, thought faux-Victorian brick features would add a dash of sophistication. Still, in its defence St Johns remains very profitable for it’s owners, and this is likely the reason why it continues to squat on what should be a prime city centre site - a pound shop paradise instead of a Gucci-style emporium. It’s not all bad though, we were also gifted St Johns Beacon in 1969 as a glorified chimney to ventilate the centre. Better known today as the Radio City Tower, it’s become a landmark in itself, but also architectural marmite. Shorter than was originally intended, it’s short-lived rotating restaurant feature has long-since closed with its crown now defaced with radio antennae. Recently it was threatened with a quite frankly ridiculous zip wire proposal that would have seen the more adventurous amongst us flung across St Georges Hall before landing on top of the Liverpool Central Library, but thankfully, the subsequent uproar consigned the scheme to Liverpool City Council’s rather large book of planning mistakes.

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St Johns Centre as viewed from St Georges Hall, 2020.

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Clayton Square (left) and St Johns Centre (right), 2020.

St Johns is sadly not alone across this axis of tat that defaces central Liverpool. There is also the now, in my view, ruined Clayton Square. You might notice that I don’t refer to it as a ‘shopping centre’ because today it is a far cry from its intended design, having been boxed up internally for long standing retail anchor Boots the Chemist. The original grand and spacious feel of the 1990’s glass-covered mall lost behind MDF wall panels. The only redeeming feature of Clayton Square is its distinctive glass dome as a reminder of what once was. Again, the victim of a visionless ownership doing the bare minimum, this once impressive shopping centre has been turned into a forgettable cut-through.

Sadly today, Liverpool’s optimistic 1960’s shopping centre architecture and MDF pre-fab station retail (Liverpool Central) is all looking incredibly tired,…

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The rap sheet of poor developments goes on…there’s the now wrecked former Blacklers store populated at ground level by the Wetherspoons pub chain and greasy low-end fast food joints. The unforgivebly bland and beige ION student accomodation scheme which replaced the Futurist (a building that still needed to go as it was collapsing). Its depressing cladded hulk hiding the even more depressing breeze block, creaking floor misery that is the Student ‘Castle’ behind. Then there’s the decaying former ABC art deco cinema on the opposite side of the road that has also fallen victim to numerous false dawns including plans to turn it into a TV studio. And who could forget the Holiday Inn towering above St Johns? For some bizarre reason, the hotel was painted black with white window frames and now provides a nice clean target for seagulls offloading their mess quite visibly across the facade, a delight I’m sure for those arriving at Lime St for the first time. But the pièce de resistance has to be the blue plastic cover stretching around the St Johns Centre car park as an apologetic gesture from the city leaders, who are all too aware of how much of an embarrassing eyesore this part of the city has become. No amount of repaving is going to fix that one.

I should stop there as the horrors of Williamson and Queens Squares with their out of town retail architecture are too much to bare. Even the entrance to Liverpool Central station and shopping centre is a sorry indictment of how quick the city is to demolish great architecture and replace it with worse. Too little is invested in Liverpool’s transport infrastructure today. If this was London, things would look very different.

Anyway, that’s enough of the critical; let’s move on to the constructive! At Liverpolitan, when it comes to architecture and urban design we at least like to have a stab at putting our money where our mouth is and so we’ve visualised what central Liverpool could potentially look like with a major, joined up and comprehensive redevelopment plan akin to Liverpool One.

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The featured visuals explore how a forward-thinking city administration, alongside some ambitious local politicians and business leaders might take central Liverpool forward. The designs imagine a city centre unlocked from the obstructive mess that indoor shopping centres have created and moves instead to individual buildings and re-instated streets. Those buildings play host, not to the bargain basement, but to hotels, much needed Grade A flexible office and event spaces, small and medium-sized businesses. There’s also a leisure and media hub, landmark building to replace Clayton Square and ground-level, accessible market space to replace St Johns Market, now relocated to Williamson Square with the potential for it to spill out into the surrounding streets.

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A re-imagined St Johns Beacon.

We imagine a new central Liverpool anchored by a new transport hub with a major expansion of Liverpool Central station returning this increasingly overcrowded and underinvested underground station in to something more in line with its former role as a national gateway with the completion of the Edge Hill Spur scheme to tunnel the Northern line out to Edge Hill and beyond (we’ll have an article on that at some point).

New and re-instated street connections between Queens Square and Central Station offer a clear line of sight through to the St Georges Hall portico. Rather than repeat the mistakes of St Johns, which for want of a better phrase, turned its architectural ‘arse’ to one of our grandest buildings, new structures will offer a proud face towards it. It’s almost as if architects in the 1960’s dismissed St Georges Hall as some imperialist soot-covered beast that would soon be demolished, and so contextually didn’t matter. Bulldozers were on the cards for Lime St’s Great Northwestern Hotel frontage, it it wasn’t for a campaign to stop them.

The design concepts envisage a far more porous central Liverpool with a new green space, elevated across several levels, looking out across St Georges Plateau. Hopefully it would act as an invitation to the now sad and disconnected lower London road to join the re-development party and come back into the city centre fold. Scale and world class architectural design would be the order of the day much like Liverpool One. Instead of leaving such an important project in the hands of a clique of local developers practice on a budget, International competitions would invite the world’s best to compete. Let the best designs and those with the best track records win out.

Lewis’, the former Blackers Store and the remaining streets between would all be spurred on to step-up and re-invent themselves. The result? A whole, new beating heart for central Liverpool, far more befitting of where the city wants and needs to be. A statement to anyone arriving at Lime St Station that Liverpool is a world class city that respects its heritage, but is determined to do everything it can to match and surpass its history. One that thinks bigger, and better.

It would be nice to get off the 82 bus one day and walk through a vibrant, modern central Liverpool - a place without chewing gum ridden pavements and hot dog stands. Liverpool One still set’s the bar for city centre regeneration. We did it before, we can do it again.

Michael McDonough is the Art Director and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a lead creative specialising in 3D and animation, film and conceptual spatial design.

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