To the left: what next for the Wirral Waterfront?

Jon Egan

Feb 22, 2024

As a child I found Wirral, and Birkenhead in particular, to be a deeply mystifying place. I knew that Ireland, where we went on holiday, was across the water, but where exactly was this other place? It wasn’t Liverpool, but was it even England or maybe Wales, or some strange liminal place existing outside my primitive geographical understanding?

My earliest journeys across the Mersey did little to dispel Wirral's sense of disquieting otherness. The deep, dark descent into the underworld of the Mersey Tunnel only reinforced its obvious detachment from humdrum reality. This must be the other side of the looking  glass.

Years later during my counter-cultural phase, and in the spirit of Parisian Surrealist explorations, we’d take “the metro” to Birkenhead in search of the merveilleux. Birkenhead’s numinous aura was only magnified by the eerie absence of people, the monumental grandeur of Hamilton Square echoing the ominous emptiness and abandonment of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical city scapes.

In later years my associations with Birkenhead became more prosaic and practical through involvement in a succession of aborted regeneration initiatives and "visionary" but unrealised masterplans. Spending days talking to frustrated residents and world-weary stakeholders I was struck by their sad fatalism, as if the town had been subject to some strange and enervating enchantment. As Liverpool’s cityscape was magically transformed before their very eyes, Birkenhead seemed frozen in a state of suspended animation akin to Narnia trapped in its perpetual winter. 

But of course there was nothing supernatural about the decline of Birkenhead. Once styled the City of The Future, Birkenhead has a proud and pioneering history. In addition to its global shipbuilding prowess, it’s the town that built the UK’s first public park, its first Municipal College of Art as well as Europe’s first tramway. Birkenhead’s curse is a toxic blend of economic decline and disastrous urban planning, making  Birkenhead a place that’s easier to pass through than get to. Whilst cars, people and investment pass Birkenhead by, it’s tempting (and partially true) to point the finger at poor leadership and botched planning. But is there another more fundamental reason for the town’s baleful situation? Is it rooted in Birkenhead and Wirral’s deeper crisis of identity? 

Regeneration has to be informed and framed by a sense of place - a clarity of purpose and identity. Without an existential paradigm regeneration is likely to be a series of disconnected and arbitrary interventions, very often aiming to undo the unforeseen consequences of a previously failed intervention. Birkenhead shopping centre is a palimpsest of flawed visions and ham-fisted initiatives. It is still just about possible to discern the archaeological remnants of what was, once upon a time, a high street (Grange Road), dissected, butchered and disfigured by ugly and already half-redundant modernist protuberances . This is town planning re-imagined as self-mutilation. 

In 2001 Wirral Council attempted to resolve the peninsula's ambiguous identity with a bold, but alas unsuccessful bid for City Status. This was always a difficult proposition to sell given the uneasy relationship between the borough's urban Mersey edge and its bucolic hinterland. If Wirral isn't a city, then what is it? A municipal construct? A geographical descriptor? A lifestyle aspiration? Is it one place or an amalgam of places with quite different characteristics, histories and identities? It is difficult to suppress the suspicion that the failure to arrest the decline of its distinct urban centres has something to do with their slow immersion and disappearance into an amorphous and confused abstraction. It's little wonder that a Council without a settled sense of identity (its fractious communities historically divided about whether they should have an L or a CH postcode), should struggle to formulate or deliver a coherent regeneration vision. To borrow a Marxist analogy, Wirral's debilitating dialectic needed a resolving synthesis - and happily they found one.

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‘Downtown Birkenhead needs to re-orientate itself and define its future in relation to an already burgeoning Liverpool City Centre…’

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The Wirral Local Plan (currently awaiting Government approval) ingeniously united the borough's disparate communities and political factions with a strategy to vigorously defend its greenbelt and direct all new housing development onto urban and brownfield sites. Implicit in the plan are two revelatory and foundational propositions.

1) Wirral is not a homogenous place - its Mersey edge is a connected urban strip that is qualitatively different from the pastoral commuter settlements west of the M53. (Income disparity between the borough's most deprived and affluent areas is greater than in any other UK local authority area.

2) The history, identity and future of the urban edge is umbilically connected to the place it stirs out at across the Mersey (but sometimes thinks exists in a different hemisphere) - it’s Liverpool’s Left Bank.

Wirral's Left Bank vision was a new regeneration narrative to reposition and re-imagine the Mersey shore, but is also the core strategy against predatory housebuilders’ determination to challenge the no passaran defence of the greenbelt. However, this defence would only be sustainable if Wirral could make the Left Bank a sufficiently attractive and commercially rewarding location for the scale of building necessary to meet the borough's new homes requirement. 

And herein lies the challenge. From New Ferry to New Brighton, the Left Bank littoral has, in recent decades - with one gloriously idiosyncratic exception (more later) - been a virtual regeneration exclusion zone. Turning what is often perceived as Liverpool's down at heel urban annexe into a thriving regeneration powerhouse is a challenge requiring exceptional presentational and practical capabilities.

The presentational brief has been curated by an impressive creative team, combining the branding and visualising expertise of designer, Miles Falkingham with the editorial acumen and eloquence of Birkenhead writer, David Lloyd,  The Left Bank mood board, flawlessly realised in the eponymous digital and print magazine, presents a richly fertile incipient oasis, pregnant with possibilities and welcoming to innovators, prospectors and the independently inclined.

Birkenhead Dock Branch Park, conceptual visualisation.

The Left Bank

As a destination for the discerning, Left Bank is a counterpoint to a Right Bank (Liverpool) whose identity and character is being lost under the stultifying uniformity of the standard regeneration model. 

But the Left Bank idea is more than a cleverly crafted re-branding exercise. It is also a set of values and sign posts to inform the delivery of what is potentially Wirral's most transformational regeneration windfall. Birkenhead 2040 outlines a radical vision for a re-imagined Birkenhead town centre underpinned by a series of successful Levelling Up and Town Deal funding awards totalling £80 million. 

In 2016, following on from my involvement in a consultation on yet another undelivered regeneration project, I was one of a small group who produced an unsolicited document sent to Wirral's then Regeneration Director, entitled Manifesto for Downtown Birkenhead. A call to arms, it's opening paragraph set out the key challenge and imperative:

"Downtown Birkenhead needs to re-orientate itself and define its future in relation to an already burgeoning Liverpool City Centre. Reaching out and strengthening its sense of proximity and connectedness will be vital in attracting the energy, activity and people that are currently absent from a once vibrant centre." 

The content was a series of ideas offered or identified during our conversations with stakeholders, or arising from immersive wanderings around a town rich with unique and under-utilised assets. The ideas included creating the region's best urban market, transforming the abandoned Dock Branch railway into Birkenhead's "low-line" and creating a venue for the town's burgeoning new music scene. In 2019 a Festival of Ideas, held as part of Wirral's Borough of Culture programme rehearsed these and other possibilities that would become the anchor ideas for the successful funding bids. 

But with both the ideas and funding to deliver transformational change, doubts are emerging as to whether Birkenhead may once again squander a golden opportunity. Following a flurry of key officer departures, including Alan Evans, the Regeneration Chief widely credited with delivering the successful funding bids, concerns are growing that the Council lacks the organisational capacity and technical skills to translate tantalising visions into tangible realities. 

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‘…it’s something that people would be willing to get off a train for.’

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More worrying still, it is now highly probable that pragmatic imperatives will lead to the abandonment of one of 2040's flagship projects. When visionary Dutch architect Jan Knikker was engaged in 2015 by Liverpool developers, ION, to feed into their Move Ahead, Birkenhead masterplan, the possibility of an urban market as unflinchingly radical as his Rotterdam masterpiece became a beguiling statement of ambition. After all, Birkenhead had been a market town, and a re-imagined, relocated modern urban market was the one thing Liverpool didn't have to offer. In the words of Birkenhead Councillor and Wirral Green Party Co-Leader, Pat Cleary, "it’s something that people would be willing to get off a train for."

Citing spiralling costs, the proposal for a new market on the site of the former House of Fraser store at the interface between the St Werburgh's Quarter and the proposed Hind Street residential quarter, would now appear to be dead in the water. A proposal to move the existing market traders into the former Argos store in the Grange Precinct, which is owned by the Council, is being presented as a smart value for money solution that turns a vacant liability into a source of much-needed revenue.

For Cleary, this would be more that the death knell of one of 2040's most transformational projects, it would signify, in his words the replacement of a genuine "regeneration perspective by an asset management mentality." For Cleary, the future of the market is emblematic. If one piece of a coherent jigsaw can be removed, where does that leave projects like Dock Branch Park that could just as easily begin to look expensive and expendable. His is not a lone voice, Birkenhead MP, Mick Whitley, called on the Council to reaffirm its commitment to the new market, warning that the revised option "would mean years of work up in smoke." Following a fraught Council meeting on December 6th, it appears these concerns are unlikely to be heeded.  Although officers were instructed to investigate two other options  including refurbishing the existing market hall, the House of Fraser site looks likely to remain a boarded up monument to failed ambition.

Others intimately involved in the evolution of the 2040 vision are also worried that the integrity and spirit of the 2040 vision could be lost in delivery.  Liam Kelly, whose Make CIC organisation is a key partner in the delivery of the proposed creative hub in Argyle Street, is willing to accept the need for pragmatism, but favoured a less costly iteration of the existing plan on the proposed site, explaining, "it doesn't have to be expensive to look great." For Kelly, the litmus test for 2040 overall will be the Council's willingness to sustain the coalition of stakeholders and co-creators who have worked with the Council in shaping the vision. As the various funding strands are blended and the overall delivery architecture is refined, Kelly believes, it's about "having the doers around the table and how difficult decisions are made" that will safeguard the integrity and deliverability of the 2040 blueprint.

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‘Seeing the tragic and seemingly inevitable decline of the once vibrant Victoria Street, local entrepreneur, Dan Davies, embarked on a uniquely eccentric and joyous regeneration adventure.’

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With a final decision on the market project now scheduled for February, the omens point increasingly in the direction of Argos. Both Cleary and Kelly stress the much bigger picture perspective that is somehow absent from the beancounting calculations underpinning the Argos proposition. Without a radically different and vibrant Birkenhead town centre, the viability and credibility of plans to build thousands of new homes on brownfield land at Hind Street and Wirral Waters becomes highly questionable.  With Leverhulme Estates already launching a legal challenge in support of their plans for 800 greenbelt homes, the pressure on the Local Plan, and the fragile political consensus underpinning the Left  Bank idea, may begin to exhibit destabilising cracks and fissures.     

Away from Birkenhead there is another equally worrying indicator that when push comes to shove, pragmatism and asset management logic may be taking precedence over a commitment to the Left Bank aesthetic. There is no known precedent or template for the extraordinary regeneration story of Rockpoint and New Brighton. Seeing the tragic and seemingly inevitable decline of the once vibrant Victoria Street, local entrepreneur, Dan Davies, embarked on a uniquely eccentric and joyous regeneration adventure. Buying up empty and semi-derelict shops, he commissioned internationally renowned street artists to execute a series of spectacular murals celebrating the history, culture and identity of the town memorably dubbed, The Last Resort, by photographer Martin Parr. 

This was not just about a lick of paint or a superficial facelift to cheer the spirits.  Davies's restless energy and obsessive Canute-style audacity has reversed the tide of decline by bringing new businesses, cafes, venues,  an art gallery, pub, recording studio and performance space to make Victoria Street possibly one of the most visually and creatively eclectic high streets in this part of England.

With an offer that caters for every demographic - from disadvantaged young people to socially isolated older residents - the breadth of Rockpoint's improvised and quirky inclusivity was perhaps most perfectly expressed in Hope - The Anti-Supermarket. Occupying the thrice-failed food store, Rockpoint transformed the unit into a multi-use space for artisan and independent retailers, social events, comedy, music and local am-dram performances. At a time when communities everywhere are witnessing a diminution of social capital and public space, Davies was delivering, under one roof, the kind of outcomes that 2040's proposed "creative" and "wellbeing hubs" can only promise.  In a baffling decision, Wirral Council chose not to extend Rockpoint's tenure of the building, opting instead for the revenue rewards of a hardware store. Hadn't they read the magazine?

The Left Bank idea is an astute piece of positioning, and with an intelligently targeted and resourced campaign, it’s a necessary component in differentiating Wirral's offer, and guiding its regeneration direction. But the Market and Anti-Supermarket case studies also highlight the fragility of mood board-based regeneration, especially when those ineffable and immeasurable subtleties don't convert easily into the hard currency of public sector fiduciary imperatives.

But perhaps there is another flaw in a strategy that fails to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causation. Paris's Left Bank is not simply the bohemian haunts of the Latin Quarter and St Germain-des-Pres and nor is London's South Bank just Borough Market and its trendier residential enclaves. To return to Pat Cleary's challenge, what will make enough people get off the train, or even decide to put down roots in the new urban neighbourhoods envisaged in Birkenhead and the Left Bank? To be more than the One-Eyed town, doesn't Birkenhead need (and deserve) its equivalent of The Musee D'Orsay or Tate Modern? At the conclusion of the Manifesto for Downtown Birkenhead, we posed a question - shouldn't the town that invented public parks and pioneered mass transit reclaim its capacity for innovation and ambition?     

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“Important places are home to important institutions.... Far from being frightened of big ambitious ideas, we need to encourage them, test them and ultimately deliver them.”

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Does 2040 lack the scale of ambition and impact necessary to deliver the catalytic stimulus that Birkenhead requires? Conceiving and delivering projects of that magnitude (including the discreetly mooted V&A of The North) and integrating and re-balancing the two banks of what a casual visitor might mistakenly believe to be one city, is a task that probably necessitated the invention of a City Region and a Metro Mayor. 

In fairness to Wirral, the authority has been especially ravaged by the impact of austerity, hollowing out its core capacities and stretching  services to breaking point. This is a difficult time to navigate the uncharted terrain of delivery, and the pressure and temptation to find pragmatic compromises may be difficult to resist. 

In difficult and demanding circumstances, Wirral has formulated a complex and highly integrated planning and regeneration prospectus, an edifice where big picture objectives are founded on detailed and precisely crafted plans and projects. When Councillors meet to make a final decision on the future of Birkenhead Market in February, they may need to consider whether this is the moment to play a particularly precarious game of jenga?

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Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

*Main image: Eszter Imrene Virt, Alamy

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Ye Wha? Opera on the Mersey and other Mad Visions

Paul Bryan

“The way I come at things is to make no small plans. The city has had too much of that, too much dross, too much crap, too much small time thinking.”

So says Michael McDonough, Co-Founder here at Liverpolitan, and a man who has developed a bit of a reputation for his outspoken criticism of Liverpool’s (lack of) development scene. And in fairness, it’s a view that I, as the magazine’s Editor, often share.

One of the things that makes Michael interesting to me (other than the fact he’s had to develop skin as thick as a rhinosaurus to bat off ‘the army of gobshites’ who take him on or even pose as him online) is the fact that despite a successful career as a 3D designer and animator which has taken him to the capital, he continues through his design work to try to make a positive contribution to his home city of Liverpool and the discussion about its future. He does this without fanfare or gratitude and in fact, often in the face of quite complacent criticism from ‘locals’. Often by people with far less talent or insight than himself. For over ten years now, entirely under his own steam, Michael has been dreaming up new ways to re-imagine Liverpool’s urban landscape – designing outlandish opera houses, cathedral-like train stations, gothic bridges, and new visions for the docks. None of them have been built or are ever likely to be. They are not fully formed architectural plans, more dreamscapes of the imagination and we’ve made a showcase of that work in this feature article.

But why does he bother? What’s the point? Aren’t they just castles in the air built before AI and Midjourney made fantastical images the prerogative of all? To believe so would be to miss what’s really going on. There’s a much harder edge lying beneath the glossy visuals. He’s making the case for ambition as an antidote to a city-wide loss of nerve.

“We should be thinking in the same way world cities do like London, Singapore and New York. All these places have big ambitions. We should be looking to emulate that,” says McDonough. Instead, he believes Liverpool increasingly seems resigned to a lower status and too often its mediocre plans reflect that. Small schemes are favoured over transformative ones and then heralded as being the way forward. Anything substantial or showy is typically treated with hostility and suspicion.

“I keep hearing that in Liverpool we’re different, that we have our own models of success, but it’s a language of defeatism, masked and airbrushed as some kind of urban superiority.” He rejects this idea totally. “Being different doesn’t mean you reject ambition, scale and big ideas. That doesn’t make you different, it just makes you stupid.”

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‘There’s an obsession in Liverpool’s planning circles with ‘context’ – the idea that new developments must be submissive to the city’s crown jewels."

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Michael’s designs are meant in sharp contrast to the veritable cottage industry of ‘place-making’ peddlers, much favoured in recent years by our city leaders, whose low aspiration output chimes with this defeatist mindset. Meanwhile, the same old local architectural practices win job after job, churning out budget off-the-shelf buildings that further erode what makes the city special. There’s an obsession in Liverpool’s planning circles with ‘context’ – the idea that new developments must be submissive to the city’s crown jewels. But that attitude just results in bad buildings and Michael’s designs deliberately shun such restrictions. Some of his designs will inspire, but also enrage.

“The irony,” says McDonough, “is that those buildings we love so much are there purely because of ambition, because of power and commerce. They didn’t just land there as gifts from God.”

The point of history is to learn from it, not to fetishize it. We do Liverpool’s history a disservice by feeble attempts at mimicry. The Liverpool of yesteryear was bolder and more global in its perspective and if we are to take something useful from the past, it should be that.  What Michael is attempting to do with these designs is to remind the city that it’s capable of bigger ideas, capable of re-imagining itself, capable of statement architecture, and capable of challenging its city rivals.

“What pushes me to create these designs is a desire to make people see the city differently – and by that I mean primarily the people who live and work within it. Because if we can awaken that boldness of old, so much is possible in our future,” says Michael. That is the lens through which he’d like people to view his designs. Of course, design is subjective. What might be considered beautiful by one person, can be viewed as horrendous by another but he claims to welcome those reactions. “One of our motivations for founding Liverpolitan magazine, was to create a place where thoughts and ideas on the city’s built environment could be shared, discussed and visualised – to think beyond self-constrained limitations,” he concludes. And indeed that is part of our mission.

So buckle in. This is Michael’s contribution. We hope others will be inspired to contribute in the future. It’s a long read. You may need a cup of tea. But there are lots of pretty pictures and food for thought.  

Enjoy.

English National Opera, Liverpool

Post-Eurovision, Liverpool emerges with its reputation for hosting big events enhanced and attention inevitably turns to ‘what next?’ So how should the city attempt to capitalise on this positive exposure? Capitalise being the key word here – turning the benefits of a one-off event into something long-lasting, and preferably given a tangible physical form.

Step forward candidate 1: The English National Opera (ENO). This prestigious London-based institution has been told by its funders, Arts Council England, that if it wants the purse strings to remain untied, the institution needs to up-sticks and move to the regions, and rumour has it that Liverpool is very much on the short-list. Some will question why a city like Liverpool needs opera, but even if Tosca and Turandot are not your kind of thing, attracting such a high profile organisation will only add to Liverpool’s cultural offer and open up new job opportunities for young people who might otherwise fly the nest.

Dreaming up a new opera house on the banks of the Mersey, is something that dates back to the wild and unfunded dreams of former Mayor Joe Anderson. But this time, at least in theory, the prospect sounds a little more plausible. Not fully plausible mind – a recent article in The Post claimed the move might be more northern outpost than wholesale relocation, akin to Channel 4’s setup in Leeds. Still, it’s not completely out of the equation – especially if a new facility could combine uses with other functions – education, meeting space, performance arts. Back in 2021, the then-chancellor, Rishi Sunak allocated £2m for a feasibility study into some kind of new immersive music attraction. So despite initial talk of yet another Beatles-focused space, perhaps there’s scope for blending these projects onto one site to make the whole more achievable.

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‘The point of history is to learn from it, not to fetishize it. We do Liverpool’s history a disservice by feeble attempts at mimicry.’

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The most obvious location is the site of the now defunct former police station headquarters at Canning Place off the Strand. It’s a big site in a glamorous location with the potential to integrate the city centre more closely with the Baltic Triangle. In scale, Michael is proposing a building similar to the much lauded Copenhagen Opera House, which also has a waterfront setting, but he’s keen to avoid any slavish adherence to ‘context’ – “the space is big enough to create its own”, adding new aesthetic design cues to Liverpool’s urban environment rather than forever replicating (usually in impoverished form) what is already there. For Michael, this means “no warehouse-style blocks, no red-brick, and a departure from straight lines.” Some have said they can see a cobra snake in this design and others an elephant (hopefully not of the white variety). “I didn’t intend either but if they’re there, they’re there,” says Michael. “It’s all about organic, smooth, natural forms.” The final two images in the set, which show the interior of the main auditorium, were created using artificial intelligence more as an experiment in what is possible with the technology.

As an added bonus, Michael is proposing to demolish the John Lewis car park, which adds a “blocky barrier to the growth of the city centre eastwards,” as well as eroding the sense of occasion that this landmark structure deserves. A new solution would have to be found for the bus depot that sits beneath it (not to be confused with the Paradise Street Bus Station which would remain unaffected).

Liverpool Overhead Railway

Many people have long been fascinated by the Liverpool Overhead railway and perplexed by its loss. Extending seven miles along the length of the city’s impressive docklands from Seaforth and Litherland in the north to the Dingle in the south, the line survived for just 64 years before the decline in dock employment ate too deeply into its commuter base. There can be little doubt that if the Overhead Railway had survived into the modern era instead of being dismantled in 1956-57, it would have become another iconic symbol of Liverpool reminiscent of the Chicago ‘L’ trains. Not only that, but it may have long ago expedited the regeneration of the north docks into other uses. Instead, minus viable transport provision, we have had to watch on powerless as docks have lain derelict for decades under the tattered banner of Liverpool Waters.

As much as it’s fun to sit within an old Overhead carriage within the Liverpool Museum (and marvel at its spacious dimensions and varnished wooden interiors), Michael would much prefer to see it rebuilt. The case is becoming stronger with the soon to open Bramley Moore Dock Stadium, the Titanic Hotel and new apartments in the Tobacco warehouse extending the city centre and creating a line of activity to the attractions centred around the Albert Dock.

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‘The Liverpool Overhead Railway may have long ago expedited the regeneration of the north docks into other uses. Instead, minus viable transport provision, we have had to watch on powerless as docks have lain derelict for decades under the tattered banner of Liverpool Waters.’

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However, Michael says “we cannot and should not merely recreate a pastiche of the old line.” Technology and engineering have moved on, and the old structure was difficult and expensive to maintain. Besides, its heavy-set viaducts blocked views of the river from further inland, which might be unwelcome today. If the city are ever to rebuild the Liverpool Overhead Railway, he feels it should “celebrate the past but not be beholden to it.” A little like London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR), his version 2.0 is a fully-fledged railway, not a monorail, elevated by organic and elegant concrete columns that avoid the blocky and very nineties form of the DLR design.

To maximise its utility, Michael’s new Liverpool Overhead Railway would not simply follow the old route but would connect more widely. Starting at Bootle in the north to better integrate that area as part of our metropolis, the line would connect the Everton stadium and key attractions centred around the Albert Dock before heading off south to the airport, and perhaps also east via the disused Waterloo or Victoria tunnels. The design of the structure would be modern, and the trains capable of running on conventional tracks (like the recently introduced Merseyrail ones) opening up options for integration with the wider rail network.

Royal Opera House North & Wirral Cultural Centre

At Liverpolitan, we’ve always believed the Wirral Waterfront to be Liverpool’s great missed opportunity. Overlooking one of the finest riverside vistas in the world, the left bank of the Mersey should be prime real estate, and yet it’s almost apologetically unimpressive – as if frightened to upstage its more famous brother. Surely, we can do better? “People laughed at the idea of Salford Quays hosting the BBC and the Imperial War Museum North,” says Michael, “but with its spectacular setting, the Wirral Waterfront should be aiming higher again.”

Two waterfronts, one city has to be the future but to really make that idea count, at some point we’ll need a significant intervention in the landscape. Wirral Council are doing good work in master planning a new Birkenhead with a better relationship to the river and Liverpolitan is all for it. But to seal the deal, argues Michael, “the Wirral needs something that stands out, something that can be seen from the Liverpool side – something that says ‘Look at me, come over to the Left Bank.’”

Given the 0.7 mile width of the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead, any new landmark structure would need to be huge, gargantuan even. Taller than the 210 feet Ventilation Tower. Possibly taller than the 328 feet Radio City Tower. Cathedral-like in scale and presence. It was along those lines that McDonough put forward this earlier concept for a Royal Opera House North – aligned so that “you can see it as you look down Water Street – the two sides of the river visually connected with an iconic landmark; a catalyst for seeing Birkenhead through new eyes.”

The design is dominated by a series of steel funnels with a glinting chrome façade pointing in all directions of the compass including skyward. They would be wrapped around a central auditorium which could also have uses as a cultural centre exploring the Wirral’s fascinating history from the Vikings to its use as a monastic retreat, not to mention shipbuilding and its colourful background as a smugglers paradise.

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‘The Wirral needs something that stands out, something that can be seen from the Liverpool side – that says ‘Look at me, come over to the Left Bank.’

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Liverpool HS2

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the High Speed 2 railway project hasn’t it? Maybe that’s a good thing – just get on and build it. But for Liverpolitan, HS2 has always been something of a poker-tell, not so much about the lack of commitment of the national government to invest anywhere outside of the south – which to be honest, we can all take for granted. No, what HS2 really reveals in full technicolour is the shallowness of Northern solidarity – some places, most notably Manchester and Leeds are consistently favoured over others like Liverpool and Newcastle. Despite the sweet words of ‘King of the North’, Andy Burnham, arguments about agglomeration are forever used to draw money and opportunity towards these investment blackholes and away from everywhere else. And HS2 has been the smoking gun. More’s the pity that Liverpool’s own leaders have been too foolish to notice (or they never cared).

When the Conservative government announced the Integrated Rail Plan for the North and Midlands in late 2021, the media was full of a wailing and gnashing of teeth. Cutting HS2’s eastern leg to Leeds and scaling back plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail was seen as more evidence of the perfidiousness of London and Whitehall. Right on cue, Liverpool’s often hapless Metro Major Steve Rotheram, joined in the venting, complaining that “we were promised Grand Designs, but we’ve had to settle for 60 Minute Make Over.”

Not for the first time, a fair reflection of Liverpool’s own particular interests was absent, but with the help of railway campaigners like Martin Sloman and Andrew Morris of 20 Miles More, Liverpolitan spotted it. The truth was, the plan might have been less good for Leeds and Manchester but it was better for Liverpool. Fresh high speed track was going to be laid closer to the city in a dedicated spur that would relieve capacity constraints and increase the scope for an expansion in freight services. In addition, the need to widen the narrow throat entrance to Lime Street was also finally acknowledged. Hurrah!

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‘What HS2 really reveals in full technicolour is the shallowness of Northern solidarity – some places, most notably Manchester and Leeds are consistently favoured over others like Liverpool and Newcastle.’

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Still, wanting the best for Liverpool means building new track all the way into the city centre serviced by a full specification HS2 station. By the way, what happened to the commission set up by Steve Rotheram in March 2019 and announced with full fanfare at the MIPIM Property Exhibition, which chaired by Everton CEO Denise Barrett-Baxendale, was going to choose between 2 possible locations for a new “architecturally stunning” HS2 station in the city centre as well as 5 routes in for the track? Quietly dropped?

Focusing on the most likely outcome of a redeveloped Liverpool Lime Street, Michael has put together some outline designs, which incorporated the grade-II listed Radisson Red Hotel (previously the North Western Hotel) as the main entrance to the station.

To read Liverpolitan’s cutting dissection of HS2 and the Integrated Rail Plan for the North and Midlands, check out ‘HS2 – A Liverpool Coup?’ by Michael McDonough and Paul Bryan

Or to read Martin Sloman’s examination into the options for a city centre station, try ‘Lime Street or Bust? The Options For Liverpool’s HS2 Station’

Moorfields and the Commercial District

Back in March 2023, Liverpolitan tweeted about the state of Moorfields, which we described as “a regrettable symbol of Liverpool's down at heel CBD.”  We noted that the area is littered with dereliction, empty office buildings and signs of homelessness, and asked the question, “Have we become so used to this embarrassing patch that we no longer see it as failure?”

The tweet received almost 45,000 views and provoked a whole host of online conversation with the issue later picked up by the Liverpool Echo. Councillor Nick Small, who after the recent local elections is now the city’s Cabinet Member For Growth and the Economy, got involved, agreeing that the site needs to be developed. There was some discussion about whether robust plans for the area were in place already as part of the City Centre Local Plan and Strategic Investment Frameworks (SIFs). But mostly, to the extent that the local BID or the Council have acknowledged the issue, action on the ground seems in short supply.

To some extent, the lack of regeneration may be an issue of plot owners sitting on parcels of land and waiting for a payday, but as a subsequent squabble between Merseyrail and the Council over who was responsible for cleaning the grotty Moorfields escalator showed, a lack of concerted coordination between agencies leaves ample scope for things to fall between the cracks.

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Moorfields is littered with dereliction, empty office buildings and signs of homelessness. Have we become so used to this embarrassing patch that we no longer see it as failure?

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Michael McDonough argues that Moorfields is another of Liverpool’s great missed opportunities and it’s hard to disagree. The area’s city centre location, great transport links, and historic setting within the traditional heart of Liverpool commerce, should with the right support, allow it to live again. “The whole area needs re-invention and the drift towards noisy bars and tourism serves to cheapen its prospects,” says Michael. He claims that demolishing the rotten Yates Wine Lodge should just be the start. “Moorfields can handle density and scale and is the perfect place to rebuild Liverpool’s grade-A office offer” centred around the idea of prestige and talent.

In these visuals, Michael wanted to rebuild the entrance to Moorfields Station with mid-rise commercial office space above – no more going up to go down. He also took a stab at upgrading the former Exchange Station offices, which “may have been grand from the front, but from the rear leave a lot to be desired” – failing to properly address the park that will hopefully one day be re-instated as part of new public realm within the wider Pall Mall development.

St Johns and Central Liverpool

Far, far and away McDonough’s biggest bugbear with Liverpool’s built environment has to the St Johns Shopping Centre. We know it’s commercially successful and last time we looked it had a 97% retail occupancy rate. It clearly fills an important niche within the city’s shopping offer with its cheaper rents for retailers. But damn if isn’t an ugly pig of a building (no offence to our porcine brethren). Arriving at Liverpool Lime Street, that’s the first thing you see. Talk about first impressions. Squatting over a network of old streets and the site of what would be today, if it hadn’t been bulldozed, a much valued Victorian market, Michael believes St Johns is a “dated lump of a building that acts as a physical and psychological barrier between London Road and the rest of the city centre.” It’s not a stretch to suggest that St Johns has played a role in the former’s decline. Repeated, half-hearted attempts to patch the shopping centre up have failed and its blue plastic blanket and struggling traders’ market are a testament to “a succession of bad planning decisions going back fifty plus years.” A lasting solution to all of these problems, says Michael, “requires demolition.”

The images Michael has put together here are a collection of different attempts to reinvent this “ugly and misfiring section of Liverpool.” The main driving force behind his designs is a desire to remove this “lumpen barrier” and re-stitch together our centre “in a more permeable way that evokes expressions of pride rather than cringes.” Michael wants to see a much better front door to Liverpool Lime Street – our city’s once grand hello and goodbye point. He’d like to replace this “parody of the city’s greatness” with something more iconic and ambitious.

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‘St Johns is a dated lump of a building, its blue plastic blanket and struggling traders’ market a testament to a succession of bad planning decisions going back fifty plus years.’

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The eagle-eyed might spot the use of neon and a prominent clock tower as a modernised callback to what the site has lost. As Michael says, “we can’t always recreate the past but we can be inspired by its best bits.” He’s also given the Grade 2-listed but still a bit ugly, Radio City Tower, a makeover, adding an elegant polished steel lattice of radiating lines which add height, fluidity and tricks of light to recast a regional landmark into one of world significance.

Read more about Michael McDonough’s vision for St Johns in the Liverpolitan feature, A New Central Liverpool.

The Silo

The former grain silo in the north docks is one of Liverpolitan’s favourite buildings in Liverpool. If it was just a little further south, closer to the Tobacco warehouse and Bramley Moore, we could imagine it being repurposed as a truly iconic, high capacity arts, events and business hub. However, the silo is located deep within the working part of the dock estate with industrial infrastructure all around it, so that idea is likely to remain a dream. Still, just imagine what could be done with this incredible structure. For McDonough, the project would “represent a development challenge similar to how London’s Bankside Power Station was transformed into the Tate Modern.”

For these visuals, Michael has re-imagined the space as a media industry hub – with film, TV and radio studios and education space for our universities – “a back-up plan in case the Littlewoods Film Project doesn’t deliver.” There would also be a theatre venue, gallery space and office facilities for the production sector – which he describes as “the perfect tonic to act as a catalyst for the regeneration of North Liverpool.” Another possible use, he suggests, might be a central hub for burgeoning logistics businesses if the new Freeport ever takes off. As you can see, Michael has taken the liberty of re-instating the Liverpool Overhead Railway, with ‘Silo Station’ ready to whisk visitors straight to the doorstep.

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‘What Michael is attempting to do with these designs is to remind the city that it’s capable of bigger ideas, capable of re-imagining itself, capable of statement architecture, and capable of challenging its city rivals.’

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Liverpool John Lennon Airport

Not for the first time, Liverpool John Lennon Airport finds itself in a strange position. Back in the years following World War 2, JLA (minus the Beatles moniker) lost its opportunity to become the north’s most important airport when the Ministry of Defence, which had requisitioned it for the RAF, sat on the asset while its Manchester rival grew. It’s been an uphill struggle ever since.

Not that Speke Airport, as some still call it, hasn’t had its days in the sun. For a time in the early 2000s, Liverpool was THE favoured location for budget airlines in the northwest as passenger numbers ballooned from 0.6 million in 1997 to 5.5 million in 2007. That growth stalled as its much larger rival came to its senses and stopped turning its nose up at budget travellers.  Still, JLA has remained a valuable strategic asset for the city, and despite the devastating blow that Covid dealt to its passenger numbers and its finances, the airport is making a solid recovery. Finally free of the dominant stranglehold of Ryanair and Easyjet, the airport is now diversifying its offer, attracting new airlines such as Lufthansa, Air Lingus and Wizz Air. And JLA continues to pick up a steady stream of awards for the efficiency of its operations, where queues tend to be largely absent.

Sad then, that Liverpool Airport has found itself consistently under attack in recent years from local environmental activists such as Liverpool Friends of the Earth and the Save Oglet Shore campaign group, who appear to want to make an example of it, by opposing all possible expansion. In fact, it’s been pretty clear in Liverpolitan’s own Twitter debates with these groups that there are those who would like to see the airport closed altogether – its miniscule contribution to the nation’s CO2 output too much for some. Others claim the farmers’ fields to the south are too ecologically important to lose or that air quality is impacting the health of local residents – the result in part of some very strange and short-sighted choices by the Planning Department on where to locate new residential developments. Inexplicably, our council continues to have a very ambivalent attitude to what should rightly be viewed as a key enabler of our economic prosperity.

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‘The reality is, the healthy human desire to travel and see the world will not and should not be legislated away by those with a dystopian vision of the future.’

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The reality is, the healthy human desire to travel and see the world will not and should not be legislated away by those with a dystopian vision of the future. The technical challenges to realising a cleaner way to fly are immense, but they are not uniquely Liverpool’s burden and no other city would so blindly hobble itself in restriction.

Michael McDonough grew up next to Liverpool John Lennon Airport and has seen its infrastructure grow from “a small, bland, industrial shed of a terminal into something more befitting,” and at some point in the future he believes it will need to expand. Michael argues that better public transport provision should be a priority with an extension of the Northern line or a tram connection mooted as alternatives. In these designs, Michael has proposed a train line that tracks underground for the final few hundred meters to arrive directly at a much expanded terminal. The capacity of the current structure is around 7 million, so if JLA can hold onto its post-Covid gains and continue to build upon them, discussions about what comes next will be inevitable. “The myopic few who claim the northwest already has a large airport and doesn’t need another, are shutting their eyes on the obvious.,” says Michael. “Demand for flying will continue to rise and the north can easily sustain a larger Liverpool John Lennon Airport at Speke.”

Northern Assembly

Given the shenanigans at Liverpool City Council in recent years, it might seem strange to suggest our city as the seat of political governance for the whole of the north. But a Labour government is a distinct possibility come 2025 and they’ve often flirted with the idea of greater regional devolution and a northern assembly to govern our unruly mob. Manchester is the usual default option, of course, but at Liverpolitan we can’t be having that. Perhaps only Newcastle can offer the grandeur of our riverside estuary setting here on the Mersey. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Liverpool took inspiration from its darkest days to become a paragon of democratic values? To take accountability and citizen engagement as its governing principle, to put behind it the days of boss politics and party before city, and instead show the world how local government is done when at its best.

McDonough’s design of a new Assembly district is based on a wholly different concept to Peel’s current underwhelming plans for Liverpool’s central docks – albeit quite capable of incorporating a sizeable, new park. The site encompasses a parliament building, ancillary office space, a new cultural centre with notes of modern gothic and an extension of a revitalised mixed-use Ten Streets area including substantial residential to repopulate the area and give it life. In these days when the potential for terrorist attacks is sadly a design factor, Michael believes the location’s riverside setting has unique advantages, making it defensible for security services. Addressing concerns about the loss of ‘blue space’ at Waterloo Dock, he has increased the provision of waterways by reclaiming some of the infilled land, and bridging buildings across it. This Michael explains is “meant as both a symbolic and practical gesture of compromise in a city often at loggerheads with itself on how to reach for the stars architecturally without compromising existing heritage elements.”

Naturally, this substantial expansion of our city centre, requires transport infrastructure, which Michael has designed in with a new station at Vauxhall on the Northern line. Such investments in transport become more viable as we add additional all-year-round uses instead of just relying on the footfall that the new Bramley Moore stadium will provide.

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‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Liverpool took inspiration from its darkest days to become a paragon of democratic values? To put behind it the days of boss politics and party before city, and instead show the world how local government is done at its best.’

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For a fuller exploration of this concept, read Michael McDonough’s Liverpolitan feature, Welcome to the Assembly District.

Liverpool Central Station

The redevelopment of Liverpool Central Station has long been on Merseytravel’s wish list and it’s not hard to understand why. Boasting the highest passenger numbers of any underground station in the UK outside of London, Liverpool Central is, despite recent minor refurbishment, “a dark, dated and cramped station prone to over-crowding,” according to Michael. Its current single island platform structure and track layout on the Northern Line section also places restrictions on train capacity. A full scale expansion of the station, which the Liverpool Combined Authority are pushing central government for, would allow more trains to run through services linking up the Northern and City lines via a re-used Wapping Tunnel. This would in turn free up capacity at Lime Street Station enabling it to focus on its role as an intercity and regional transport hub.

A few years ago there were grand plans to convert the old Lewis’ department store which sits next to Central Station into a new shopping centre accommodating new residential blocks. A side benefit of the scheme was the use of Lewis’ ground floor to open up a new, additional entrance to the station itself. However, the proposed scheme, which ultimately came to nothing, left intact the tired, almost prefab current station entrance – “a pale shadow of what was once a magnificent Victorian railway terminal,” says Michael.

McDonough believes that when the time comes to rebuild this thing, we should “go all out and design a station that lets in the light.” These visuals imagine a doubling in the size of the station envelope, with an additional platform, and the complete removal and replacement of the shopping arcade with a dedicated railway concourse at the street level front end. The plan would allow the floor above the underground platforms to be removed allowing sunlight to reach down to create a much more welcoming environment. Reinforced as a major local transport hub for the city, and with the poorly performing shopping centre now gone, Michael believes the wider site offers potential to “accommodate new office and residential accommodation at impressive scale.”

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‘The proposed scheme, which ultimately came to nothing, left intact the tired, almost prefab current station entrance – a pale shadow of what was once a magnificent Victorian railway terminal.’

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New Brighton Pier and Observation Tower

The advent of foreign travel certainly did for many of Britain’s seaside resorts. Still, nostalgia aside, glancing through old photographs of New Brighton does makes the heart bleed for what was lost. It’s hard to think of a more striking example of the region’s self-destructive attitude towards its built environment than the loss of the old ballroom and tower, fire or no fire. Not to mention its pier, pleasure grounds and lido. Daniel Davies of Rockpoint Leisure has been doing his bit in recent years to bring a bit of hip to Victoria Street and the Championship Adventure Golf course is well worth a visit too. In fact, there are tentative signs that Wirral Council are starting to understand what they have, even if the area has been stripped of many of its key attractions.  Liverpool’s Left Bank can and should be a treasured beauty spot, a place for families to enjoy and a haven for the avante garde and edgy. Now is the time to think bigger.

Michael hasn’t yet worked on a full plan for New Brighton but bringing back some kind of landmark beacon with a viewing deck, visible from the other side of the Mersey and prominent to the passing cruise ships feels like it should be part of the picture. Back in the early 2000s, sculptor Tom Murphy proposed a 150-foot statue of the Roman god, Neptune, to sit in the waters at the mouth of our mighty river – Liverpool’s equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Colossus of Rhodes. Oh, how we’d like to have seen that! Or if money was no object, two of them either side of the river standing proud like the Argonaths of Lord of the Rings. In the meantime, Michael McDonough took a stab at a slightly less monumentalist beacon a few years ago.

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‘Back in the early 2000s, sculptor Tom Murphy proposed a 150-foot statue of the Roman god, Neptune, to sit in the waters at the mouth of our mighty river – Liverpool’s equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Colossus of Rhodes.’

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The Liverpool ‘Angel’ Bridge

Unashamedly a flight of fancy and almost certainly the most outlandish of McDonough’s ideas, the concept of a bridge linking Liverpool and Birkenhead delivers an element of San Francisco’s Golden Gate magic and then tries to one-up it. There’s something slightly Game of Thrones about this design, which Michael says he wasn’t consciously thinking about at the time. “It’s intended as statement architecture,” says McDonough, “A big ‘Here I am’ to the world that would forever add a new image to the iconography by which Liverpool is known.” The idea behind it is to unlock the two sides of the Mersey as one urban centre, transforming Birkenhead’s prospects for the better. It would, of course, be ludicrously expensive and so is likely to remain one for the mind’s eye. “Building this kind of structure would take serious doses of civic ambition and that’s the kind of vision we don’t often see in these parts,” said Michael.

For those worrying whether the bridge would undermine the Mersey tunnels, it has been designed as pedestrian-only, although it could be adapted to accommodate light rail or electric tram-buses. In terms of location, on the Liverpool side, Michael imagines it would sit between the Albert Dock and the Museum of Liverpool, while over at Birkenhead, the bridge would land at Woodside, right next to his alternate proposed site for an Opera House North.

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“It’s intended as statement architecture”, says McDonough, “A big ‘Here I am’ to the world that would forever add a new image to the iconography by which Liverpool is known.”

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…and finally.

Project vision and designs by Michael McDonough. Article by Paul Bryan.

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Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach.

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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