Bill Gleeson: The age of the skyscraper has finally ended

Jan 16 2008 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

SHOPPING channel QVC needs a new head office and broadcasting base.

While its call centre and warehouse are located in Knowsley, the head office and broadcasting base are currently in London.

But the lease on their London premises expires in 2012, so QVC is evaluating its options.

Two places on their list of potential new homes are Knowsley and Salford’s Media City development.

You can see the logic for both.

They already have premises and staff at Knowsley, and maybe savings can be achieved by housing the entire operation on one site.

On the other hand, Media City may offer a pool of relevant talent that is not available here. At stake are 500 jobs, most of them well paid. It would be a great opportunity to secure what would be Grade A inward investment for the region. Let’s hope The Mersey Partnership and Knowsley Council can land it.

LIVERPOOL Vision chief executive Jim Gill has done no more than state the obvious when he warned that there won’t be any more tall buildings constructed in Liverpool for many years.

The credit crunch will deter bankers from backing new urban living skyscrapers.

It doesn’t help that many of these urban living developments are already half-empty.

Now that the rush to build high appears about to be coming to an end, it’s a good moment to reflect on the missed opportunities of the recent past.

Do you remember all the delays and dithering about proposed investments by, for example Irish group Chieftain Developments. Their original proposal for a tall building close to Lime Street station was turned down, some felt, because it was too close to English Partnerships Lime Street scheme. But, just a few months ago, that EP scheme was abandoned, too. The Mersey Property Group’s proposed Princes Dock tower appears to have fallen off the radar. Maro’s first Brunswick Quay scheme is another that suffered at the hands of the heritage lobby and politicians.

All the indecision about the city’s tall buildings policy three years ago meant many schemes were turned down when investors were still keen to put money into the city. The dithering doesn’t look so clever now that many of those investors have gone away.

I WATCHED last Friday’s opening ceremony for Capital of Culture year on the telly.

I was interested to see how it was covered, given all the fuss made earlier in the week about how much of the show BBC News 24 could broadcast live.

A muddle about securing the artists’ agreement to show more than two minutes of live coverage had been blamed for the BBC’s inability to screen the whole thing live.

But, in the end, the BBC showed much more than two minutes. I would estimate that in all they screened 10 to 15 minutes of live performance while cutting to and fro to other news stories, which is a bit puzzling really. My guess is the BBC didn’t really want to screen the whole thing anyway, and by referring to artists’ rights, they were trying to offer a polite excuse.

The excerpts the BBC did show were The Wombats, Ringo Starr and a big interview with the Liverpool Echo’s arts editor Joe Riley.

The snag is The Wombats chose to sing about moving to New York, while Ringo sang about leaving Liverpool.

I couldn’t decide whether Ringo had lost the plot with his choice of song, which repeating the line “I left you Liverpool” numerous times, or whether it was some poignant reflection on the city’s history of migration.

The best bit was Joe Riley. He was the only one on message.