Viewpoint: These are challenging times for a city playing catch-up

May 21 2008 by Peter McGurk, Liverpool Daily Post

THE city centre has gone from strength to strength, but, not so surprisingly, this incredible progress has raised fears in some that the surrounding boroughs will be left behind.

The city is to be congratulated on its achievements for 2008, although we realise that this is just a beginning.”

These are challenging times for a city playing catch-up with Britain – like every other city, needing to re-invent itself in a post-industrial age.

What does Liverpool need to do? Where should it start and where could it be taken?

Many world cities have done better than Liverpool, and many have understood that finding new life for old docks, working with the buzz of existing port operations and the spirit of the place – creating a world-class tourist destination and business location is really the only way.

The city made a start on this road at Albert Dock and as a first wave has made a great success, but the number of visitors has been running out of steam.

The V&A Waterfront, at Cape Town, the Inner Harbour in Baltimore and Darling Harbour, Sydney, are great and successful examples of port regeneration that are as fresh today as when they started in the late 70s.

Liverpool One, the Hope Street Quarter, FACT and the Buddleia Centre are the corner stones of the emerging arts and cultural district centred on Park Lane to the south. Great Howard Street will be the backbone of the extended commercial centre stretching from Leeds Street to the north – a home for the post-industrial, high-value economies of service, trade and knowledge as well as the city region hub.

If we are to bring back the people to Liverpool, we need the bits of self-sustaining communities that got missed out or subsumed under a wave of Victorian expansion. We need to rebuild or make new local centres.

We need to keep West Derby as a village, to rediscover Everton as a place with a centre and a heart – to not let it get lost in an endless inner-city sprawl.