CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 39 the church’s new owners clean out the gutters and fix the roof. For Nairn, modern buildings were equally welcome – irrespective of scale, provided they were of real quality. Gilbert Scott’s colossal Anglican Cathedral is ‘part of Liverpool in its immense warmth’. Basil Spence’s 1960 university physics department tower is simply ‘the best new building in the city’. Yet he saw through misplaced 1960s optimism. Graeme Shankland, as planning consultant and Walter Bor as city planning officer, might ‘give modern architecture a fighting chance’. But the results ‘could still be terrible’. Worse still, the brutish blocks of flats put up to replace the slum clearance terraces replaced the old integrity with nothing more than a jumble of cliches. The risk is that the city will really have slum problems, said Nairn – a problem of New York proportions with ‘an urban population reacting in loveless meaningless violence against the up to date but loveless environment.’ Nairn’s doubts proved well founded. Starting in the 1970s, Liverpool experienced multiple layers of collapse. Jobs were lost, people moved out, vast wastelands emerged in the inner city and social collapse led to some of the worst riots in England, followed by a left-wing regime in the council, bent on confrontation with the Thatcher government. Yet if the 1960s were a false dawn, the 1970s and 1980s were a false apocalypse. With massive infusions of public-sector funds, much wiser planning, focused on regeneration, conservation and the human scale, slowly turned the city round. The council cleared many of the brutal 1960s towers and gave Everton a new city park on the ridge top, with spectacular views across the estuary. The 2000s were almost a golden era, with enlightened private investment in housing, retailing, higher education and tourism, alongside the public-sector commitment. And the 25 years in which the city centre simply fell asleep had saved much of its historic fabric. Restoring the derelict yet wondrous Sefton Park Palm House was emblematic of wider achievement. At last Liverpool’s architectural inheritance seemed to get the recognition it deserved. In 2004 the city was inscribed as a Unesco world heritage site. Nairn would surely have approved. Equally he might have been infuriated by the decision to remove that status only 17 years later, mainly because of an outline permission for speculative development of high-rise buildings in the derelict North Docks (never built) and one completed high-rise building (in scale with its surroundings)3. All this was incompatible with the preservationist ethos of Unesco and its advisor in ICOMOS, the International Council for Monuments and Sites. In Unesco-speak, just the possibility of new tall buildings (not unlike those already constructed in the early 1970s) had caused ‘irretrievable damage to the outstanding universal value of the world heritage site.’ With characteristic irreverence the city kept the brown tourist signs on the waterfront and by the M62 approaches to the city, which read ‘Liverpool World Heritage City’ rather than ‘World Heritage Site’. Truly, it was an odd decision. None of the great buildings and vistas identified by Nairn had been damaged. During the period as a world heritage site there had been massive improvement in the condition of historic buildings. The final traces of city-centre dereliction were swept away. Grosvenor’s Liverpool One development reinstated the old street patterns, bringing together the waterfront, the fabric of the restored Albert Dock and the city’s retail core in an award-winning scheme. One other great development project did proceed. Nearing completion, it is in Liverpool’s long-standing tradition of massive structures on the waterfront – the ocean liners, the cruise ships, the dock cranes, the shipyards, the grain silos, the big warehouses, the Pier Head buildings, not to mention those massive 20thcentury cathedrals, perched high on the ridge. That new building is the Everton football stadium. Like a huge, glistening, recently landed UFO, it sits in tawdry North Liverpool industrial landscapes (still scarred by wartime bombing and cheap redevelopment). The stadium is a powerful visual foil for the recently regenerated Stanley Dock complex, including the Tobacco Warehouse, one of the biggest brick buildings in the world. It has retained and restored all the derelict historic dock fabric below and around it. Unfortunately, a water area in part of the derelict North Docks has been lost, to make way for the football pitch. Unesco saw it as final justification for striking Liverpool off. We can be sure that Nairn would have enjoyed the big buildings Unesco so evidently dislikes. Concluding his account, he wrote: ‘Even good modern architecture is not enough. Here it must be way out, possessed of the huge scale and drama of the city itself. It is a tall order. But then Liverpool is probably the tallest city in Britain.’ Ian Wray is the author of Great British Plans, a fellow at Manchester University’s planning school and an honorary professor at the University of Liverpool’s Heseltine Institute. 3 See Dave Chetwyn and Ian Wray (2021) ‘What Was Unesco up to in Liverpool?’ Context 170, December. Everton Football Stadium at Bramley Moor Dock, which opened in 2025 (Photo: Peter de Figueiredo)
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