IF ANY Baltic Triangle residents want to know what a reborn St James’ Station could look like, they need to speak to the architects of the future.
As revealed in the Liverpool Post last month, businesses in the Liverpool creative quarter have launched a push to reopen the Parliament Street station.
St James’s Station sits on Merseyrail’s Northern Line between Liverpool Central and Brunswick, but has been unused since 1917.
The area around the station, known as the Baltic Triangle, has in recent years seen the arrival of a number of businesses in the creative and digital sector.
Many of them are housed in Elevator Studios, the Victorian former warehouse complex in Parliament Street, or in the new "creative campus" at Baltic Creative – while many of those workers and entrepreneurs regularly visit eateries Camp & Furnace and Elevator Cafe.
Meanwhile, the former Contemporary Urban Centre building in Greenland Street is set to be converted into schools specialising in life sciences and the digital and creative sector. The North Liverpool Academy-run complex will eventually bring more than 1,000 students into the area every day.
Public transport links, however, are currently poor – so local bodies, including the Baltic Triangle stakeholders’ group, are pushing for the old St James’s Station to be rebuilt to serve the growing local population.
Now, architectural technology students at Liverpool John Moores University have shared their vision for the station as part of their final year projects.
They were tasked with developing a masterplan for the Greenland Street area and all took the chance to include St James’ Station within their plans.
Each student also had to focus on one key site within the Baltic Triangle and suggest a mixed-use development in line with the "manifesto" that local businesses have produced for the area.
The students then had to present their initial ideas at Baltic Creative to a panel including senior lecturers Paul Jackson and Mike Farragher, Liverpool City Council urban design manager Rob Burns and the council’s senior urban designer Samantha Campbell.
