PEEL Holdings’ submission of its Wirral Waters planning application this month is a story of potentially immense significance.
We must hope that this is the next stage of a project of such towering ambition it will become our space race – climaxing in a generational giant leap for Birkenhead and Merseyside.
The project’s astonishing statistics speak for themselves. It is Britain’s biggest planning application, it will cost £4.5bn, and it will see 500 acres of brownfield land transformed into a futuristic Dubai-like landscape creating 27,000 jobs and 15,000 homes.
As a Birkenhead-based business, we see the desperate need to seize this glittering opportunity. Wirral has a bustling business community helped by Wirral Council’s networking initiatives.
But problems remain. It was reported in November that Birkenhead has high adult unemployment.
The resultant poverty brings the risk of social breakdown.
Birkenhead’s lost generation needs Wirral Waters to happen.
However, there are signs that Wirral Waters is coming at the right time. The resurgence of Cammell Laird has proven emphatically that the spirit of the town will not die. Cammell Laird pumps the heart of Birkenhead with pride and provides skilled jobs to people of all backgrounds. The firm’s revival has seen it reclaim its rightful place as one of the leading shipyards in Europe, and last year it contributed more than £33m to the Merseyside economy. Importantly, the Cammell Laird of 2009 retains the ethos of the Laird family. That ethos is an incredibly powerful combination of industry and social benevolence.
Not only did the family build up one most of successful shipyards of the age, they also built Hamilton Square, one of the finest Victorian squares in Britain. And they were instrumental in building Birkenhead Park, a facility so impressive that Central Park in New York copied it. Lairds, then as now, thought big. And Wirral Waters is this century’s equivalent to what Lairds was in the 1820s when, precisely like Peel, the Lairds saw the potential of Wirral’s underdeveloped docklands.
It is my passionate belief that Wirral Waters can transform the polarised fortunes of Wirral and Birkenhead.
