Stanley Park back to its finest with bandstand and Gladstone Conservatory _460
A MULTI-MILLION pound scheme to restore north Liverpool’s version of the Sefton Park Palm House is nearing completion.
These pictures show how the Gladstone Conservatory, in Anfield’s Stanley Park, has been transformed.
The £12m restoration project has required the expertise of specialists from all over the country to make the space – disused for 30 years – a lush, period-style inner-city haven.
The contract, carried out by civil engineer DCT, incorporates the Victorian Grade II-listed conservatory, a new public cafe in a specially-developed lower floor, an intricately decorated bandstand with a copper roof, an impressive row of stone pavilions and picturesque thoroughfare called Rose Walk.
Work has been under way since November, 2007, and the conservatory is now expected to open in the summer.
With its potential as a striking wedding venue, bookings for private functions are already coming in.
Original stonework and wrought ironwork has been cleaned and retained wherever possible, while bespoke craftsmen have sympathetically replaced what could not be kept.
The conservatory itself was completely dismantled and restored.
Contract manager Ray Birch said: “In essence, we did not want to build something new.
“It would have been easy to rip things down, but that was not the ethos of what we wanted to do.
“This is a reasonable resemblance of the same thing people would have seen in Victorian times.
