DRIVING into Liverpool along arterial roads like Edge Lane is like entering the Third World.
Decent housing, churches and buildings are boarded-up awaiting their fate.
Why? Because it is economically viable to demolish huge swathes of buildings which have stood up for 150 years.
Writer Anna Minton unravels how this bizarre situation has come about, in her new book, Ground Control. She says: “This Pathfinder project is based on a commercial property model, with a huge amount of money to be made by vested interests knocking down perfectly good houses and building new ones.
“The fact that these communities will be smashed up, although the houses only need about £20,000 each to be upgraded – far less than the cost of replacement – is neither here nor there.”
Britons, she says, are increasingly aware of living in a society plagued by fear and unhappiness. She poses the question that it could be due to the way our towns and cities are being planned. The market place has taken over from the electorate. Untested urban planning is taking control of our public space and citizenship.
“It’s come about through a lot of factors,” she says. “There’s not a conspiracy to privatise the city. Yet we are now following American policies, dictated by commercial property companies using real estate models designed to maximise money.
“We had big out-of-town shopping centres which planning laws barred from the city centres, so places like Liverpool One was their way of circumventing and creating open air malls.
“When this type of development started, both central and local government were keen on it, as they could offload the responsibility and cost for large parts of city.
“That’s where the blame lies, for not keeping control of public life.”
Research for the book revealed the rather skewed values of such companies, keen to protect investments.
“At Liverpool One, they’re proud of very some strange things. They boasted to me they have CCTV covering every inch of the site.”
The problem of Liverpool One is that it could be anywhere, she says. The developer, Grosvenor, was keen not to relate it to the city’s heritage.
