Save our heritage

Nov 26 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

ONE OF Liverpool’s boasts is that it has more architecturally listed buildings than any city outside London. It is not true and, indeed, we are way down the league table.

There are around 2,500 listed buildings across the city, but over the Pennines in Bradford the Yorkshire city can boast 5,800, many of them within a World Heritage Site.

It seems Liverpool’s false boast stems from the fact that, until the 1980s, the city council owned more listed buildings than any other provincial town or city. Even that is not true any more, following the disposal of freeholds around the Ropewalks area.

Bradford councillors ordered an audit some years ago of buildings to determine whether they should be given the accolade, as well as legal protection from demolition or change.

It seems to me that, in around a century’s time, the civic fathers and mothers will have their work cut out when they leaf through a list of what will then be old buildings, but are today’s modern work of architecture.

Maybe the new Museum of Liverpool will be given a badge of honour, or the new ferry terminal at the Pier Head and even the waterfront arena.

However, there are insufficient modern buildings of significant architecture to swell the city’s tally.

That is why the city council should look now at what we have that is worth preserving and slap a listed label on them. Numerous times in the past year, planning applications have come before the politicians to demolish some grand buildings worthy of preservation. The cry has always been the same; can’t save them because they are not listed.

So if Bradford, and no doubt other places, can do a trawl of its environs to select candidates for listing, why not Liverpool?

In the past week, the old Bedford Cinema, in Walton, has been placed under threat of demolition to make way for homes. It is Liverpool’s first purpose-built picture palace, built 99 years ago. It will never reopen as a cinema and is, quite frankly, looking bedraggled.

But its original facade could be saved and incorporated into a redevelopment scheme.

Liverpool is a participant in an organisation known as Help or the Historic Environment of Liverpool Project, working with English Heritage to look at the city’s built environment. The Help team put forward recommendations for listing at the rate of around one a month. At that rate, it would take 200 years to catch up with Bradford.

The other mechanism for getting listing status for a city is if it is suggested by local councillors.

Maybe, in Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture, one of the 08 exercises should be to do a city-wide search of buildings, possibly hidden away like the Bedford, along a side street, to draw up a grand list of buildings that should and need to be saved. Little by little, much of our heritage is being reduced to rubble.