Comment: Success vital for Festival site plan

Jul 11 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL’S derelict former International Garden Festival site has been a significant blight on an important gateway into the city, ever since it fell into neglect in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, despite an ambitious £250m scheme to transform the site receiving government permission yesterday, that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

There are a number of reasons for this. Planning practicalities and the year-long delay brought on by a public inquiry mean that a lot of work remains to be done behind the scenes before work on the 125-acre Otterspool site can start.

The credit crunch may also lead to a change to the phasing of the scheme, which includes 1,308 apartments and 66 town houses.

The Langtree McLean partnership has insisted their first priority is to deliver a high-quality 56-acre park, including the restoration of the Japanese and Chinese Gardens on the site, as previously promised.

The developers also said they were confident of the scheme’s success as there would always be demand for high- quality homes in prime locations.

It is to be hoped they are right, as, given the large number of job cuts announced this week alone among UK householders because of the housing slump and the squeeze on mortgage lending, this could hardly be a less propitious time to embark on a major housing project such as this.

There has, of course, been fierce and determined opposition to the scheme by a group of environmental campaigners and local residents, who want the area to be used as public parkland.

While their motivations have been entirely principled and honourable, there is a general consensus that the site cannot be allowed to continue to decay in the way it has over so many years.

There have been too many false dawns over what to do with this site since it hosted the 1984 garden festival. It would be a great shame if, having come this far, this latest scheme was to join them.