Critique of Liverpool 1, 2009

Before making observations, a look much further back than my youth through the urban and architectural monocle of Nash’s 1811 masterplan between two London parks, we can recognise a scale and grandeur that had not been seen in London before, yet its main route followed that of the mediaeval road from Marylebone to St James’s Park, with a small detour to take in some government land and to tie into the smart area of Charing Cross. His project may be considered by some as `generation’ rather than `regeneration’, but this would be a mistake. It involved demolishing mediaeval, 17th and 18th Century buildings and buying up a multitude of freeholds and leaseholds as well as creating Regent’s Park. It was a commercial development where all buildings were privately financed. It involved several architects designing individual buildings in the neo-classical style such as Sir John Soane and Charles Cockerell along with Nash. Cockerell would later work in Liverpool, where he designed Liverpool’s St Georges Hall, and the city’s Bank of England in Castle Street. The residential apartments and houses were built facing and framing the parks. The continuous five storey commercial buildings defined the streets, with no residential element, and they incorporated weather protection in the form of projecting double height colonnades to each side of the street. Two landscapes acting as lungs in central London became the leisure `anchors’ of the development. St James’s Park was transformed over five centuries from marshy meadow, to deer park, to centre of pageantry, pomp, celebrations and fetes and redesigned in the 17th century with lawns avenues of trees and opened to the public by Charles II. A little over a century later, John Nash redesigned it in a more romantic style ­ a landscape for pleasure and leisure as he did when creating Regent’s Park. When the leases started coming up at the turn of the century, there was an opportunity to rebuild. Nash’s building form was no longer suitable ­ being too small for the emerging Edwardian department store retailers of which only Liberty and Hamleys still remain. The architecture of Regent Street south of Oxford Circus is all second re-generation. All the buildings are listed, and were designed within Nash’s existing urban infrastructure by several architects – Sir Reginald Blomfield, JJ Arthur Burnett, Henry Tanner and Arthur Davis among others.

This recall of a London retail-led regeneration from another era sounds familiar. It highlights the value of the masterplan, the rate of change and extent of renewal, the precedent of investors engaging many architects to help deliver the project and the role of `anchors’ in retail schemes.

What is the site’s particular heritage? Is there an apparent ambition to build upon it, to discover and harness its genius loci, by which I mean that it is incumbent upon the designers to re-search, read and appreciate the hidden roots that can contribute to cultural identity and its continuity, not just the physical and environmental traces? Is there a depth of meaningful references that can be made metaphorically evident in Liverpool One? To be contextual does not simply lie in aping existing architecture, but to be sensitive to and design with the context, and not against it. This allows modernity to make a positive contribution provided that it is of our time in approach, technique and material.