Liverpudlians, the inhabitants of the once mighty city of Liverpool in north-west England, have long endured being the butt of jokes from their countrymen about accents, alcohol afflictions and dreadful shoebox architecture.
Brookside, a dreary British television soap centred on a cul-de-sac of cheap housing on the outskirts of the city, seemed to encapsulate Liverpool’s sad decline into fecklessness and hopelessness. British viewers started to desert this depressing portrayal of Merseyside life and by the time it finally went off air a few years ago hundreds of thousands of real-life residents had left Liverpool too.
Between 1931 and 2001 the birthplace of The Beatles and Liverpool Football Club lost half its population. A city that had once had more than 800,000 residents and bustling docks that handled 40 per cent of the world’s trade – a combined Rotterdam port and Heathrow airport of its day – had been reduced to a husk.
The fine old docks that had once supplied an empire and provided the link between old Europe and the new Americas were rusting and obsolete. The city centre was carved up by monstrous traffic schemes and some of the world’s best Georgian buildings – built as symbols of Liverpudlian imperial pride and wealth – were mere refuges for tawdry bedsits or weeds.
At the turn of the 21st century, it looked as if Liverpool was lost. And yet just seven years later there are the green shoots of an extraordinary renaissance.
In 2004 the Pier Head, the waterfront location of Liverpool’s most recognised buildings, known as The Three Graces, finally won its global spurs by being classed a world heritage site by Unesco.
This year the city celebrates its 800th anniversary – it is planning a lavish party with Europe’s biggest fireworks display at the end of next month – and in 2008 it will be European Capital of Culture, following in the footsteps of such illustrious names as Barcelona and Paris.
This designation and the events associated with it are expected to bring 14,000 new jobs and £2bn of investment into the city on top of the growth already under way.
“Liverpool is reviving itself and pulling itself up from pretty deep places,” says Jim Gill of Liverpool Vision, which is co-ordinating the architectural regeneration of the city. “It will show that it’s possible to develop while maintaining the built heritage of the city.”
The population is once again growing (up 40 per cent in the city centre in just five years) and house prices, long in the doldrums, are finally rising, particularly for new-builds (up more than any other northern city). The professional classes are moving back – but prices are still relatively low and investors from Liverpool, London, Ireland and further afield are moving their money in too.
Ironically, it was perhaps the economic catastrophe that befell the city in the 1970s and 1980s that has made it such a magnet for investment. There was simply not the money to raze the Georgian quarter near the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals or the grand park-side Regency villas in the once riot-struck Toxteth. And lack of funds also saved the rambling but elegant Victorian warehouses and merchant houses by the water at Rope Walks. In fact these were the properties that were first refurbished by pioneering developers Urban Splash in the 1990s.
Substantial grants are still available to buyers prepared to take on restoration projects privately and many fans of Georgian buildings priced out of London or Bristol have eagerly taken up the opportunity. Set back from the water between the two cathedrals is a collection of streets in the Canning district that are lined with houses built from the characteristic purple-coloured local bricks – their exteriors decked out with fine ornate balconies, fanlights and doorways while their interiors have window shutters, friezes and panelling.
There are more listed buildings (properties awarded special protection because of their architectural importance) here than anywhere else in Britain outside London. Streets such as Hope, Canning, Percy (with grand stone facades resembling Edinburgh’s New Town) and Rodney (where the 19th-century British prime minister William Gladstone was born) provide some of the best preserved Georgian architecture outside London but at a vast discount to inferior specimens elsewhere. Some would now sell for almost £1m but that is probably half what they might fetch in other parts of the country.
In Toxteth it is still just possible to buy a rambling Regency villa in reasonable condition, complete with coach-house, for £400,000. Large flats in Percy Street are rarely on the market but when they are they tend to fetch about £350,000. A stunning five-bedroom Georgian house in the area was recently on sale for £550,000 through Venmore Thomas & Jones.
So exquisite are some of these properties that conservation agencies The Georgian Group and English Heritage have decreed Liverpool a “special case” and deemed its architecture worthy of particular protection and funding. No wonder, then, that the city is the second most popular urban film location in Britain after London.
Down on the waterfront, the old docks escaped the uninspired conversions or dumpy new-builds executed in wealthier cities in the 1980s and early 1990s because only the welfare sector was interested in a city where comparatively few residences were owner-occupied. Now they are being revamped with home-grown and outside money and the benefit of being able to learn from the mistakes made elsewhere.
There are ambitious regeneration plans for both banks of the city’s River Mersey, with a projected skyline designed to eclipse that of Salford Quays in Manchester, Liverpool’s great rival city to the east.
Peel Holdings, the company behind this 30- to 40-year masterplan, has announced a £5.5bn project for the currently derelict Central Docks designed to transform them into “an international waterside destination”.
Other conversions combined with ambitious and glossy new-builds, such as the East Float Mill at Wallasey, City Loft’s Prince Dock and Millennium Estates’s Alexandra Tower (a 26-storey, glass-enclosed icon with good views of the city and its river), have already been snapped up. Some are setting record prices for Liverpool, such as a duplex penthouse with views of the docks and the Welsh mountains at the dark glass tower at 25 The Strand, priced at £795,000.
But most properties, the two- or three-bedroom apartments, for instance, sell for much less than £300,000. A two-bedroom, 11th-floor flat near the Royal Liver Building was recently on sale for £249,950 through Venmore, Thomas & Jones.
Such is the perceived excitement in Liverpool that there are now 3,000 additional new-build units under construction. And national estate agencies, such as Knight Frank, have recently opened offices in the city to take their share of the action. “We’re seeing a lot of confidence and interest from investors, with people buying three or four units each,” says the agency’s Jonathan Kennedy.
One development attracting much attention is Princes Dock, where sleek waterfront, contemporary apartments next to the Three Graces are fetching up to £485,000 through Knight Frank.
“In the mid-1990s the smartest waterfront developments were fetching £80-£100 per sq ft,” adds Gill. “Now we’re talking £300 plus. But the most important thing is that this is all possible without public money. At last the residential market is self-sustaining.”
Local agents
Venmore Thomas & Jones, tel: +44 (0)151-236 4400; www.vtj.co.uk
Knight Frank, tel: +44 (0)151-243 6061; www.knightfrank.com
