The future of Liverpool #Liverpool

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View from St George’s, Everton, 1949
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View from St George’s 2014
I have just received an email from my good friend Professor Charlie Duff, a leading figure in Baltimore’s renaissance:
I just read your (frankly terrifying) piece about selling parkland to developers. I will never forget visiting Liverpool parks with you less than a Brexit-and-Trump year ago. What magical places you showed me. Please tell your readers that an impartial American thinks that your parks are an astonishing treasure. So much of every city is just this-and-and-that, but the parks of South Liverpool are a triumph of the people and their city. I was amazed, not only by the quality of the landscapes (and waterscapes).
May I introduce you to my friend, Alex Garvin? Alex, a polymathic New Yorker who has done a million impossible things, has just published a book called “What Makes A Great City”, in which he argues that the answer is the Public Realm — streets, squares, and parks. His “culture hero” is Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York and created Americas’s tradition of the relation between Man and Nature, – and whose first park influence was the park you showed me in Birkenhead.
In a follow-up email, Charlie adds:
As luck would have it, my reading this morning was right on point with your post about selling municipal parkland. The article in the London Review is called “The Strange Death of Municipal England”. It’s in the 15 December 2016 issue. The author is, I think, Tom Crewe. He paints a very bleak picture of municipal governments financially dependent on a Whitehall that wants to increase inequality. Mayors and Councillors wind up doing less and less and getting blamed for it, and they often sell municipal assets to fund services. Crewe specifically mentions sales of parkland, though not specifically in Liverpool. He also argues that the Tories want to convert councils from “mini welfare states” to “economic development authorities,” which sounds plausible. And grim.
Charlie, as always writes eloquently and incisively about the danger we face in Liverpool in having a Council fixated on treating its land as a commercial asset rather than a resource that is there for the benefit of all the community rather than a small number of developers. Planning decisions are taken in which we, the rate payers and citizens, are dismissed as cranks or nimbys. In reality, there are many, like me, who have imaginative and realistic ideas of how Liverpool can make more of its many assets. It is time we made our voices heard.
The photographs I have chosen illustrate what can be done to redress the balance in a once overcrowded area. The packed terraces of Everton have been replaced by a stunning parkland. How sad that we are now taking parkland and green space back to provide unnecessary executive housing for a very small number of people. .

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