Healthy debate/opinions - loving it!!!
Some things I picked up on from your post Chas.
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You describe Peel as 'the immediate threat'. I would have to say that is a strange description for a private business who want to plough billions into a decimated area at their own cost, enhancing a low level innocuous skyline and bringing listed docks ans ancillary buildings back into use in the process - oh, and ofcourse creating much need employment - in the thousands.
You mention how the view of Everton once was. Before your time and going off prints from the 1800s and before, we could say that the era you were growing up in spoilt what was there previously but that is progress. People inhabit and require abodes. The city lost a massive population and now it's being encouraged back. Build and they will come - Liverpool is not the barnpot it was in the 80s - we cannot live on protecting views alone. In any case, many I know think the view from Everton looking down towards the revitalised city centre and it's skyscrapers beyond is now better than ever but that is all subjective of course and hey guess what - you can still see the Welsh mountains and hills beyond so nothing is obscured.
'Marry in haste' might have been relevant if the site they want to build on had only been cleared 6 months ago but it's been like that for decades so how long do we wait. How long do we deprive the people living in the area of somewhere of their own where they don't have to walk a mile South to see some life. Will the kids who live in Vauxhall today be saying to their kids in 20 years time 'There was once a grand proposal for this area son but the powers that be put the blocks on it - it's been like this now since I was a boy' How backward thinking that boy would think those powers that be were.
Liverpool preservation trust is not even a trust but a one man blog from a guy living in the past. Now, living in the past is something I could be accused of with my site heavily loaded in that direction, my model of a tenement block demolished 25 years ago and my books recall past pleasures but let's face it. We've not got a Mr Barclay Walker, a Mr William Brown or a Mr James Picton nor the funds to build replicas of our fine civic buildings. Each era has its own architectural style and it so happens that the styles being presented now, whilst looking radical, are statements in theri own right and are no more bizarre than what was offered up when Oriel Chambers and the Liver Buildings were erected - and both castigated. Live in the past with our memories and by all means preserve our Georgian and Victorian heritage but we cannot be a living museum.
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