Originally Posted by
fortinian
I see where you are coming from... but I still disagree. Just how much of the city do you want to preserve? How many tourists go out into the suburbs? Have you ever been to Prague's suburbs - they are not medieval cobbled streets, nor Paris. The city centre may have a 'look' or an aesthetic that indentifies it but that is not maintained through the rest of the city, nor should it be.
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We have the 'Georgian Quarter' which is a really nice way to preserve a swathe of our Cityscape, we are in no danger of losing late-victorian terraced housing, in fact we have a super-surplus of them which can still be lived in (a travesty in its own way). I fear you are imagining me as some sort of wrecking ball that wants to destroy the fabric of your city for the mere sake of it.
I am not of a generation that remembers the courts, tenements etc... I have grown up in a Liverpool devoid of 'the docks', yet I still love Liverpool and can appreciate its heritage and feel it is somewhere different and special.
How many tourists (or potential investors) enter or leave the city through its suburbs? (answer: all of them) - and what sort of impression do they create? And what sort of impression
could they create if we only thought of them as being and integral part of an greater "whole", rather than just the stuff round the edge of a very limited version of "Liverpool", which starts at Lime Street and finishes at the Pier Head?
I can remember getting the bus into Liverpool in the late 70s / early 80s when the huge (and well-designed) 1920s and 30s council estates round Dovecot and Old Swan were just falling victim to "modernisation" (based on what was cheapest) and the "right to buy" - random bits of stone-cladding etc etc.
They'll never be a "tourist attraction" in their own right (except for a handful of people who are interested in the achievements of Sir Lancelot Keay, City Architect at the time they were built), but Liverpool's suburbs (with a bit of litter picking, some careful refurbishment, and probably far less wholesale demolition that has been envisaged recently), could be a worthwhile introduction to the more important delights of the city centre.
And yes, have seen the suburbs of Prague, and of Paris, and they look and feel nothing like each other, or like Liverpool's suburbs.
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