Grade I, II and II* listed buildings in Liverpool

[Howie]

Demolition fears grow as developers move in on ‘iconic’ Victorian building
Mar 3 2008
by Laura Sharpe, Liverpool Daily Post



FEARS have been raised that one of Liverpool’s architectural gems is being destroyed without planning permission.

Scaffolding, rubble and a skip have appeared outside Josephine Butler House on Hope Street, just over a week before a planning application is due to be heard.

Riverside councillor Steve Munby accused building company Maghull Group Ltd of starting to demolish the 1861 building, which has been put forward for listed building status, before planning consent had been given.

He said: “It’s scandalous they are knocking down the building before the listed building status or planning application is decided.”

More...

[PhilipG]

Unfortunately, despite Liverpool claiming to have "More Listed buildings than Bath", too many suitable candidates aren't Listed, and there aren't enough people who really care.
English Heritage should be bombarded with local buildings which should be Listed in this COC year, because any building that isn't Listed can be demolished with LCC incapable of doing anything.
The buildings will then remain long after 2008.
It's too late to wait until the building is threatened.

There's another application for the housing development on the site of the (to be demolished) Bedford cinema tomorrow.
In this case, EH won't list it.

[marky]

Josephine Butler House: From what I can see, the yellow brickwork on the front has now been destroyed (by power-tools, by the sound of it).

[PhilipG]

Oh Dear, COC is going to be known as the year when Liverpool was completely powerless to protect its own buildings, without English Heritage's help.

One good piece of news.
The Jewish Synagogue in Prince's Avenue has been raised to Grade I Listed status.
The highest there is.

[quincyg]

Oh Dear, COC is going to be known as the year when Liverpool was completely powerless to protect its own buildings, without English Heritage's help.

One good piece of news.
The Jewish Synagogue in Prince's Avenue has been raised to Grade I Listed status.
The highest there is.

when I was in junior school we had a Jewish teacher and she arranged a class trip there to show us a different culture. it was a beautiful building as I recall so that's excellent news.

[Ged]

The Josephine Butler building should have had applications to list it earlier, though the ones that have been have been knocked back???? - Why???

I hope Maghull developments do as they say and keep the facade at least.

[marky]

The front of Josephine Butler House, earlier today:

[quincyg]

The front of Josephine Butler House, earlier today:

words fail me

[Howie]

Liverpool, Capital of Vandalism
The supposed city of culture has in fact been pulling down its great Victorian buildings
March 8, 2008
Tristram Hunt

Amid the elegant Georgian terraces that run off Hanover Street, rising up the hill from Canning Dock, you can still get a sense of Liverpool's mercantile past: a lost age of transatlantic trade, civic pride and merchant princes. And just as Liverpool celebrates this proud heritage as European Capital of Culture, the council is cynically signing off on agreeing to the demolition of three of these Grade II listed houses - numbers 68, 70 and 72 Seel Street - for a shoddy new development. Learning nothing from its postwar history, Merseyside is in danger of turning into the Capital of Dereliction as town hall leaders sanction another assault on its architectural fabric.

By far the most elegiac and anger-inducing publication of recent months has been Gavin Stamp's Britain's Lost Cities. Stamp painfully outlines the postwar loss of Britain's urban civilisation and, in doing so, nails the lie that the German Luftwaffe was primarily responsible. Instead, it was the love of the motor car, rise of the town planner, arrival of Le Corbusier's Continental Modernism and an ugly animus for history that did for our regional centres.

“Behind all this,” Stamp writes of England's northern cities, “there was a sense of shame about the industrial past, a visceral and blinkered rejection of the dark but substantial legacy of the Victorians that could amount to little more than civic self-hatred and which resulted in relentless destruction.” Sadly, that shame still lingers.

From Plymouth to Coventry, Glasgow to Worcester, grandiose city plans were published that bulldozed the old and, in its place, laid out arterial roads, car parks, mass-production housing and shopping centres. “Cities must be extricated from their misery, come what may,” came Le Corbusier's battle cry. “Whole quarters of them must be destroyed and new cities built.” And so in Birmingham, the Central Library, Pugin's Bishop's House and the Market Hall fell victim to the Inner Ring Road. In Hull, almost all the dock warehouses, Georgian chapels and Victorian churches were destroyed in the name of postwar regeneration. But few cities suffered as much as Liverpool.

Between August 9, 1940, and May 9, 1941, Merseyside endured 68 air raids gutting much of the historic neighbourhood surrounding the docks. By far the worst architectural victim was John Foster's Greek revival Custom House, a testament to Liverpool's 19th-century ambition to play the Athens of the North: a city of commerce and culture reflected in an uniformly classical urban aesthetic. But rather than rebuilding this shattered civic icon, the postwar planners opted for demolition. It was a decision that set the tone for the ensuing decades of planning terror as dock warehouses, stuccoed Regency houses and elegant piazzas fell victim to the ring-roads and clearances.

Fifty years on, now that Liverpool basks in its status as Capital of Culture, one might have thought the demolitions would ease up. Yet rather than commemorating its extraordinary civic inheritance, the planners are repeating the mistakes of their postwar predecessors. For as Liverpool's prosperity accelerates, the council is still prone to dismiss its marvellous historic fabric as an impediment to growth.

Under the past ten years of control by the Liberal Democrats, some 36 listed buildings have been lost to the bulldozers. Whereas Merseyside once enjoyed a Georgian building stock comparable to Bath, what little remains is now under threat. In addition to the terraces of Seel Street, there are numerous properties in Duke Street, Dale Street and Great George Square - as well as such listed landmark churches as St Luke's, Berry Street and St Andrew's - equally at risk. And that is excluding the Toxteth terraces and Welsh Street houses that remain under planning blight.

The difference this time is that the threat comes as much from property developers, whose lawyers and bully-boy chicanery runs rings round council officers, as grandiose redevelopment schemes. But the results are the same as buildings slip into disrepair, night-time demolitions “happen” and inexplicable planning permissions are granted.

Unfairly, Liverpool has often been accused of wallowing in the past. If only it did. Today what every successful city requires, in the competition for new businesses and graduate residents, is a sense of place and authenticity that can only come from the historic fabric, architecture and attitude of its streets and spaces. The postwar redevelopment of Merseyside did everything it could to destroy that civic identity. If the choice facing the Capital of Culture this year is between the 1820s and 1950s, then it must save the Georgian terraces and ease up on any more Modernist monstrosities.

Tristram Hunt is author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

Source: Times Online

[Howie]

£100m Hope Street regeneration plan at risk after listing row
Mar 12 2008
by David Bartlett, Liverpool Daily Post

A MAJOR £100m development, in Liverpool’s historic Hope Street, was dealt a blow yesterday after the city’s planning committee said it was minded to refuse a key element.

Maghull Developments was seeking permission for four applications in the street, but had angered councillors by “hacking off the front” of Josephine Butler House last week after campaigners had requested it be listed.

More...

[Ged]

Couldn't agree more. Considering the criteria listing status has to meet, I wonder how properties suddenly become de-listed and demolished so easily. There should be something in place whereby if a property is given listed status, the owners then have a given amount of time to bring it upto scratch (if it isn't already) and cannot allow it to fall into disrepair (in which case it automatically falls into the hands of the council)

Paul 'the Gardens' (A member here) and I were showing the Gardens of Stone film to an audience again last night, and they couldn't get over how communities and buildings were just bulldozed in the name of 'progress' which more often than not just means new road schemes. Council residents have long been cannon fodder, the 2nd Mersey tunnel crossing could well have been at Aigburth if it weren't for the anticipated objections and legal wrangling overs CPO's which were not a problem in the north end. Flyovers, internal mini motoways, 6 lane dual carriageways - the time machine scenario where everything was demolished and rebuilt and all of a sudden all this new major traffic with the world and his dog passing your door.

The ropewalks area should be retained, or at least the facades (like I notice they're doing with a block on Seel St) at all costs and if that means telling developers that that's what they've got to do then so be it.

[Cadfael]

One of the biggest crimes was to demolish Emmanual-Everton on West Derby Road for the new inner ring road.

What happened? The inner ring road was shot and this is now an empty piece of land.

[marky]

I passed Josephine Butler House a couple of times, and they were trying to smash as much as they could. Yesterday and today, the workmen had vanished. They had managed to smash two sides of the building and left a couple of piles of yellow bricks on the floor. What they couldn't remove, such as large sand-stone blocks around the entrance, they just drilled chunks out of. This shows what kind of developer Maghull Developments are. All perfecly legal, of course.

Seel Street: I noticed one of the Listed Buildings has gone completely, and a couple of others look like they'll be next (the ones surrounded by red steel supports)

[Ged]

I thought those red steel supports were to keep the facades up whilst rebuilding the rears.

[marky]

There doesn't seem much left of those buildings on Seel Street. I was there on Sunday, when one had gone completely. The other 2 still had some of the facade standing. Time to get one last look of those buildings.