The history of tower blocks in the city neatly illustrates how the poor are callously warehoused, their communities broken up, and how planners and architects are complicit in this.

When the slum clearances began next to no one who was about to be rehoused was involved in the planning of the new estates. Very few who were about to be rehoused would have chosen to live in a high rise block. Remember all those documentaries in the 60s that highlighted the despair and loneliness of the new inhabitants of tower blocks?

And then there were the problems associated with dampness, noise, poor insulation, lifts that didn't work and the anomie that springs from an environment that is poorly maintained.

To be fair, not everyone was against tower-block accommodation: for some reason, a lot of council employees ended up in the pick of the new tower blocks - the ones around Sefton Park and there have been accusations that there was also a 'no blacks' policy in operation for allocation to these flats. Believe it or not, not many council employees ended up in the tower block that came and went on Warwick Street in the space of just over 20 years. I can't think why!

So we had buildings constructed that weren't designed to meet the self-identified housing requirements of the population being rehoused - except the ones in leafy south Liverpool for which there was a waiting list! Hardly a recipe for success. In the poorer parts of the city most of the blocks came and went within a few decades and were never loved by the majority of people who lived in them.



If only the planners and the architects had listened to what people wanted or looked abroad for inspiration from cities that never suffered from inner city blight we wouldn't have the doughnut effect we have now in which the inner city is fighting to survive and some parts of which have given up the ghost.