Liverpool: Work in Progress

Why Liverpool, and why now? Why devote this 56 page feature from The Architectural Review to a city which has, for six decades, produced little architecture worth reviewing in the literal sense or rewarding a second view?

An answer might begin by reminding that, while reviewing may be confined to evaluation of things as they are presented, criticism cannot but move toward questions of how they come to be produced, and hence to how to proceed in future. In Liverpool, these questions are acute; for what preceded its architectural decline was exceptional; of which, despite ruinous losses, enough remains to rebuke all but the best of what is now, to general astonishment, suddenly getting built there.

Current developments will certainly return Liverpool to the regional centre that it was. Whether it can recover the world significance that it once had is altogether more speculative. All British regional cities suffer from London's overbearing monopoly, subsidised by its role as national capital, of executive functions. Yet the colossal schemes now projected by Peel Holdings, owners of the Port, show that a local propensity to dream big and showy has not gone away.

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