“Masterplanning, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Vimto”
I’ve never been fond of masterplans. Too often they’re like well-meaning PowerPoints—tidy, boring, and wildly optimistic. So when I was sent by Grosvenor to photograph Liverpool ONE, that glittering 42-acre regeneration project squatting over the city’s retail heart, I packed extra skepticism along with my lenses.
And then I got there.
Liverpool—Yes, I love Liverpool, we have history—has always been a city with rhythm. Not the polite hum of a market town, but the full-throttle thump of a port built on global ambition, maritime trade, and a long shadow of decline. For decades, the docks rusted, and the great sandstone facades gathered dust and bird droppings, it became a collection of vistas across empty streets.
My first visit to Liverpool had been in the early ‘80s, during my press snapper days, a quite pocket of town known as Toxteth, Upper Parliament Street. Look it up, boisterous week, not quite architectural photography, not even if you count flying bricks.
Other visits had been to document Roger Zogolovitch’s Charterhouse scheme to turn the Duke Street Quarter, as it was then called, into an artist-led cultural quarter. That hadn’t ended well, but it what a moment, full of promise.
And then there was Liverpool Town Hall for Donald Insall, I took the job to stand on THAT balcony, like the Beatles did on their return from America, joy unbounded.
Anyway enter a client with very deep pockets (hello, Grosvenor), they set about the almost laughably ambitious task of stitching this part of Liverpool back together.
So, Liverpool One, it’s what the Americans might call a mall, but a city—outdoors, unapologetically contemporary, and, miraculously, not awful. Buildings with actual architecture. Views that lined up. On a sunny days, bustling with life and activity, given all the decay that had preceded, you have to admit, not too bad.
The Stirling Prize jury, back in 2009, nearly gave them the crown. They praised its “generous public space networks”and “rigorous yet flexible design briefs.” Translation: it worked. You could get a flat white, a trench coat, and an existential moment of civic pride all in the same half hour.
A product of 26 different architectural practices. It should be chaos. But.
Liverpool ONE isn’t perfect, of course. But it’s hashtag#Liverpool why should it be? This is a city that doesn’t do neatness. It does soul, and reinvention. And somehow, this place has found a way to bottle that and sell it next to a Zara.
There’s a strange poetry to it all. A city once ruled by ships and trade is now all shopping bags and cinema screens. A masterplan that, for once, didn’t erase the past. And was just loose enough to make a cat walk for swagger.
Photographed for Grosvenor MarksBarfield Architects WilkinsonEyre John McAslan + Partners Architecture Today FAT
