C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 15 John Hinchliffe Liverpool, a city with a view Liverpool City Council has put in place guidance to protect its world heritage site while, it says, positively encouraging the right form of development in the right place. Liverpool’s natural geography could barely have been better evolved to create dramatic and dynamic views over the landscape. The long north-south Everton Brow ridge of red standstone and Bunter Pebble, falling gently eastwards towards the River Mersey and a secondary bluff of higher ground, nearer and parallel to the river bank, create a natural amphitheatre. The mile-wide river provides a clear zone for unobstructed panoramic views from the west. The 10-metre tidal range not only changes the visual aperture but also transforms the foreground view from a swirling fluidity at high water to a wide tidal margin of silt, sand, sandstone and seaweed at low water. Add in the unpredictable swells of the currents, the rapidly moving sea frets from the Irish Sea and the diurnal shadows created by the passage and angle of the sun, and the dynamism of the natural sights begins to be appreciated. On top of nature’s gifts, successive generations have built layers of tangible cultural heritage on the east bank of the river, which mostly delights, but always captivates, any human eye which chooses to look up to the horizon. (The west bank is not without interest, but it is not just Tranmere Rovers who are not in the same league.) Liverpool’s historic buildings have a tradition of monumentality. Their very bulk and height make them instinctive focal points. Along the unbroken seven-mile line of historic docks, ‘the biggest and most complete system of historic docks in the world’ (Ray Bondin), lay recumbent huge dockside warehouses, such as those at Albert Dock (the biggest Grade I listed building in the country) and Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse (the biggest brick building in the world).The stylistically disparate trio of Edwardian masterpieces at the Pier Head assert their presence on the waterfront unequivocably, facing westwards and clearly influenced in scale, detail and attention-seeking by their forebears across the ocean. On the aforementioned ridge and punctuating its silhouette sit the early cast-iron framed St George’s Church of 1814 and the rotunda of Margaret Street Water Tower, not to mention the delicate coronet of Gibberd’s Metropolitan Cathedral on top of its concrete funnel and the brooding guardian of the city that is Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican Cathedral. Regrettably, most of the city centre’s historic churches and their sky-piercing spires are long gone, but Liverpool retains ensembles of historic buildings of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, which were designed to impress and vie for attention. Many of these are laid out on grid-iron street plans which create long-range framed vistas, often with an enclosing landmark building at the end. The show-piece commercial and cultural buildings are each of individual interest. When juxtaposed together and layered on to nature’s canvas, they create a cityscape that has the richness of an architectural treasure trove. In addition to the architectural and technological significance of the buildings and structures, the city and the port have outstanding universal value as ‘the supreme example of a commercial port at the time of Britain’s greatest global influence’. The structures and the intangible heritage, to which they bear witness, justified Liverpool’s inscription on to UNESCO’s world heritage list in 2004. With the honour of that inscription comes the expectation that the outstanding universal value, authenticity and integrity of the world heritage site will be identified, protected, conserved and transmitted to future generations. This increases the heritage manager’s responsibility to care not just for the physical conservation of heritage structures, but equally to ensure that their setting and place in the the historic urban landscape are protected. ICOMOS’s Xi’an Declaration (2005) reaffirmed the need to conserve the setting of heritage structures. It suggested that, in order to do so, bespoke planning tools should be developed for each heritage area on the basis of a full understanding of that asset and its setting to ensure that the local context of that heritage asset is managed and conserved A framed view of Albert Dock Visual structure around Liverpool 1, from the master plan
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