Among a welter of great insights at this week's Mersey Power Towns event hosted in #IrvineBuilding by Frank Mckenna was this cracker from Chris Lee: "We need to be super-ambitious for Wirral and Birkenhead. The first thing I'd do is rebuild the tower at New Brighton."
Now, for those who don't know, it was Wirral's tilt at its own Eiffel Tower, with a ballroom at the foot upon whose stage once strutted four chirpy lads from across the river. They went on to greater things.
Chris's point, however, wasn't about recreating past glories, but more about the signal that ambition sends to the market, and how the market invariably responds positively. Funders, developers, end-users and residents buy in to ambition when it's delivered at scale and with the requisite quality. It's why Wirral Council is driving forward a number of significant masterplans and why they signalled their intent with two Grade A office buildings, Mallory + Irvine.
Does it work? Well, let's look at another slightly rainy shipbuilding town with a population of 350,000. Most people felt its hey-day was long gone and that a re-scaling of its ambitions and population was in order. The good burghers of Bilbao begged to differ, got the Guggenheim museum built, whilst simultaneously delivering a stunning, Norman Foster-designed underground network.
The market responded with gusto. Where once there wasn't a tourist to be had, the place is now bunged with the curious - typically well-heeled explorers keen for an intriguing fix of urbanism. Hotels have sprung up with glorious regularity and the city's unemployment - once a blight on whole communities - has fallen dramatically. And it still rains - a good deal more than Birkenhead, in fact (1,134mm pa compared with 824mm, for the hydrologically-minded).
#Birkenhead is in the early stages of its own transformation, but it would take a brave man to bet against it, given what's coming down the tracks (after all, we already have a rather spiffy underground network, with six stations in the town centre). Maybe time for you to take a fresh look.
Marcus Shaw MRICS David Wade-Smith Stephen Parry Ben Lavell Chris McKenna Pic caption: Ships Nostalgia
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