Mid July and Liverpool was basking in one of the hottest days of the year.
Without a cloud in the sky, it was one of those rare days where the River Mersey appears to turn a gentle shade of blue.
Those looking on at Liverpool’s waterfront from the ferries will have seen it at its resplendent best, the Three Graces baking in near 30 degree heat.
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But these icons of Liverpool, surrounded by some new entrants to the waterfront picture, will have looked composed as ever in the balmy conditions.
5000 miles away in China the atmosphere was markedly different.
Ice cold and ruthless, Liverpool was about to have its World Heritage fate sealed by UNESCO delegates who’d convened in the mega-city of Fuzhou.
“[UNESCO] decides to delete Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) from the World Heritage List,” read a clinical draft recommendation report a few weeks earlier.
13 votes to five later, Liverpool was ‘deleted’ from the list.
Irrespective of the heat, a chill ran down the spine of much of the city.
World Heritage Status
Liverpool was awarded World Heritage Status back in 2004.
The Status is granted to certain sites or areas in the world by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, commonly known as UNESCO.
The sites chosen are considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.
To be selected, a World Heritage Site must be a unique landmark which is geographically and historically identifiable and has special cultural or physical significance.
Liverpool was one of only a handful of sites listed in the UK and its ownership of the title stemmed from its rich history as a port.
In UNESCO’s eyes, Liverpool was a ‘maritime mercantile city’, a city carved from its centuries operating as a thriving dockland and centre of commerce and trade.
Whereas many of the sites on the list are singular buildings, such as the Taj Mahal, Liverpool's World Heritage site covered much of the city centre taking in the Albert Dock, Pier Head, North Docks, Ropewalks and the Cultural quarter around St George’s Hall.
The title didn’t come with exclusive funding or financial reward, but was seen as a symbolic marker of how Liverpool’s history continued to shape that city that it is today.
When the accolade was awarded in 2004, the city had finally begun to climb out of the industrial and managed decline that peaked in the 1980s and scarred much of the cityscape.
Liverpool was then starting to confidently wear a new persona as a destination city for culture and tourism.
The transformational change of 2008 was only around the corner.
Irreversible loss of attributes
The news that Liverpool has been stripped of its status broke on July 21, but it's unlikely the decision will have taken many by surprise.
At the time, Mayor Joanne Anderson reacted by saying she was “hugely disappointed and concerned.”
She said: “This decision to delete Liverpool’s World Heritage status… comes a decade after UNESCO last visited the city to see it with their own eyes.
“Our World Heritage site has never been in better condition having benefited from hundreds of millions of pounds of investment across dozens of listed buildings and the public realm.”
Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram said: “We did not want to lose our World Heritage Status, but nor could we allow it to preserve our region in aspic, while the world evolves around us.”
Mayor Rotheram’s comments were drawing on some of the developments proposed within the World Heritage Site.
From the start of the decade, outline planning permission was in the works for Liverpool Waters, a £5bn scheme that would transform much of the north docks with a range of residential and commercial developments.
The plans were met with ire from UNESCO who reacted by placing Liverpool on its ‘danger’ list in 2012.
The body felt that changes to the plans had to be made to reduce its scale while other development across the heritage buffer zone needed to be more carefully managed so as not impact its “integrity”.
But this was further complicated by the approved plans for Everton’s new £500m stadium to be built by infilling Bramley Moore Dock - which UNESCO also objected to.
Despite Everton FC committing £55m for heritage and conservation of the site, the stadium came to symbolise the tipping point in Liverpool’s viability to stay on the heritage list.
A draft recommendation from UNESCO’s committee said: "The implementation of the Liverpool Waters project and other large-scale infrastructure projects on the waterfront and northern dock area of the property and its buffer zone have progressively eroded the integrity of the site."
It added: “[This] has resulted in serious deterioration and irreversible loss of attributes that convey its Outstanding Universal Value, and that further projects, such as the approved new football stadium in Bramley-Moore Dock within the property, add to the ascertained threat of further deterioration and loss of the OUV of the property.”
It concluded that the “State Party has not complied with the repeated requests of the Committee” and the decision was therefore voted on - resulting in Liverpool’s title being stripped.
“A museum, not a living city”
Many outlined their shock at the decision when it landed, but there had been a growing inevitably in the years after 2012.
Michael Parkinson is a Professor at University of Liverpool and has chronicled the city’s recession and renaissance over the last 50 years.
After the announcement, he said: “ I believe Unesco’s evidence was questionable and its judgement about the city unbalanced.
“Liverpool has been treated unfairly in relation to other world heritage cities and its unique urban history of development has not been recognised. It has, in fact, been treated like a monument or a museum, not a living city.
“Attending to the north docks is an economic, social and political imperative. This area collapsed when the port declined, leaving the people living in the area marooned in a sea of economic decline. And it has missed out on the city’s extraordinary renaissance of the past 20 years. Giving those communities and people a brighter future is critically important for the city.”
Professor Parkinson pointed towards the £740m spent on Liverpool’s heritage assets and a further £350m on conservation projects since the World Heritage Status was awarded in 2004.
He outlined that significant work had been undertaken to preserve the city’s maritime mercantile history.
However UNESCO could not look beyond plans for the North Docks following other warnings about development in the city centre. Therefore the entire city was called into question.
Laura Pye is the director of National Museums Liverpool and leads one of the largest heritage organisations in the city.
Ms Pye believes the decision that was taken was “unfair” and did not offer a fair reflection of Liverpool.
She told the ECHO: “I was disappointed that we lost the status. Not so much because I felt we needed it, but I felt we deserved it.
“To make a decision having not visited the city for 10 years was unfair. I think the suggestion that our heritage was in a worse state than it was back in 2012 is simply not true.”
Looking towards developments at the North Docks, particularly Bramley Moore, Ms Pye feels the decision was still short-sighted.
She added: “The issue around the infilling of docks is a part of our history. If we didn't infill our docks, we wouldn't have the Three Graces. And I don't think anyone would suggest that that would be better for the city.
“I do think to some degree it's their loss rather than ours.”
However, Ms Pye can see some clarity in the decision when taking a wider look at how the city had changed over the course of nine years.
She told the ECHO: “To be fair to UNESCO, in lots of ways we didn't help ourselves. Some of the development in the city hasn't been good enough. I think many people would acknowledge that.
“The quality of the developments in the city over the last 10 years hasn't been where we've needed to be as a city.”
“It became an easy argument and binary choice”
Current Central ward Cllr Nick Small was the Assistant Mayor to Joe Anderson until 2018.
He believes any bid to preserve the city’s heritage status while developing the city’s future vision got lost in mixed messaging, resulting in many seeing the two as a “binary choice.”
He told the ECHO: “When Joe was Mayor, along with the business community, we sent out mixed messages about the value of UNESCO. That should have been the wake up call in 2012.
“We didn't articulate enough what the World Heritage designation meant for the city. We didn't quantify the value it would bring in terms of jobs, growth, economic and cultural opportunities. We didn't sell that to the people of Liverpool enough.
“It became an easy argument to make of 'oh, it's just a plaque on the wall, it doesn't mean anything'. Or that it's a stadium versus a world heritage site.
“I'm a big supporter of Bramley Moore and I think it's a great opportunity. But I think we failed when we didn't have Bramley Moore and were able to keep World Heritage Status.
“It wasn't a binary choice and it shouldn't have been a binary choice.”
“We just attracted people with no development experience”
Cllr Small believes that while there may have been some unfair criticism of the headline developments planned for the North Docks, there could have been better overall quality control on what was being built in the wider city centre and heritage buffer zone.
He added: “As a city we need to be much more self confident. Liverpool is a city that's going places and for too long we've seen anyone who is willing to invest in the city as a good developer and any development is good development.”
Liberal Democrat and council opposition leader Cllr Richard Kemp is more scrutinous of the developments and its practices which he feels lowered Liverpool’s stock in the eyes of UNESCO.
He told the ECHO: “In 2017 the council started to get a bit worried about the negative impact [of losing the status], but by then it was too little too late.
“I think the biggest problem we had was not any individual act. It was the fact that we continued to denigrate the World Heritage status as a whole.”
Cllr Kemp says he “doesn’t blame” UNESCO for the decision that it came to and that actions by the council eventually resulted in the title being removed.
He points towards failures in the regeneration department and issues with fractional investment, a development model which has seen many sites across the city stalled and many investors lose a lifetime of savings.
Max Caller’s Best Value Inspection report was carried out at Liverpool City Council after the arrest of Mayor Joe Anderson in December 2020, resulting in government appointed commissioners overseeing a number of departments at the council - including regeneration.
Mr Anderson has strongly denied wrongdoing in the face of his arrest last December on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation.
Cllr Kemp believes Liverpool’s attractiveness to ‘opportunist’ developers was however one reason why the World Heritage Status was denigrated.
He added: “What we need to do looking to the future is to attract long term investors who build and continue to own buildings.
“What we didn't do for 10, 11 years was to involve the Grovesnors and the Bruntwoods of this world. We just attracted people with no development experience who found a money making machine rather than a development operation.
“I saw UNESCO as a badge to encourage those good developers. A way of striving to be the best. Just as they did 100, 150 years ago in the city when people spent money on their buildings because they wanted them to last.
“With the heritage status gone, what we might see is a dumbing down of aspiration from developers to strive to meet what they see around them.”
In the days after the status was stripped, Riverside MP Kim Johson took a similar view when outlining that “property tycoons” will be “salivating” at the prospects of moving in on land in the former heritage site.
While disappointed that the heritage status has gone, Cllr Nick Small doesn’t believe Liverpool is now more at risk of bad development and that conservation areas still offer a large part of development guidance and protection.
“We need to raise the level”
Back on the waterfront on that scorching hot day in July, nothing changed or crumbled to the ground once Liverpool was ceremonially ‘deleted’.
At the North Docks and Bramley Moore work continued on as normal.
The waterfront looked as remarkable as ever. Liverpool’s history was no different.
The true fallout, if any, from UNESCO’s decision won’t be felt in the short term.
With much of global travel and tourism again on hold due to the pandemic, it’s difficult to quantify if our number of visitors is impacted by the removal of the status.
Most industry leaders take the optimistic view that it won’t, and the regeneration of a derelict dockland would cushion the blow any blow regardless.
But even if the economic and wider reputational hit will amount to only a gentle body blow in the grander scheme of an evolving Liverpool, UNESCO’s decision should still generate a reaction from the city rather than be shrugged off.
If Liverpool considers itself a world class city, but sees the gratification of a world governing body confirming this as superfluous, where do we look to qualify quality progress and transformation?
In the view of Laura Pye, what we have lost is reputational, but the decision should not be viewed as a liberation.
She told the ECHO: “I think we all need to take the hit and acknowledge that as much as we disagree with the decision and as much as there are parts of their decision that I believe are wrong, UNESCO did have a point on some areas here in Liverpool.
“We as a city now need to address that and raise the quality level.”
