Major work will begin this week at the Festival Gardens site in south Liverpool this week.
A huge development of around 1,500 homes is planned for currently derelict land north of the public gardens, which Liverpool Council bought for £6m in 2015.
The Otterspool site, which played host to the International Garden Festival in 1984, r equires a major scheme of remediation works to be carried out to tackle problems such as gas risks and groundwater contamination.
It was used as a waste dump from after World War II until the 1980s, when it became the centre of Tory minister Michael Heseltine's efforts to regenerate Merseyside.
Made up of 60 separate gardens by the time they opened in 1984, the Festival Gardens were the centre of the 1984 International Garden Festival.
Taking place between May and October, the festival attracted 3.8m visitors.
But the site slowly fell out of use after the festival finished, with the gardens falling into disrepair and the central dome eventually being torn down in 2006.
The city council's contractors Vinci Construction have been undertaking site preparation works for the past six months and will this week embark on a two-year programme of site infrastructure work.
This is intended to pave the way for the development of 1500 new eco-friendly homes on the derelict land to the north of the popular public gardens.
The works will also create a new eight hectare public open space in the enhanced Southern Grasslands with almost 5,000 new trees planted.
Regular visitors to those gardens will have seen new hoardings put in place that are cutting off areas where people would usually walk.
The council said that this is to enable further remediation and clearance works on the boundary between the Development Zone and The Gardens to take place in the next few weeks.
The remediation of the Development Zone will see more than 380,000 cubic metres of waste material processed, 95% of which will be recycled. Following remediation there is a further £8.5m programme of ground infrastructure works to lay drainage, utilities, a road network and a ground gas management system.
Local residents are being warned to expect an increase in noise and traffic on site.
Planning permission for remediation and infrastructure works was granted in March 2020, and since then the council has secured consents and permits with other statutory authorities, including the Environment Agency, United Utilities, as well as the contractor delivering the site preparation works.
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The project is being jointly funded by Liverpool City Council, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and Homes England.
Liverpool City Council is working in partnership with IMGF Developments Ltd to enter into legal agreements for disposal in the future. This will allow for the release of the land in phases for delivery of housing-led development.
It is anticipated IMGF Developments Ltd will submit a residential planning application for 1,500 eco-homes by summer 2022. It is expected that, pending planning permissions, construction of the first homes will begin in late 2023, with the development being phased over the following eight years.
