Cityscape

Chavasse Park and One Park West, Liverpool One, 3rd October 2008

Last Friday we were in Liverpool and took the chance to explore the huge Livepool One development, the new shopping heart of the city. Old streets have been cleared and even newish buildings demolished to make way for the colossal regeneration of this underused area of the city. It is bright and clean and will soon blend seamlessly into the surviving pattern of streets between Paradise Street and Lord Street. But I am uneasy. I think that there should be more to city life than shopping, more to streets than a way of getting from one shop to the next. The space between the shops has been largely ignored; the space rises through three floors - so the old South Castle Street is now a three-tier shopping arcade open to the sky - and is crowned with an open space that I think has been called Chavasse Park. But it does not feel like a real city park; it feels like landscaping designed to show off the new buildings.

My gut instinct is to rebuild city life - the lives of cities - from the street up. I feel that cities are tinkered with endlessly, so that they become a mish-mash of half-baked plans. Liverpool One ends abruptly and the streets beyond are as scruffy and potholed as ever and there is no understanding of street life - buskers, benches, conversations, statues, smokers - on these sterile new streets. And then I wonder if I am being curmudgeonly, whether my vision of cities is old-fashioned. But cities are more than shops and more than money; there is more to urban life than consumption.