The makings of a grid plan for downtown Liverpool

The Old Hall Street area of the city is seeing a considerable amount of
investment with the Beetham tower, hotel and office complex, the new glazed
entrance to the RSA and Post and Echo buildings, the X Building in Bixteth
Street and the forthcoming Unity Tower and Albany developments. Gradually
the area is becoming more vibrant and an attractive place to live and work.

Parallel to Old Hall Street is Pall Mall and Highfield Street. This area is
receiving its share of regeneration with the large Bellway apartment
development , the relatively new housing area to the east of Highfield
Street, improvements to Pownall Square and the proposed Persimmon Homes
development on the site of St Mary's Church.

In between these two developing areas is the old Exchange Station site which
is largely given over to car parking, except for a landscaped area to the
rear of Mercury Court.

Obviously, this site is a prime development area and
plans have been announced to develop it to provide office accommodation,
public squares and multi-storey car parking.

I think that it would be in the interest of all three areas to re-establish
the cross streets that used to link Old Hall Street and Bixteth Street with
Pall Mall and Highfield Street before Exchange Station was built in the
nineteenth century.

At present, the only way of getting from one side to
the other is by walking across the car park and there is no direct road
route. This prevents communication between these areas and results in the
quite attractive streets that run between Old Hall Street and Bixteth Street
being effectively dead ends.

One of the cross streets, Prussia Street, used to be continued in a long
pedestrian subway underneath the station. This has now been boarded up and,
rather than attempt to reopen it, it would be far better to reduce the level
of the car park in that area to allow for the street to extend for its full
width from Highfield Street to Bixteth Street and on through the gap in the
existing retail development to Old Hall Street.

Other streets that might be extended across the station site are Old Leeds
Street and Cockspur Street.

The re-establishment of the grid of streets would go a long way to
reintroducing some urban vitality to an area that is pretty desolate at the
moment and would encourage further development.

Martin Sloman

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