The Liverpool Urban Design Guide, Steve Corbett & Michael Cosser

The Liverpool Urban Design Guide

Steve Corbett provides the background to promoting good urban design in Liverpool and Michael Cosser gives a local practitioner's view

In March last year, Liverpool City Council adopted its Liverpool Urban Design Guide as supplementary guidance for making its planning decisions. It is not a complex document and its ideas are blatantly from CABE’s By Design – itself a document with a respected provenance in terms of its urban design ideas.

The final version of the guide has been given two principal objectives. These address different levels of decision-making, the first as a voluntary code; the latter relating to its statutory planning function.

The first objective is that it supports the implementation of the city’s Community Strategy as a set of principles to guide the physical development implicit in the initiatives and actions of all the partners in the Local Strategic Partnership. In Liverpool’s case, some 33 public, civic and voluntary organisations, led by the city council.

Its second objective is to assist the implementation of statutory planning control exercised by the city council as local planning authority. This it does in two ways. It is supplementary guidance for the existing planning policy for ‘general design requirements’ – the policy mentioned above. This policy acts as the ‘hook’ on which to ‘hang’ the supplementary planning guidance. It then, secondly, acts as a statement of emerging policy for the replacement to the UDP – it proving legally unsound to introduce new policy outside of the development plan process, despite a need to better reflect national guidance.

The final version of the guide provides only generic advice through a set of ‘rules’ that can be applied anywhere. It does not, as a number of consultees on the draft document suggested, undertake any analysis of Liverpool’s underlying urban structure or character. ‘Character’ is arguably the most difficult of the guide’s (and CABE’s) seven generic principles to interpret. Whilst avoiding this analysis, the guide does introduce, as supplementary planning guidance, four ways in which character analysis should be addressed in any design statement required to be submitted in support of a proposal.

It requires firstly that character is defined through spatial analysis, as suggested in By Design’s list of ‘key physical attributes’ – addressing topography, urban morphology and building typologies. Secondly, there is a need to consider the temporal aspects of the city’s character. As a ‘time collage’, the city’s built environment has immense value. Partly, this relates to civic identity and the ‘spirit of the place’, but there are good economic reasons too. It is in the historic quarters, with their low rentals and informal lease agreements, that the ‘habitat’ for small, local businesses, including the creative industries, is found. This is especially so in the city centre. These are also the assets that assist in marketing the city as a distinctive place, and consequently attract visitors and investors.

How the city is, and has been, used is the third aspect in defining its character – the way in which the city has evolved as a coherent and connected network of ‘streets’ and ‘squares’. Liverpool city centre was spared much of the post-war modernisation that ‘unpicked’ many towns and cities. The guide advocates techniques such as space syntax analysis to understand how to manipulate and configure outdoor spaces to promote the natural movement patterns implicit in the city’s structure and that are a part of its character. There is better understanding that ‘everyone moving everywhere’ is the lifeblood of the city and that it is this movement that in turn animates its streets and supports its businesses.


Architectural character

Finally, thought is given to the most sensitive of character issues, that of architectural character. Liverpool’s city centre, in particular, oozes Classicism. Its layout is little altered from its 18th century growth which, along with a good number of surviving Georgian buildings, set its townscape context. During the 19th century, as anyone who knows the city will vouch, Classicism won out convincingly in the ‘battle of the styles’. Edwardian Classicism is notable too, with the Pier Head, including the trans-Atlantic classicism of the Liver Building, arguably its apogee. From the mid-20th century, there is the ‘stripped Classical’ of the principal shopping streets. Admittedly, there are in the city good examples of northern Gothic (Waterhouse’s work is notable) and Modernism has made its mark too (especially in the university campus, with fine work by Lasdun, Spence and Fry) but Liverpool’s city centre is without doubt characterised by classical architecture. This raises familiar issues about pastiche and how to respond to this aspect of the character of a place.

Ultimately, the guide steers clear of overt references to architectural style. To promote architectural character, it requires proposals to demonstrate a competence in understanding the principles of architectural composition and form – the ‘regulating lines’ and proportional relationships that guide the best architecture.

Architectural design will continue to be contentious. This is nothing new in the history of architecture but it does raise some interesting urban design issues. Tellingly, and this is possibly indicative of the maturity of the debate in the city, the principles of ‘place making’ in themselves have been criticised as not sufficient to deliver architectural excellence – what some have called the ‘wow factor’. (Just as conversely, the ‘wow factor’ alone may not necessarily produce good place-making.)

There is in Liverpool an aspiration to draw out the best from architects and designers, and to encourage far-sighted patrons. This too, is part of the city’s character. It has a proud legacy of some highly innovative buildings and enlightened patrons. The city’s 21st century renaissance will not succeed without either of these. Here, the urban design guide can do the vital job asked of it in establishing the ‘ground rules’.

Where are we now, one year on? Development control planners are increasingly using the guide’s principles to assess proposals. Advice to Planning Committee from its Liverpool Urban Design and Conservation Advisory Panel (LUDCAP), which considers major proposals that are regularly presented before it, is similarly informed by the guide’s principles. Politicians on planning committee are familiar with the agenda. They were included in an inter-active training event at the guide’s launch. Representatives from local architectural practices were also present at the launch and made an important contribution to the debate.

The guide is establishing common ground but written policy is only part of the story. The challenge is to promote urban design in a broad and inclusive manner. For a generation that is increasingly design-conscious I would like to think of this as the most exciting of prospects for the city.

Steve Corbett, Conservation and Urban Design Liverpool City Council

Part of the cover of the Urban Design Guide	Old Haymarket redevelopment (Shed KM, 2002)	Campbell Square, Ropewalks (Brock Carmichael, 2002)

A local practitioner’s view

The objectives of the Liverpool Urban Design Guide are wide-ranging and ambitious, perhaps too much so. The guide is intended to serve many purposes, from focusing the council’s collective efforts on achieving the Community Strategy, ‘Liverpool First’ through broad urban design aims, policies and aspirations, to providing explicit design guidance. Whilst the desire to provide a consistent design advice throughout the city is to be applauded, it results in a document that of necessity becomes heavily focused on general issues. More detailed guidance is very clearly needed therefore, and to its credit this shortcoming is recognised in the guide.

Throughout the guide photographs are used by way of illustration but they are not closely referenced to the text and in some instances seem to fail to emphasise any particular point or characteristic specific to Liverpool. One obvious and striking impression is the complete absence of any spatial or location plans. Another surprising omission is any succinct overview of what makes Liverpool distinctive and unique as a place, such as its many and varied conservation areas and listed buildings, or its international maritime history, the importance of which has been recognised by the city’s shortlisting for World Heritage Site status.

In terms of understanding the unique character of the city and its individual centres and neighbourhoods the guide recognises that ultimately a full character study is needed. However, with ever-increasing pressure on limited resources there can be no firm commitment that this can or will be done, certainly in the foreseeable future. It seems inevitable therefore that the onus will fall on applicants generally, and developers in particular, to justify their proposals on an individual basis with the likelihood of duplicated effort.

On a positive note, the guide states that individual and innovative architectural style will be encouraged. However, elsewhere there is reference to the council preparing a local listing policy in respect of ‘distinctive’ buildings, which ‘should never be demolished’. This is bound to raise the usual concerns for practitioners of mixed messages and variation in quality standards, with the prospect that such a policy might extend to the mediocre and just plain old, simply to maintain continuity of the existing built fabric.

The Liverpool Urban Design Guide claims to bridge the gap between national policy and local policy and practice, distilling national advice and putting forward an approach relevant for Liverpool. In my view it is too early to say that this aim has been achieved. Undoubtedly, the guide is a good start but to obtain maximum benefit the additional detailed guidance must be produced as soon as possible.

Michael Cosser is an architect and planner and Partner in Brock Carmichael Architects in Liverpool.