Save Plumpton Terrace-From Liverpool City Council.

Along Everton Road.

There is a tall grand terrace. 

A long brick structure, a row with its principles of Georgian design almost intact. 

With remnents of its doorway fanlight faded glory. It stands there tall in defiance.

I will not be moved it says to me, in the autumn sunshine.

 I will not fall down, no matter what you do. 

Built 1824. there are a few alterations and a bit of work could be put right.

Generally I hate mock Georgian. The proportions don't work because the ceiling heights are usually reduced. This is the real thing. 

Looking smaller than its three storeys in pictures, than its true scale. 

It stands there as if it has been left behind and in another timezone.

Liverpool in the 1980's.

You could almost put its faded elegance to a UB40 soundtrack and without too much effort, imagine what it was like in the late seventies in post war decline Liverpool, managed decline. Thatcher decline. 

When the mantra was to manage that decline because Liverpool was dying in front of our eyes.

I saw it in spray can graffiti before grafitti became fashionable.

“Will the last person to leave Liverpool switch off the lights'.

It was a distress call. A pleading. 

Vandalism in protest.

I know because I have done it too.

Declaring that Lady Doreen and Sir Trevor Jones in my opinion were “Partners in Slime”.

The terrace plus the adjoining row which are in good order were mentioned in 'Buildings of Liverpool'...saying they were needing attention.

That book was published by Liverpool City Council in 1978.

Just how can this be allowed to happen to such an imposing row of beautiful proportioned dwellings?

It is owned by Liverpool City Council, thats how.

A labour council who behave like Tories. 

Where Mayor Joe Anderson and his Head of Regeneration were arrested, alledgedly as partners in slime. 

They and the council were probably waiting for it to get in a worst state so they can do us all a favour.

 And knock it out to one of the “Cosy” developers that they fed with our land, that we the citizens of Liverpool own.

Plumpton Terrace was alive when I was young.

Everton Road leads into St Domingo Road and thats where I was born in Wye Street almost next to Everton Library that is still standing.

Just about.

It may receive some attention soon.

Or is that another empty Liverpool heritage promise?

Across the road is the beautiful and historic Grade I listed St Georges Church. 

Which was my church of St Georges infant school, where we were led to pray before I discovered the untruths contained within religion. 

I walk through its gatepost entrance, that I once climbed and clung to, and threw confetti over my neighbour in celebration as he walked through it, beneath me with his bride, on his marriage day.

It is easy for you to imagine yourself in the countryside.

At the top of Beacon lane.

St Georges platau has always been an important place.

Feel the craftsman cut 18^th century script in the historic stones, that all tell a story, in the graveyard and you can feel the history through your fingertips

I got quite emotional there today. Maybe I was remembering sitting inside looking up at the majesty of its architecture when as a six year old, not knowing that this was a Rickman design but knowing that it was special. 

Or maybe it was recalling my mothers funeral service that was held there recently. I dont know, but I do know that the sense of place that I still feel to this area is within my soul.

There is a bit of, a new, mad looking Acadamy heading back to Plumpton Terrace. The place where as a child I once went to the Red Triangle club. That was a long time before the Kung Fu fighting Bruce Lee craze took hold. 

This is where another neighbour of mines brother, Steve, older than me, trained. He went to compete at the Olympics. The Red Triangle has trained some good people. 

And kept many young Liverpudlians off the street. Maybe gave them some pride.

This area has had its ups and downs and most of it is on the up.

We need to Save Plumpton Terrace-From Liverpool City Council.

While there are fortunes going into new build shoe boxes, we need to respect the past, where we come from.

This building, or buildings need to be saved.

So what could it be, well as I remember those dark Boys from the Blackstuff days.

I can also remember how I felt proud to have a certiificate, a City and Guilds certificate. That showed that I had trained as a proper apprentice. 

That I had served my time, not inside, where poverty wants to grab you and take you down to.

But as a carpenter. “You will never be out of work” I was told.

Now Liverpool needs more trademen. Good lads and now ladies, who will feel the same pride as I did.

Like the mythical plasterer written into Alan Bleasdales script who signed his name on the corner of his wall because he was so proud of his work. 

Yes I remember him too.

Everton needs to rekindle its pride and look after its youth and give it hope and a new future.

Plumpton Terrace could just be the place to do that.

Save Plumpton Terrace-From Liverpool City Council who have let it decline and will let it fall down.

If we let them. They Are Guilty  

Liverpool The City That Knocked The Cavern Down And Then Called Itself Beatles Town.

SAVE EVERTON LIBRARY TOO

Living In Liverpool Its too hard to bear sometimes

Liverpool's World Heritage Site Status-In Ruins.

UNESCO have now decided that the city of Liverpool does not understand the concept of looking after its best asset, it's World Heritage Site. They meet this week to discuss whether Liverpool should be removed from the World Heritage list.

They have asked repeatedly that Liverpool provide them with provisions of how to manage its world heritage site.

No such undertakings have been received.

The United Nations cultural arm have expected a city that has a world heritage site would have people in place who would understand its cultural significance in terms of world importance and they would protect it against planning blight, and we get Joe Anderson, before him Mike Storey and in between the both of them Warren Bradley.

Unesco World Heritage Committee meet in Krakow high on the agenda is Liverpool.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/sessions/41com/

Liverpool To Lose UNESCO World Heritage Site Status In 2018. Its Official.

In view of the above analysis, it is recommended that the Committee expresses its deep concern that the projects already approved as well as those approved in outline have actual and potential highly adverse and irreversible impacts on the OUV of the property. 
Therefore, it is also recommended that the Committee retain the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger but consider its deletion from the World Heritage List at its 42nd session in 2018, if the State Party does not reverse course and stop the granting of planning permissions which have a negative impact on the OUV of the property, provide substantive commitments to limitation on the quantity, location and size of allowable built form, link the strategic city development vision to a regulatory planning document, and lastly provide a DSOCR and corrective measures that could be considered for adoption by the Committee.


Read it yourself here.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/3519

I have been forced to watch as my cherished views have been destroyed by these consecutive city council leaders who seem blind to seeing what I used to be able to see, my history, my culture.

  Both pictures here are of the same view before and after note the cupola of the Port of Liverpool Building...now obscured.

For over ten years now I have been campaigning vigorously to stop the continual erosion of the majesty that once was Liverpool.

They have taken away my pride.

They have stolen it from me.

I have fought hard, really I have fought hard but the power that these people possess has surprised even me.

Civic vandalism is too tame a description of the sheer destruction of the soul of the city that in places has been stripped bare of all historic meaning.

Capital of Culture became Culture of Capital.

It was easy to pull the wool over the eyes of a lazy electorate.

Yes strong words but true.

Shame on all those who could see what was happening, but did nothing, often as with the guardians of our museums they had the brains........but were in on it. They destroyed Manchester Dock which pre-dated The Albert Dock by 60 years......to build a new museum.

The directors and curators busy making their names and furthering their own careers.
Yes you at Liverpool Museums you know who you are.

There were others who also had opinions. 

See Ptolemy Dean video describing on a programme entitled Britain's Vanishing Views.

I don't claim easily that the brain drain that happened in Liverpool in the 1960's has left us with a foolish breed of poorly educated architects without morals. But its true.

So what of these architects of disaster who sold themselves short for wages. Sold, well our soul really.

And of English Heritage whose ill conceived Chairmen such as Sir Neil Cossons and consecutive Chief Executives have to share most of the blame, allowing their operatives to be in on the deals.

I met with two Unesco reactive monitoring missions and asked Ron Van Oers of Unesco face to face, “Why did you allow them to destroy the Pier Head”

“With English Heritage supporting the developments there was nothing we could do”, was his reply.

Now we can't expect people from The United Nations to save a city from itself or understand the way Liverpool's forever corrupted regimes work the planning system.

Its really not their fault the blame lies elsewhere. 

You cant blame the barometer for the weather.

There are third world country World Heritage Sites to look after, surely they can't believe that a country such as the UK, as member of the G7 would behave like the Taliban in destroying its own heritage sites. 

Though instead of blowing them up with TNT they destroy them with planning blight.

Some historic buildings, listed, now look alien in their own environment because of what was allowed to be built around them.

Liverpool was placed on the Unesco 'World Heritage In Danger' List at the same World Heritage Committee meeting that saw Aleppo and the Palmyra Temple added, that was subsequently blown up by ISIS.

I feel like I have wasted so much time now, but for years I have been fighting for Liverpool's historic buildings, fighting against the odds, with planners, turning up to argue at planning committee meetings in my own time, those committees that had carefully politically placed members who had already taken the decision to pass the very plans that have now done the damage, thus denying me and other objectors, a democracy of fairness.

It's as if those with the power are walking round with welders goggles on, oblivious to the beauty that the forebears had left us, unable to see. Or are taking liberties for their own gain, they have just let it happen.

Frustration has become a way of life for me.

But now, Liverpool having been on the Unesco register for quite some time, it appears that we are at the last chance saloon, before we as a city, lose the title of World Heritage Site.

How can so many be let down by so few.

UPDATE 12.1.2022

LIVERPOOL HAS NOW LOST ITS WORLD HERITAGE SITE STATUS

THE MAYOR JOE ANDERSON AND OTHERS HAS BEEN ARRESTED ON FRAUD AND BRIBERY CHARGES AND ARE AWAITING CHARGE.

LIVERPOOL-THE CITY THAT GETS WORLD HERITAGE SITE STATUS AND THEN GIVES IT AWAY.

Arthur Dooley's Last Studio Ransacked To Make Way For Flats. Its a Disgrace. Exclusive.

How long can Liverpool keep on losing links with its past and its history.

Arthur Dooley was a sculptor that I believe could not have come from anywhere other than here in my home town of Liverpool.

I fought to try and save herbert Tyson Smith's sculpture studio at the Bluecoat, predicting it would become a cheap and nasty gift shop. Guess what has happened.

There next to the garden was an evocative and inspiring glimpse of a man who helped form modern Liverpool. http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/herbert-tyson-smith-bronze-piece-of-week.html

He sculpted many of the reliefs on buildings such as Martins Bank Building with its slave iconocraphy and a lot of monuments around the town.

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/should-herbert-tyson-smith-sculpture.html

His stone carving that was on display at the Old Post office has been restored and is on show in the Met Quarter which now stands on the site. It may be slightly tucked away from the main drag but none the less with a little seaching you can easily find it. Herbert Tyson smith may have been accepted by the establishment and Liverpools merchant classes. Arthur Dooley never was although most of his work was for the clergy who also had a rennaisance in fortune after the second world war, where they were rebuilding and modernising building some godawful structures along the way.

Now another chance goes begging.

It was Arthur Dooley, I am led to believe who coined the phrase Paddy's Wigwam the Metropolitan cathedral of Christ The King, that is now becoming part of the accepted landscape, mainly by people who dont recall that it was Jerry built and leaked like a collander and needed extensive repairs within years.

Dooley was a character that did not hold back his punches, literally being a bit of a boxer himself he came to blows during one argument with ..........in The Everyman..........now demolished to make way for the New Everyman........isnt that a sexcist term these days, shouldnt it be called the Everyperson.

 I know he would have been fighting against its demolition if he was alive.

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/arthur-dooley-bull-piece-of-week.html

He would also have put up a good fight to save Tyson-Smiths Studio.

Now his last studio in Seal street has been ransacked by cretinous property developers right next to the psuedo Liverpool Acadamy of arts that held a fantastic Dooley exhibtion in 2008.

The Acadamy of arts is a pale shadow of its original form that Dooley helped to recreate but none the less it had finance to stage a wonderful exhibition.

June Lornie who runs the present Acadamy has not been able to do anything to inform the public as to the impending disaster that has now unfolded I am informed regrettably, due to ill health.

So no one knew until it was too late.

Whether or not the Do Littles of this city would have cared anyway. 

Whether it would have interupted their Frapaccino lifestyle and they could have helped save it, is now hypathetical, or maybe just pathetical. 

A sad epitaph is now that no-one except the Dooley speculators care. Some of those speculators pretending to be interested in art that wouldn't know a decent sculpture if it fell on them. 

Dooley wasn't the best sculptor around.

 In fact he wasn't even a good sculptor, he got it wrong more times than he got it right. 

But he had something inside him that drove passion which is what we all are now familiar with. 

He fought for  things he believed in.

 Its not his fault that in Brain Drain Liverpool he didn't have a tradition of artistic training for the working class and he became a metalworker first and then used his experience to manufacture emotion by default. Dooleys son Paul told me that upon his fathers death in 1994 the phone never stopped ringing with people who wanted to buy his work, sensing a upward trend they now wanted to buy his art, when for decades he had struggled to pay the bills.

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/arthur-dooley-centurion-piece-of-week.html

This is his studio almost intact at 34-36 Seel Street he was a active member of the Liverpool Academy. He campaigned to have the right for Liverpool artists to show their wares outside the Bluecoat. He is slowly being recognised as an important man active in town planning not afraid to have his say.

Remember Him.

I warned about this years ago. It is a sad day when one of Liverpool's ebulient characters studio is ransacked to turn it into …......flats.

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/arthur-dooley-remember-him-and-save-his.html

The Wellington Rooms-Liverpool’s Disgrace.

What is the point in letting this historic building rot?
Here is a picture taken in 1989 by Jeremy Hawthorn. It was used on calendar a couple of years past that was published by The Nerve.

How can this building be left to rot after a billion pounds of European objective one funding has been sloshing around over recent decades?

The city in talks of regeneration while this building, and many other, lay in a state of degeneration.

It’s easy to miss its façade as you drive along Mount Pleasant.

 The Wellington Rooms in Mount Pleasant were once described as a ‘house of mirth and revelry’.

They were erected after funds were raised by public subscription in 1815
http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/
Pic as it appeared in NERVE magazine current issue 24 available from News from Nowhere Bold Street Liverpool

An Adaptation of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates of Athens, which was illustrated, in the influential publication, by Stuart and Revelt, entitled Antiquities of Athens.
It had a porch on one side for the setting down of sedan chairs. The Portico was originally open but was found to be draughty and a disfigurement to the original design was made in my opinion, with the blocking up.
A ballroom of some 80ft by 40ft it had a card room and a supper room.
It was thought to have been frequented by the upper classes, as subscription balls, assemblies and occasional fancy dress balls.

How that description conjures up the most remarkable images of Georgian Liverpool.

A Maritime City of tall masts, sundrenched sailors, rope-makers and barrow boys.

The Welly is from at the nucleus of Liverpool’s upward growth, from humble beginnings, of its gentrification, taking it to the city of its height in the early 20th century.
It is a descendant of bygone age of wigs and crinoline gowns and candlesticks and taverns.

I grew up with it being known as The Irish Centre in the 70s and 80s, and ignorant of these historic facts relating the building back to the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleons defeat by the then axis powers under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington.

In 2008 I highlighted its plight in a walkabout for the then Daily Post pleading for the then Liberal Democrat council to save it.

There were then ghastly plans put forward to develop it, by sticking a Rubik cube sort of extension on the back.

The plans looked more like a sketch on the back of a jerry-builders ciggy packet than a professionals work; thankfully they were rejected amid controversy.

2008 may have turned the nations perception of my town but being European Capital of Culture was also a curse because it turned into a culture of capital feeding frenzy, where property developers are helped to do the ordinary and the more difficult has to wait to fall down

Nothing has been done to stop the rot, and it is still the same building, only the deterioration seems to have been helped, by the lead on the roof going missing. What state inside to the plasterwork and its Adams style frieze?

On the English Heritage at risk register for as long as I can remember.

It is Grade II* listed.

The area director of EH should be ashamed of the record that Liverpool has for not looking after its Georgiana.

Though asking English Heritage to protect, with this planning department that in my opinion is a law unto itself, is like asking my mouse to look after my cat.

With a ineffectual conservation office we don’t stand a chance.

Now this great city has areas such as Duke Street with its swathes of beautiful simple three storey Georgian terraces that now look alien in their own environment after modern pastiche, or inferior designed student flats have been erected.

So what chance by this council under a Labour council of turning the tide of humiliation to our Georgian stock.

There may be developers crawling over it now. But look at the mess the council made with St Andrews Church on Rodney Street, after it was reported, was offloaded by the city council for a quid to a convicted fraudster.

Yes I know we have to move on but our history is our future.

Look at the restoration of Seymour Terrace; they certainly did a good job there.

Over the road on Hope Street, they throw a £20 million grant at the demolition of the Everyman culling it, with history bleeding out of its walls. They build a replica in its place, whether that will prove successful time will tell. But once you lose your history its lost forever. This is the town that knocked the Cavern Club down.
Next to this historic gem, and with objective one funding an extension was built on Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral built by the architect Gibbard,

The Oscar Niemeyer Basilica rip off, daubed by the effervescent card carrying communist, Arthur Dooley, Paddys Wigwam, while this wonderful little Georgian gem lies there, rotting, a forlorn looking Mausoleum to itself.