Liverpool’s commercial district is dying a slow death. Who can reanimate our ghost town?

Dear members — Happy Halloween! This bleak weather certainly feels on-theme, doesn’t it?

To celebrate the holiday, we’ve got an appropriately spooky story today from David Lloyd about the haunted heart of Liverpool: the commercial district. David takes us from the underground lake that forms on rainy days at Moorfields, to war zone-like car parks and the Pall Mall wastelands. What’s will all this desolate emptiness in prime Liverpool space? And why does Castle Street only really come alive at night? The sorry state of our commercial district today, one source tells David, is a direct result of our elected leaders’ inability to showcase opportunities here.

That illuminating feature is below. But first, your regularly scheduled Post briefing.

Your Post briefing

Metro mayor Steve Rotheram has not ruled out an increase in bus fares across the Liverpool City Region after chancellor Rachel Reeves told the House of Commons the price of bus travel would be rising to £3. Bus fares were capped to £2 in 2023 under the former government to help with the cost of living, though the £2 bus fare cap had already been introduced by Rotheram to the city region in 2021. In response to Reeves’ announcement, Rotheram said he was working to examine what measures could be put in place to make local travel as affordable as possible.

The teenager accused of killing three girls in the Southport stabbing attack in July has also been charged for possessing poison and an al-Qaeda training manual. In a search of his home, 18-year-old Axel Rudakabana was found in possession of ricin — a highly toxic substance derived from castor oil plants — as well as a PDF document relating to terrorism. He has already been charged with the murders of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, as well as the attempted murder of ten others. His trial is set for January next year.

The bypass proposed to go through Rimrose Valley has been axed as part of the budget. The £250 million plans for a dual carriageway had been divisive for members of the community in Sefton, with rows over the protection of green space and wildlife dominating the local political landscape for years. Now, campaigners from the Save Rimrose Valley group have said they feel vindicated by the announcement. 

Liverpool’s commercial district is dying a slow death. Who can reanimate our ghost town?

Let’s start with a Halloween joke. Seems appropriate. Where’s the dead centre of town? 

Sorry, Pan Book of Jokes and Gags for Kids, it’s not the cemetery. At least, not around here. In Liverpool, it’s the commercial district on a weekday morning. 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like I’ve arrived in a burgeoning city’s commercial core until I’ve waded through an underground lake, navigated a Crystal Maze-like obstacle course, and struggled to find my way out of a barricaded-up railway station exit, only to wander through a rutted and rubble-strewn badland edged with buddleia-fringed, derelict buildings. Welcome to Liverpool’s pulsating commercial heart. 

“When it rains we get leaks everywhere. Above ground and below,” says the frustrated chap at Moorfield station’s ticket office. “That’s when we get our trusty collection of buckets out on the concourse. They’re not easy to dodge at peak times.” 

Then the same fleet-footed travellers have to play an escape game to find their way out onto Moorfields’ street itself. Moorfields is that rare gem, an underground station that forces you to go up before you go down to street level again. An awkward reminder of the city’s ‘walkways in the sky’ pipedream from another failed epoch. 

What an endorphin rush for the start of a commuter’s day. Truly, they must feel like the Kings of Wall Street once they’ve made it this far. 

“The escalators have been broken for a year and a half,” my ticket office friend tells me. “The contractors say the council has stopped paying them, the council says it's waiting for a part, and Network Rail say it’s nothing to do with them. So nothing happens.”

Nothing much happens immediately outside the station, either. The abandoned shell of Yates's wine lodge slowly crumbles away, beyond which stretches a vast surface level car park (I say car park, but in reality it’s an ashen wasteland punctuated with the bright yellow lollipops of NCP parking signs). Take a look at exhibit A below and ask yourself: war zone or bustling commercial district? This is central Liverpool, today. It’s outrageous when you think about it, isn’t it? 

Here’s a question for you. How many pockmarked car parks are there in the commercial district? Come on, this is an easy one. It’s a place you’ve walked through many times; the historic core of our proud Mercantile City. Only, we’ve collectively stopped looking. 

There are, in fact, eight. I counted them, so you don’t have to – from Covent Garden to Shenanigans on Tithebarn Street. More than in any other area of the city. 

Even greater emptiness awaits, should you wander deep into the district’s dark heart: huge tracts of land so catatonic they can only dream of being commercially viable enough to become yet another car park. 

Pall Mall’s two-football-pitches’ worth of weed-choked nothingness is the biggest vacant lot in the city. Maybe it should be marketed as the Chavasse Park for lunchtime office workers – at least for those nimble enough to hurdle over the metal crash barriers with their butties. There has been talk for years of this place becoming 400,000 square feet of Grade A office space, home to 2,500 new jobs. We are not even at the land-levelling stage.

There are acres of emptiness like this in the heart of the city. Not quite enough to fill the Albert Hall, but close. If Liverpool is a doughnut, the commercial district is the hole in its centre. 

Five years ago, seemingly intent on addressing the problem, the council appointed consultants, Arup – based in St Paul’s Square – to produce a Spatial Regeneration Framework (SRF) to pinpoint its potential, in the hope of attracting new investment. 

Its findings probably won’t shock you. The area needed more Grade A offices, it declared. It needed to retain and refurbish its existing stock and not hand it all over to restaurants and hotels. It needed nicer streets, stronger placemaking. Pocket parks. So far, so regeneration bingo. 

The council then spent hundreds of thousands on a branding exercise. The severed heads of commercial district bigwigs were hoisted high and hung from the scaffold, Game of Thrones-like. Technically, they were banners hung from lampposts. But the effect was the same. A parade of decapitated, gurning industry leaders stretching from The Strand to the Superlambanana, declaring: THIS IS THE COMMERCIAL DISTRICT. 

What is? This crappy car park you’re grinning over? You can almost hear the agency’s box-ticking pitch: ‘oh it’ll humanise the area. Show people how diverse the commercial district is…’ 

The council lapped it up. Because populating the place with placards is easy. Populating it with people is something they’ve yet to get a grip on.

Since those heady days, nothing’s happened. Well, Covid did. And Sony moved into the area. But, with the greatest of respect, after Wavertree Technology Park, Old Hall Street must seem like London’s Kings Cross to Sony’s merry band of gamers.

Placemaking expert Paul Kalee Grover was part of the team that drafted the SRF. He now runs his own agency, and is in no doubt: the commercial district isn’t working.

“The difference between here and Manchester is stark,” he says. “Over there, you see restaurants full of businesspeople at lunchtime. Here, you’ll get a handful of tourists.”  Spinningfields has been a huge success, the way it blends seamlessly into the retail heart of the city. It’s a place you’d be happy to spend time in,” he says of the rebooted slice of Manchester’s city centre: with its village green, co-working spaces and sleek offices where, once, the Manchester Evening News offices stood. Oh and yes, an ugly surface car park too. 

Taking its cue from Manchester’s success, Liverpool’s SRF, Paul says, was a way to direct attention on our own commercial heart and ask what, exactly, do we need to do next?

“Cities will always need areas where large offices are clustered, but It was about showing what else it could become, and how we get there,” Paul says. “The aim was to make sure the focus wasn’t taken away from the city centre, after the success of the Baltic, Liverpool ONE and Kings Dock.”

The area in question covers 40 acres at the northern fringe of the city centre. It fans out from the city’s historic core, stretching from the brick-cladded monotony of Princes Dock to Hatton Gardens at the far end of Dale and Tithebarn Street. This is where the city has, traditionally, gone to work. Home to the city’s banking, legal, maritime and property companies, and the indefatigable little businesses that served them, creating the area’s vibrant, industrious ecosystem. The cobblers and the key cutters, the butty bars and the barbers. 

Or, at least, it used to be. Over a million square feet of office space has been converted to residential or hotel use over the past decade. We’ve less than that remaining as vacant office stock. And only a third of what’s left is in any fit state for you to move in, plug in your laptop, and get straight to work.

Liverpool hasn’t seen a speculative new office development in 25 years. And, while we wait for the fabled £200 million Pall Mall scheme to magically sprout up from stony ground, work stalls on Martins Bank’s redevelopment, and Castle Street’s Bank of England – expressly singled out in the SRF to be repurposed for office use – is set to reopen as the Ivy Restaurant next month. Cheers! 

The undead, they say, only feast at night. If that’s true, then chances are you’ll find them on Castle Street. Once thrumming with life from nine-to-five, these days it only really comes alive after dark.

All those grand banking halls and actuaries offices are now restaurants. The busy little florists, electrical stores and printers long gone; all lost to the monoculture of our evening economy.  And once those cocktail bars and bistros sink their teeth into the neighbourhood, the pulse of daytime trade grows weaker. The urgent thrum of the morning commuter rush is replaced by sloshing of buckets swilling out the dregs of the night before, and the discordant chimes of a thousand Cruzcampo bottles tipped into the dumpster. 

Don’t get me wrong: Our vibrant food and drink sector is important. It employs around 29,000 people and adds a healthy £600 million to our economy. The reanimation of Castle Street, and its entourage of tributaries, has been remarkable. Hawksmoor does a mighty fine chateaubriand; and who doesn’t love a bit of Mowgli magic?

But are these places likely to offer the calibre of jobs to encourage our young graduates to linger and put down roots? (I’ve previously written about the troubling exodus of our best and brightest.) Plus, even the best of them struggle with midweek bookings. Can a successful city just hold its breath until the weekend comes around again? 

Every new restaurant doesn’t arrive by chance. It sailed through an allegedly rigorous planning process, and has been deemed suitable by a council keen, allegedly, to regenerate our business core. How to enrich a commercial district? Simple. Just add Hooters. 

Each new arrival marks the final resting place of a commercial district office or small business, and an ever-narrowing array of options for newcomers to set up shop here, or for startups to start up.

“Five years ago I could walk from my office in Old Hall Street to Castle Street at lunchtime and see four or five people I knew and have a chat,” says Alison Lobb, Managing Business Partner at Cotton Exchange-based solicitors Morecrofts. “It doesn’t happen anymore. That kind of impromptu networking is so important, but it’s gone.”

Covid, Alison believes, definitely had a role to play in the changing fortunes of the area. Estimates suggest around 40% of Liverpool firms operate some kind of hybrid working options. “But I speak to colleagues around the country, and we’re not seeing the bounce back that other cities have seen,” she says. “Why would people want to leave their house to work in an office overlooking areas of dereliction in the heart of the city?”

The knock-on effect is that Friday evenings are often dead in the commercial district, too.  Gone are the days when you couldn't get in Rigby’s for an after-work drink,” Alison says. “The owner of the Abbey Road bar now pays people to wander the streets with free drinks vouchers to pull the city crowd in, or what’s left of it.”

So what of the possible routes to salvation etched out in the SRF? What does Alison think of its recommendations? 

“It would help if people even knew it existed,” she says. “I’ve not heard it mentioned much at all. I don’t see its recommendations being acted on.” 

The city centre, Alison says, has changed radically since the report was commissioned. “Hybrid working is here to stay. If people choose to spend less time in cities, we have to work even harder than we did before to attract them. If we don’t, they’ll commute to other, more inviting places.” 

“Potential employers do their homework,” Paul agrees. “And that includes looking at the commuter rail stations. Other cities just wouldn’t put up with the appalling state of Moorfields. I’d make that area a Mayoral Development Zone immediately, and start there.”

Businesses, Paul says, know that if they want to attract the best talent, they need to make sure they’re in a location that offers the right mix. It’s a mix that features co-working spaces, and the so-called ‘third spaces’ of coffee shops for freelancers and informal meetings.

“It’s about the quality of the coffee and cake as much as it is about the office these days,” he says. “Places to interact with other businesses are more important than ever.”

Not so easy when your commercial district’s high street is squarely aimed at stag and hen parties, the weekend football crowd and Airbnb apartments. And, elsewhere, no new office developments and street-level third spaces have replaced those we’ve lost, and continue to lose. 

There are some bright spots, Paul says, mentioning the vibrant startup community of the Tempest Building, with its rooftop gardens and event space. Property company Bruntwood has done similar in the Cotton Exchange, creating a forward-thinking mixed-use work environment with breakout spaces, refreshments and coworking hubs. 

Bruntwood, too, is responsible for inviting the Graffiti Spirits Group to open Nord restaurant in the atrium of the Plaza – by far the most beautiful dining space in the city. But there are few other inspired incursions like this. And even Nord’s interior design chutzpah struggles to warm the icy core of St Paul’s Square through the week. 

None of which goes unnoticed by potential investors too, Paul says. “They’ll look at Liverpool, and they’ll ask me: why should I choose to invest here?”

It’s a fair question. Especially so when you look at the rents a developer can hope to recoup from their investment. City centre office rates in Manchester run around 30-40% higher than those in Liverpool. Yet, despite this, Manchester saw a 40% increase in office take-up this year alone, while Liverpool's take-up decreased by 72%.

The scarred landscape and piecemeal progress of our commercial district is, according to Chief Executive of Liverpool BID Company Bill Addy, a failure that can be traced to the commercial district itself – or, more precisely, to the Town Hall. 

“This is clearly a leadership failure,” he says. “We’ve gone backwards over the past thirty years.”

You can’t argue with the numbers. If you take, for example, inward investment from overseas, Liverpool is wallowing way down the list, in unlucky 13th place. We’re behind such powerhouses as Brighton, Reading and Bristol.

“The reason why we haven’t developed the commercial district is because commercial values are so low,” Bill says. “Developers will take whatever they can, so if that’s hotels and restaurants, so be it.”

“Our members helped pay for the SRF. So it’s only fair they’re asking ‘what’s being done about it’?” he says. “Writing it is the easy bit. Following its recommendations is what we desperately need to do now.”

“This isn’t about the commercial district,” Bill says. “It’s bigger than that. This area is the driver for growth in the whole of the City Region. We deserve better.”

The state of our commercial district today, Bill believes, is a direct result of an inability of our elected leaders to showcase the opportunities here. To go out there and sell the shit out of the city, like the natural born merchants we are. 

Before I leave, I grab a sandwich at Out To Lunch on Chapel Street, like I used to when I worked here (at Trinity Mirror, but let’s keep that to ourselves). Back then, there were queues out the door. Now I start chatting to a couple of 20-something suited lads, the only other customers here.  

“Do you know where the commercial district is?” I ask one of them. He looks at me blankly.

“The commercial district?” he asks, shrugging. 

“Oh,” his friend offers, “do you mean Liverpool One?”

I glance over the road, at Fazenda restaurant and El Gato Negro Tapas in Exchange Flags, once the commercial district’s ground zero. 

“Yeah, maybe I do,” I say. 

Correction: In a previous version of this story, we wrote that the solicitors firm Moorcroft is located in St Paul’s Square. The firm name is actually spelled Morecrofts, and it’s located in the Cotton Exchange. The story has now been amended.