The bars, the clubs, the violence and the whole sickening spectacle of Concert Square are symptoms of the problem, but Liverpool’s city centre should never have been allowed to get in this state in the first place.
Apparently the people who bought the old Whitehouse Pub, on the corner of Berry Street and Duke Street, are going to paint over the Banksy-painted rat that has adorned it for the best part of a decade.
Merepark’s Central Village, which will include the Lewis’s building, is set to redress the cash drain towards Liverpool One, but it’s not clear to me whether the city can support so many different retail/leisure/lifestyle hubs – is there genuinely enough cash being spent to go around Liverpool’s various city-centre areas?
I hate to say I told you so but, as I predicted, Destination Kirkby has been thoroughly kiboshed by the government.
It was, financially, a good deal for Everton and an affordable way out of a crumbling ground badly served by surrounding infrastructure.
But it was also a good few miles away from Goodison and came with a bundle of other leisure and retail strings attached.
Communities secretary, John Denham, was apparently worries about the negative impact on surrounding areas of a vast out-of-town development.
It’s almost enough to make one what Liverpool One’s management team made of it all.