Features

Liverpool revival

31 Oct 2013 by GrahamSmith
After a decade of reinvention, the Merseyside city is welcoming innovative hotels, world-class events and a whole new generation of fans, says Tom Otley The new Liverpool is a revelation. Walk down to the waterfront, past the scrubbed bricks of refurbished Victorian warehouses and the shining glass-fronted hotels and art galleries, and the changes are remarkable. Historical buildings have been thrown into sharp relief by angular new additions. Where before art deco masterpieces rubbed shoulders with half-empty sixties office blocks, a reminder of Liverpool’s precipitous decline, now the contrast between old and new is striking, invigorating, and controversial. The overhanging slab of the new £72 million Museum of Liverpool, which opened in 2011, and the shiny black glass of the Mann Island development, sit next to the Three Graces – the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building – on the waterfront. Finally, after a decade of reinvention, it seems Liverpool once again can reveal itself as a great world city. It always had the setting. You can wander up the Mersey river and have lunch at the yacht club overlooking the boats belonging to those who “made good” or are enjoying a sailing holiday. The river will always be the backdrop for Liverpool, and though the throng of boats will never return, the new cruise terminal that opened in 2007 is certainly popular, with 35 liners mooring in 2013. During the few days I was there, first Holland America Line’s luxury cruiser, the MS Prinsendam (part of the Carnival empire that includes Cunard, P&O and Princess Cruises) docked, and then the Celebrity Infinity, with its 2,000-plus passengers. They come for obvious reasons – The Beatles being a particular lure. Sites such as the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, the venue that famously put the Fab Four on the map, draws in people from all around the world, as do the two sites for The Beatles Story attractions on the Albert Dock and Pier Head on the Waterfront. As well as its musical heritage, Liverpool has shopping, football and architecture – with new developments drastically transforming the city. Liverpool is a coherent whole in a way that it, perhaps, never has been. The change was marked by the city being awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2004, gaining the title of European Capital of Culture in 2008 and absorbing £5 billion of investment in ten years, including £1 billion for the Liverpool One shopping centre, which occupies 16 hectares and houses 160 shops, cafés, restaurants and bars, as well as two hotels. Still, Liverpool has to battle against long-standing negative preconceptions. It’s astonishing how many people, having once visited Liverpool, in the 1990s or earlier, express no wish to return. Many cities go through these phases but Liverpool’s story seems to be particularly turbulent, reflecting not only the waves of immigration that have washed up on its shores (some 22 per cent of the city are of Irish origin after their ancestors left Ireland during the famine of the 1840s) but also the large economic forces that powered its boom in the 19th century and then led to its bust in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s more complicated than that, however, as I am told by Elaine Allen, a registered Blue Badge tourist guide. For many Liverpudlians, the boom and the bust were side by side. While people such as 19th-century philanthropist and local MP William Brown used their new-found wealth to finance the impressive Civic Quarter of neoclassical buildings – including the Walker Art Gallery, St George’s Hall, Central Library and World Museum – others lived in little more than ghettos of back-to-back housing, sleeping 20 to a room. The Grade II-Listed Duke Street has a lasting example of this – have a look, it’s almost impossible to believe that there was row after row of housing like this. (Ironically, now it is the centrepiece of a new luxury living development.) If you’ve visited Liverpool in the past, the improvements start from the moment you step off the train at Lime Street station. The ugly high-rise Concourse House next to it was demolished in 2008, as were the strange 1960s concrete shops that blocked the front of the station. Nowadays, when you exit, there’s a series of pale stone steps leading down either to St George’s Hall or to St John’s shopping centre, itself improved from its sixties form, with a large wrap-around screen flashing colourful advertising. Liverpool has more listed buildings than any other city in the UK apart from London, but it’s the Beatles connection that gets the headlines. Thankfully, apart from buskers, visitors don’t spend every waking hour having to listen to their songs. In Salzburg, for example, you can expect Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusic to be playing in the lift to your hotel room; in Liverpool they don’t seem to have elevator music at all, probably because it would get in the way of them chatting. To state the obvious: Liverpudlians are friendly. If you talk to them, they will talk back – they are part of the attraction of the city, and will go out of their way to help you. In hotels shops, cafés, restaurants, cathedrals, museums, art galleries and taxis, I was met with consistent friendliness, and there aren’t many cities in the world where you can say that. It reminded me of London during the 2012 Olympics. Kerrin MacPhie, director of sales at the Arena and Convention Centre (ACC) tells me that the city had 2,200 hotel rooms in 2007, where now it has 7,350, with more on the horizon. The ACC is expanding from its current two-centre hub – the Echo Liverpool and the BT Convention Centre – to include a new Exhibition Centre next door in 2015. Next summer, up to one million extra visitors are expected (there were 1.47 million overnight stays in the whole of last year) as both the International Festival for Business (IFB) and the Open Championship at nearby Hoylake take place. The IFB has already confirmed 50 events such as the Sony World Photography Exhibition and the International Trade Expo, which are expected to bring in 75,000 delegates, with Liverpool Vision (the organiser of IFB 2014) anticipating a total audience of 250,000 for the six-week programme across June and July. Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed the news earlier this year, saying: “This is going to be an event on an unprecedented scale. For anyone involved in enterprise, the International Festival for Business is the place to be.” The hotel brands entering Liverpool are both old and new – four-star plus down to “luxury hostels”. Budget brand Z Hotels (thezhotels.com) opened a 92-room property this year, and is seeing strong occupancy both from cost-conscious tourists as well as corporate travellers, who are drawn to rates from £36 a night. General manager Jane Moss puts this down to a combination of the hotel’s offering (bedrooms with en suite wet zones, 40-inch high-definition TVs, free Thierry Mugler toiletries, wifi and Sky channels) and the fact that it’s such an interesting destination to visit. “Liverpool’s strength is that we have both business travellers during the week, and leisure travellers at the weekend, “ she says. The Z Hotel is one of many examples of how existing buildings are being refurbished – in this case, the top three floors and ground level of the former sixties State House. In fact, if you see a building being given a facelift, it will most likely either be in the process of being converted into student accommodation or turned into a hotel. Directly across from the Z Hotel, on the corner of Dale Street and North John Street, is the former Royal Insurance Building, which will soon welcome a 116-room Aloft – Starwood’s trendy boutique hotel brand (starwoodhotels.com/alofthotels) – when it is unveiled next year. Mark Ashall, chief executive of Ashall Property, is clear about the challenges of converting a building such as this – Grade II Listed and empty for more than 20 years – saying that the development had as much to do with civic pride as anything else. “Everyone that was involved in putting this together – from the council and the equity arrangers, to the banks and the contractors – they all really wanted to do this. It was a complex scheme to get underway, but because of the level of goodwill it succeeded,” he says. The choice of the Aloft brand also reflected the need of the market. Ashall says: “In London there is demand for every part of the spectrum. In Liverpool you need to focus a lot more on value for money, so in terms of brand we needed to find something that was a quality product but one which people were prepared to pay for and that was competitive with the other hotels in the local market. The combination of the Aloft brand and the fact that it’s in the spectacular Royal Insurance Building will make it something special.” The city has also seen the launch of Hoax (hoaxliverpool.com), a new luxury hostel. The property is in a former tea warehouse in the Cavern Quarter, and the thoughtful refurbishment of the building combined with impressive facilities means it will appeal to everyone from backpackers to families, and perhaps a few cost-conscious business travellers as well. It has free wifi, plug sockets by each one of its 266 beds, (even when sleeping four, six or eight to a room in bunks), and a great bar and restaurant with live music and specially commissioned graffiti on the walls. The Richmond opened in May 2013, and has either 51 serviced apartments, or 152 rooms and suites depending on the configuration (the property can be adapted to suit what people are booking). Housed in the Grade II-Listed former Mersey Travel Head Office in Hatton Garden, general manager Stephen Joseph says that weekend business is as strong, if not stronger than weekday business travel “because of the city’s unrivalled attractions”. There are more traditional incumbents too. An 87-room Doubletree by Hilton hotel will open early next year on the corner of Dale Street and Sir Thomas Street. General manager David Hughes sees the property as having four main draws – the rooms, the function space in the former Conservative Club dating back to 1865 on Dale Street, the spa and the 80-cover restaurant headed up by local celebrity chef Simon Rimmer. Hughes has experience here, having opened the nearby Hotel Indigo in 2011 and installing a Marco Pierre White steakhouse inside. I ate there one evening and enjoyed a traditional menu enlivened by Marco’s signatures: saltimbocca of cod with cherry tomato ragout and confit of garlic; real chips in beef dripping; and Box Tree Eton mess. I could have been in London, were it not for the accents of the staff and diners around me. Then there’s Accor, which recently announced it would operate a 200-room Pullman hotel in 2015 as part of the new Exhibition Centre. This will be in addition to several other hotels in the city that are also part of the group: the new Ibis Styles, the Aparthotel Adagio Liverpool City Centre (to read a review see businesstraveller.com/archive/2013/october-2013), which opened in March in the former Lewis’s department store, and the Novotel Liverpool Centre, which opened four years ago (see this month's Tried & Tested section). As I walk around the city, I’m constantly reminded that everyone is proud of what’s happening – they are impressed with how the city has bounced back, but their self-deprecating humour remains, ready to cut everyone – themselves included – back down to size. When I admit to one taxi driver that the city has changed so much I barely know my way around, he agrees, and says that’s why he is driving me the wrong way. “But still, it doesn’t look like you’re in much of a rush,” he adds with a chuckle. Another subject of jocularity can be found on the corner of Lime Street and Ranelagh Street – above the old entrance to Lewis’s, there’s a bronze statue of a naked man crafted by British sculptor Jacob Epstein. It was erected in 1956 to symbolise Liverpool’s return after the dark days of the Second World War, and was named Liverpool Resurgent. Of course Liverpudlians of the time took one look at the nude on the prow of the department store and nicknamed him “Dickie Lewis”. It’s a reminder that even when flying high, Liverpool will remain with its feet firmly on the ground. visitliverpool.com
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