Tony Moscardini dispells Liverpools World Heritage Untruths.

This was what we had in Liverpool, a World Heritage Site to be proud of. The most remarkable fact is how that cluster of buildings had remained untouched with Liverpools tragic 1970s regeneration make over. This was Liverpool to me everything you wanted, a city showing its pride, class, style, heritage, tradition, and all this captured, in the group of buildings at our Pier Head. This is the front cover of Quentin Hughes book LIVERPOOL City of Architecture. It was no mistake it was there, Quentin knew a thing or two about Liverpool. He had been appointed to meet the original Unesco Inspectors, in decision, on whether or not to give Liverpool its coveted heritage accolade, World Heritage Site Status. Look at what is happening now, it is very sad indeed. The Liverpool Preservation Trust was founded after long searching debates with Quentin and the simple reasoning of the need to protect the fragility of the central core of the WHS as the city was being run by spivs and uncultured people who wanted their "cosy" or preffered developers to crawl all over it.

Quentin asked me to become a council member of the Merseyside Civic Society, which I did, later to resign, appalled at the pathetic vested interests working from within, combined with the inactivity of the other council members, the few were allowed to opiniate without debate. One council member whose opinion I did respect was, and is, Tony Moscardini. It is he who writes in to the Daily Ghost, to attempt to educate the local press after the recent idiotic, so called reporting, that we have recently had to endure regarding the World Heritage Site. Tony has forgot more about Liverpools architecture last week than what young Larry Bartlett, let loose by Alastair Machray, will ever know. But do the local papers take advice from people with knowledge, hardly, thats just not done here in Liverpool, which is how come we are in such a mess. http://liverpoolpreservationtrust.blogspot.com/2009/10/dave-bartlett-blues-he-should-have-gone.html

Premature plan
THE headline in last week’s Daily Post (October 5) “City planners pave the way for Peel’s Liverpool Waters” should more accurately read “ City planners aim to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs”.

It must be obvious that zoning a massive out-of-centre site for what should be city centre uses will result in a World Heritage Site (which is the city’s greatest asset) filled with empty, mothballed or boarded-up buildings and undeveloped sites.
To say that there is a “New City Blueprint” is completely untrue. The plan referred to is the World Heritage Site Supplementary Guidance that not only excludes the Peel site but also does not in any way deal with land use allocations.
It beggars belief that a document, still to be formally adopted, can be said to “pave the way” for anything other than the protection of the World Heritage Site from inappropriate development.
The correct context for considering Peel’s proposal is the Core Strategy presently at an early stage of preparation. The proposal is clearly premature at this point in time.
The World Heritage Site's priceless value is all the more crucial in the present economic climate.
Liverpool's administrators, many of whom I suspect see the World Heritage Status as a bar to so-called “progress”, should get real.
I have been reading Peter Ackroyd’s story of Venice and there are uncanny parallels with Liverpool.
He said that Venice “ traded in goods and in people, finally it trades upon itself”. What could be truer of today’s Liverpool?
Anthony Moscardini, Woolton