“Make Festival Gardens the first purpose-built village in Liverpool for decades”, Lib Dems urge

Liverpool’s Lib Dem housing spokesperson, Cllr Richard Kemp has written to the two developers chosen to develop the Festival Gardens site to urge them to build Liverpool’s first village for decades. 

In a letter to Urban Splash and Ion, Cllr Kemp said, “Liverpool needs to develop itself as a series of villages in which people have a sense of identity where there can be inter-generational resilience and communities.

“The most obvious place to introduce the village concept is the Festival Gardens. It is probably the only part of Liverpool where we can build a new village and not just retrofit existing communities over a period of time. It can be the exemplar of a new inclusive style of development which will create not only good housing but resilient and self-supporting communities.

“Liberal Democrats believe that this development should create a place for all ages, tenures and ownerships where with associated community facilities such as schools, GP practices and community hubs such as cafés and a community centre the residents can build a reasonably self-sustaining and supportive village

“The council has announced new development partners for this site, Urban Splash and Igloo, and we are urging the council and the private sector developers to introduce a new social housing partner to ensure that 20% of the site will be developed for social housing, some of which would be for the provision of the first new housing cooperative since the early 1980s.

“Liverpool in many ways already has many villages. Some of them such as Woolton and Walton were villages before Liverpool swallowed them up more than 100 years ago. Others like Old Swan and Penny Lane have become virtual villages because of their design and access to shared facilities.

“In Festival Gardens we have the ability to create a village from scratch which can serve as an exemplar of how we change existing communities in the developed parts of the city and strengthen them over the years”

Image: Pete Chapman / Liverpool Garden Festival Site / CC BY-SA 2.0