Urbanism
Environment
Design

info@urbed.coop

Marianne will be leading a Jane's Walk on Saturday 7th May in Liverpool exploring the Granby 4 Streets. Jane’s Walks are free, locally organized walking tours, in which people get together to explore, talk about and celebrate their neighbourhoods. Where more traditional tours are a bit like walking lectures, a Jane’s Walk is more of a walking conversation. Leaders share their knowledge, but also encourage discussion and participation among the walkers.

Marianne and Gemma - architect and planner respectively - are founding members of Terrace 21 housing co-operative (terrace21.org). Terrace 21 is one partner in a consortium of housing bodies working together to refurbish the empty homes in the ‘four-streets area’ of Granby. Our tour will take us momentarily back in time as we stand at the gates of the historic Princes Park, and look down the grand boulevard of Princes Avenue, imagining the wealth and prosperity this maritime became world famous for. Quickly then we’ll drop back to explore the streets of terraced housing Liverpool has now become famous for, the epicentre of the recent Turner prize winning project. We’ll visit the Granby Workshop, and view the now occupied two-up two-down houses. As we walk the streets we’ll also consider the role the public realm and community-led design have played in this hard-won renaissance. We’ll then skip back across the Avenue to an area called the Welsh Streets, where we’ll consider the story playing out for residents of these terraced streets, similarly faced with demolition but now looking to an alternative vision for renovation. As a whole the tour attempts to invite people to view and discuss Liverpool’s creative response to the legacy of empty terraced houses resulting from the incomplete housing market renewal initiative; and to consider how local people have been at the centre of plans now unfolding, and how in this regard Jane Jacobs would have passionately advocated the place-based, community-centred approach to urban planning we are beginning to see the results of in Liverpool 8.