Post by Kev on Jul 9, 2004 6:51:40 GMT -5
:-/A CITY-WIDE festival will celebrate Liverpool's new-found World Heritage status, it was announced today.Plans are under way for an extravaganza to mark the good news, which sees Liverpool put alongside world treasures inlcuding the Great Barrier Reef and the Taj Mahal.
The city's head of planning Nigel Lee, who has just returned from the Unesco meeting in China which decided Liverpool's fate, said: "This will slot in as one of the city's festivals. Next year we intend to have something fairly big."
Sir Neil Cossons, the most senenior heritage figure in England, said the party is well deserved. He said he has loved "England's greatest Victorian city" since his father brought him as a schoolboy.
The young Neil was "entranced" by the great working port, so much so that in the late 1950s he came to study geography at Liverpool University. He and fellow students would bunk off economics lectures to watch the ships in the docks at high tide.
Sir Neil married fellow geography student Veronica, whose mother still lives in Knotty Ash, on-and in the late 1960s was deputy director of museums in the city. He remains a trustee of National Museums Liverpool.
So it was a proud moment when the news came through that Unesco's World Heritage Committee had given the Maritime Mercantile City the nod.
"Liverpool is England's greatest Victorian city and I take my life in my hands when I go round as chairman of English Heritage saying that. But I really believe that the only place in Britain that might give Liverpool a run for its money is Glasgow," the 65-year-old says.
"Twenty years ago, people would have laughed Liverpool out of court if it had said it wanted to go for World Heritage Status. But not now.
"This is putting Liverpool on the world stage.
"Nobody who has ever been to the city doubts it. The only doubters are the people who haven't seen Liverpool in the flesh. You just have to absorb the place."
Liverpool's name was first linked with the idea of World Heritage Status in the late 1990s.
Together with former Secretary of State Chris Smith, Sir Neil drew up a "wish list" of future heritage sites, including Liverpool, Manchester and the Great Western Railway.
He said: "We'd had a first series of sites accepted in the 1980s, places like Stonehenge and DurhamCathedral.
"I said the critical thing was not to put up more medieval cathedrals, but recognise the period of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Britain was the Athens or Rome of the world. She was a major imperial, industrial and mercantile power.
"I was absolutely determined Liverpool should be on the list. It was the great western European gateway, and you can feel that if you stand in Liverpool today.
"You can read Liverpool like a book of 200 years of British history.
"Liverpool's renaissance will capitalise on its past by putting in good new buildings. The city needs every ounce of recognition and renaissance that it can get.
"In the long term, this is going to be more signifi-cant than Capital of Culture. This is something Liverpool can enjoy forever."
It is quite a coup for Liverpool to have a champion like Sir Neil.
Being chairman of English Heritage is quite a job.
Since he took up the reins five years ago, the grandfather- of-three has pushed for a road tunnel and a fully-equipped visitor ctre at Stonehenge, and started a Heritage Counts audit - the first of its kind in Europe - which has become the benchmark for our knowledge about historic England and has helped persuade the government of the importance of the nation's heritage for the future.
Under his guidance, English Heritage has also become more open, and Sir Neil says people should not undervalue the importance of public opinion and support.
"The idea of public csultation is something I feel strongly about.
"Programmes like BBC's Restoration series have had phenomenal viewing numbers, and not just the older generation who have an affection for what they remember when they were boys and girls.
"There are people in their 20s and 30s, who have been brought up in one of the most fantastic landscapes in the world, and they are beginning to recognise it. This is very encouraging."
Liverpool Echo....
