BDP to produce vision for blighted Liverpool estate

The Liverpool office of architect and urban designer BDP has been appointed by South Liverpool Housing Group to produce a vision for the large Speke estate south of the A561 next to the River Mersey.

SLHG was formed to take control of 4,000 houses transferred from Liverpool City Council in 1999. The estates of Speke and Garston sit in some of the most deprived wards of Merseyside and consist of municipal planning experiments spanning the 1920s to 1960s.

Morrison's opened a supermarket at the front of the estate, opposite the Jaguar/Land Rover factory, earlier this decade after many years of lobbying by Speke Garston Development Company and, later, Liverpool Land Development Company.

BDP associate planner Andrew Teage and Rob Shackleton, architect, will lead on the SLHG contract. Teage said: "The area is a classic garden estate with a lot of green fields and wide verges and should be a more pleasant place to live than it is today. It suffers from a lack of amenities and social and economic problems."

As well as landscape architecture and boundary treatments, BDP will also be asked to suggest surplus plots for suitable for future redevelopment.

Shackleton added: "Part of our remit will be to address the identity of the estate as it is easily bypassed without realising it is even there."