Now in its sixth year, Insider’s Merseyside Property Gala Dinner has become a firm fixture in the business calendar, giving property professionals an opportunity to network and to contemplate the success of a city undergoing a physical and social renaissance.
Insider gathered over 520 professionals from the property industry in the Liverpool city region in March 2008 for a celebration at the latest addition to the city’s iconic skyline, the BT Convention Centre, ACC Liverpool.
Ahead of the forthcoming opening of phase one of Liverpool One, the biggest retail-led city centre regeneration project in Europe, the scheme’s chief executive, Joanne Jennings, addressed diners as keynote speaker with her words of wisdom on urban regeneration. She summed up her view of the importance of city centre regeneration with a quote from John F Kennedy: “We neglect our cities at our peril for if we neglect our cities we neglect our nation.”
An acclaimed specialist in urban regeneration, she has brought more than 15 years of experience to Liverpool. In her previous role as chief executive of Belfast City Centre Management Company, she played a key role in the renaissance of Belfast through its retail and leisure offer.
“People will see lots of cranes in Liverpool as the great work of re-energising the city continues,” she said. “After years when nothing much seems to have happened, now around every corner there is a building being modernised or a new development coming out of the ground.
“When somebody writes the history of this phase of Liverpool’s development the question will not be ‘why did they do all this’ but instead ‘why on earth did it take them so long to get started?’”
She said Liverpool had learnt from the experiences of other cities that were quicker out of the starting blocks in reinventing themselves.
“I believe that the city centre will have a joined-up feel unlike some others where the new seems to have little relevance to the historic core of the city,” she said. And she went on the explain the architectural ambitions of Grosvenor’s £1bn Liverpool One project, with its team of architecture firms working on 30 newly design buildings to ensure the scheme “had the feel of a city centre that has grown organically, rather than one that was parachuted in”.
She said: “What will be our legacy? For me it is the rejection of the conventional shopping centre approach. We passionately believe that people love streets and individual shops. We also think that what we have created enables Liverpool to retain its character and the traditional routes through the city centre.”
The prize raffle held at the dinner raised £5,336 for Liverpool Property Aid, a trust set up by a group of property firms in Merseyside. To date, charities helped by Liverpool Property Aid include Claire House, Marie Curie Cancer Care, the NSPCC’s ChildLine and Zoes’s Place have bought a new people carrier.
Date: Thu 27th March, 2008
Venue: BT Convention Centre