Face of Liverpool

Budget: £1m

Design Team: BCA Landscape, Broadbent Studio, Smiling Wolf

Awards: Best National Community Campaign 2006 – Presidents Grand Prix Award, NWDA Renew – Exemplar Project Status 2004

A fast-track mixed-use scheme at the gateway to Liverpool’s Central Business District. Part urban landscape, part public artwork, the £1.4m project includes ‘The Face of Liverpool’ – a wonderful installation that gave Liverpool residents the chance to have their portrait set into the scheme’s structure and help celebrate the city’s rich ethnic and cultural diversity.

The Landscape includes a twelve metre cor-ten wall and giant hardwood timber ring, alongside precast concrete walls with inlaid glass illustrations and stainless steel strips. Notions of global migration, sea-faring communications and trade-­links underpin the visual identity and graphic language of the scheme.

The morse code wall, by the way, spells out “Permission to come alongside”

“The Creative Campus has been completed by this outstanding public space which links a series of otherwise disparate buildings across a serene and playful garden. It has been realised by an imaginative designer determined to deliver on the vision. Built to an exceptional standard of finish, it is a soft and welcome delight in an otherwise harsh urban setting. A place you will want to return to again and again.” – RIBA Judge