Project: Face of Liverpool

Year of Completion: 2005

Budget: £1m

Client: Beetham

Design Team: BCA Landscape, Broadbent Studio, Smiling Wolf

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

An amazing collaborative urban regeneration project with our friends at Smiling Wolf and Broadbent Artworks to develop the landscape encompassing three new key buildings; the Liverpool Passport Office, SAS Radisson Hotel and the 30 storey residential Beetham Tower. 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”.