'Milestone moment' for Liverpool's Festival Gardens transformation

Liverpool’s Festival Gardens transformation is set to move forward in what the council has said is a ‘milestone moment’.

A report to Cabinet on Tuesday, September 10, is recommending the local authority embarks on a competitive procurement exercise to appoint a high calibre development partner to lead on creating a new neighbourhood as part of the city’s famous International Festival Gardens site, which was originally opened in May 1984. The festival saw sixty individual gardens to explore, including Indian and Japanese inspired spaces, as well as beautiful artwork and sculptures.

While the Festival Gardens are home to a beautiful park and oriental garden, which reopened in 2012 following major redevelopment work, other parts of the site of the were left in a terrible state and have been derelict for over thirty-years. 

A remediation project began in 2021, in a bid to transform the site from landfill to 1,500 brand new homes. The mammoth excavation programme moved almost 450,000 cubic metres of soil and waste of which more than 95 per cent was recycled, including 100,000 cubic metres of earth being used to create the Southern Grasslands park which opened in August of last year.

The remediation was completed in January and additional works have also been carried out including laying drainage and constructing a substation to provide a power supply for the future development.

According to Liverpool Council, the 28-acre site will be transformed into a ‘sustainable, healthy and inclusive neighbourhood which has a strong identity and high design quality’. The site includes an 8-acre area of landscaped amenity space, with the other 20 acres now ‘primed and ready’ for development.

Discussing the development, a spokesperson for the local authority said: “The ambition is to significantly boost the city’s housing supply with a diverse range and mix of housing types, including affordable properties, together with local amenities, creating a thriving new community in this prime south Liverpool location, which is well connected and within 10-minutes of the city centre.”

If the report is given the green light, the initial phase of the procurement process will begin in October, with a view to securing a partner towards the middle of next year. The development brief will form the central part of a procurement process, seeking viable expressions of interest from developers with a proven, successful track record in delivering transformative schemes at pace, which are built on strong community engagement.

Montagu Evans will be running the procurement process on behalf of the council. It is expected that the contract with the successful development partner will be finalised in Autumn 2025 once ‘thorough’ due diligence has been undertaken.