Plan to redevelop area where Ringo Starr grew up thwarted by campaigners

Liverpool City Council drops legal challenge against decision to refuse planning permission on Welsh Streets site

Many of the homes surrounding the Liverpool birthplace of Ringo Starr faced demolition (Getty Images)

After a 12-year struggle that dragged in a former Beatle and even the Turner Prize for art, campaigners trying to save 300 Victorian terraced houses in Liverpool from demolition have claimed victory, saying they may have struck a blow for the future of similar streets across Britain.

Liverpool City Council, which had planned for a housing association to build modern homes on the site, known as the Welsh Streets, has now dropped a legal challenge against a decision earlier this year by the then Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, to refuse planning permission. The area includes the house where Ringo Starr was born, although this was not among the homes that would have been demolished, and is close to the Granby Streets, where a scheme to refurbish terraces by artists collective Assemble won the Turner Prize this month.

Heritage campaign group Save, which bought one of the houses to prove they could be refurbished, said the council’s apparent admission of defeat could set a precedent that would dissuade other councils from knocking down similar terraced streets.

The few people who still live in the area – most of the houses are boarded up – remain in properties blighted by the problems associated with a derelict area: damp, rats, fly-tipping, arson and theft. And the community has been split over the plans. Protesters held signs saying “Demolish our damp homes now!” and “Rats, slugs, cockroaches? Would you live here?” after Mr Pickles refused planning permission in January.

Nina Edge, 53, of Welsh Streets Home Group, said the 12-year struggle had been “very stressful”. She claimed people had essentially been forced out of their houses by various means, including tenancy agreements not being renewed. Private owners were also quick to sell when they realised their homes would lose value as the streets were emptied.

But, for her, life in a terraced street was not something to be surrendered easily. “You are very quickly in a community. You cannot enjoy any good – or bad – fortune whilst living in a terrace and not have your neighbours have some awareness of it,” said Ms Edge.

Clem Cecil, director of Save, said she hoped the “crumbling and deteriorating” Welsh Streets would be refurbished quickly.


 Ringo Starr, the former Beatles drummer, was born in the Welsh Streets area in 1940 
 (Getty)

She added: “This should set a really positive precedent. Hopefully councils up and down the land will look at this and say, ‘If we were planning that kind of scale of demolition, we’re not going to get away with it.’”

However Alan Dean, a local councillor and the Labour group’s chief whip, insisted the council had not admitted defeat and now planned to resubmit a similar proposal, saying the “overwhelming majority” of local people had backed its original plan. He said the Welsh Streets had been due to be demolished in 1962 and could not be refurbished to the same quality as the Granby Streets, which he said “look fabulous”.

“It’s not, as Nina Edge would have you believe, that we’ve given up the ghost and we’ll just refurbish the properties,” he said. “[But] we have to be pragmatic and realise we have to vary our application to make it more acceptable to the current local government minister.”