Liverpool’s Waterfront Loses Its Unesco World Heritage Listing
Citing the threat that new development poses to the historic waterfront, the UN body stripped the U.K. city of its status.
The “Three Graces” — the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building — form the centerpiece of Liverpool’s historic waterfront.
Photographer: Anthony Devlin/BloombergJust 17 years after Liverpool was listed as a World Heritage site by Unesco, the United Nations organization has stripped the U.K. city of its status.
Major redevelopment along Maritime Mercantile City, a waterfront collection of quays, warehouses and grand shipping institutions built during Liverpool’s heyday as a global port in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, has proved “detrimental to the site’s authenticity and integrity,” Unesco says. Now no longer possessing the coherence for which it was recognized in 2004, the Maritime Mercantile City has joined Dresden’s Elbe Valley and Oman’s Arabian Oryx Sanctuary to become one of just three World Heritage sites ever to be deleted from the Unesco list.