Report suggests Liverpool councillors push ahead with Festival Gardens
Liverpool City Council's cabinet will consider a report that would recommend spending £6m on redeveloping the International Festival Gardens site. Nine acres of land to the north of the site is being overseen by housebuilder Redrow, where planning permission to build 1,380 houses by 2022 has been secured. Liverpool City Council hopes to make the Festival Gardens plot a place of “regional and national significance”.

North West Property David Casey

Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson has outlined plans for the next regeneration phase of the 100-acre former International Festival Gardens site after decades of inactivity.

A report to be considered by Liverpool City Council's cabinet later this week recommends that councillors approve spending of £6m to remediate up to nine acres of land to the north of the site, adjacent to the Britannia Inn, which could be used for up to 85 houses.

Once this has been completed, the remediated land would be sold for about £9m. The report said the sale would cover the remediation costs and "a significant contribution" to the original purchase price of the site.

Liverpool City Council took control of the Festival Gardens plot a year ago from developer Langtree and vowed to make the location a place of "regional and national significance".

Since then, it has undertaken a series of soft marketing exercised with a variety of mixed-use developers and leisure operators.

The current outline planning permission for 1,380 houses extends until December 2022, with Redrow undertaking a wider masterplan for the site.

If councillors approve Anderson's recommendations, a groundworks contractor will be appointed to remediate the nine-acre area before it can be disposed of.