It’s been a turbulent few decades for Liverpool 8’s ‘Granby Four Streets’ – a cluster of Victorian terraces made up of Beaconsfield Street, Cairns Street, Jermyn Street and Ducie Street. The once thriving district set amongst the Granby Triangle found itself at the receiving end of demolition threats, as decline in the area brought about empty homes and shops units.

Now though, thanks to a partnership guided by the streets’ dedicated community, the area is not only being restored and regenerated but is also attracting widespread attention and prestigious awards recognition as it continues to build on its unique identity.

Granby Four Streets had still been getting to grips with the international press interest whipped up by a prestigious Turner Prize nomination for work on its regeneration project, when it was then shortlisted for another top accolade. The Academy of Urbanism Awards, which recognises ‘great places’ across the UK and Europe, had also given a nod to the area’s so far successful transformation by confirming that Cairns Street is in the running for its ‘Great Street Award’ title.

Whilst such recognition has highlighted the character and potential of the small district for people outside of the city; for members of the area’s diverse and passionate community it has simply reaffirmed the strengths they’ve always known and have fought to maintain.

Following decline in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Granby Four Streets faced “continual attempts to knock the place down,” which were contested by a Granby Residents Association group. Then from the early 2000s it came up against a government Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme which looked set to remove the original properties in a bid to revitalise a failing housing market.

“They’d decided that the market in old terraced houses had died and needed to be replaced by a new market and new houses,” explains campaigner Ronnie Hughes, a board member of the Granby Four Streets community land trust (CLT) who insists that such a move would have “utterly destroyed the community” which has now done much to take maintain the area itself, be it painting and decorating tinned sheets on derelict properties or nurturing plants in communal areas.

The CLT was formed in 2011 after the HMR programme had ended, so that residents could come up with ways to renovate the existing properties and transform the area.

“As luck would have it, the programme had just failed and been stopped,” says Ronnie. ”There was absolutely no money and no chance of anything happening but the good fortune was that the city council didn’t even have the money to knock [the properties] down.

“Our ideas were that the place shouldn’t be farmed out to any single developer but developed in little affordable chunks, that some of the land should come to the CLT but make sure that for the first time the people in the area had an actual legal stake in the future, there should be a co-op or two in there, and there should be a mix of tenures so that it wasn’t all people in the most desperate circumstances.”

Despite an attempt by Liverpool City Council to tender the regeneration of the whole site to one developer, which in the end never went ahead, the CLT continued “talking to anyone who would listen” in its determination to achieve its vision for Granby Four Streets. Last year, with the city council onside, plans finally started coming together.

“We’ve got this partnership of ourselves and the community, Plus Dane and Liverpool Mutual Homes (LMH), and Steinbeck Studio which is a private developer but has also loaned the CLT some of its funding at very cheap rates.”

The Northern Alliance Housing Co-operative and individual investors who purchased properties through the council’s ‘Homes for £1’ pilot programme are also breathing new life into vacant properties, as investment into Granby Four Streets homes amounts to around £14 million.

“Something very special is happening in the Four Streets, led as much by the people of these streets as anyone else,” says Deputy Mayor, Councillor Ann O’Byrne. “They’ve both suggested and helped to knit together the partnership of organisations, including the city council, currently working to turn Granby into one of the most exciting places to live in the whole city.”

With builders currently on site to refurbish properties along each of the streets apart from Ducie Street, where a well-supported monthly street market is currently held and work by a private developer is not yet underway, demand for the revived houses is said to be strong, particularly among those who have previously lived in or have links with the streets.

LMH has already seen eight tenants move into new-look rental properties and will also be selling some houses through shared ownership. One of its tenants, 21-year-old Kelsey Parris, who has been settling into Cairns Street with her baby, had been keen to return to Granby Four Streets having grown up there.

“I wanted to move back into the area where my family was,” says Kelsey. “I’ve always felt secure around here and I know a lot of people. It’s a nice area.

“I know a lot of people who want to come back to the area and are still trying, but there are no homes for them yet.”

Meanwhile Plus Dane, which is preparing to hand its homes over from August, says its list of house hunters expressing an interest in its properties “continues to grow”.

For the CLT though, which is reworking 10 of the empty properties into houses itself for affordable rent and shared ownership, interest has been expressed from much further afield.

The trust assigned London-based architects Assemble to help revive the buildings, and the work has helped the practice win a place on the shortlist for the coveted art accolade, the Turner Prize.

“We did, in the immediate aftermath of the Turner Prize shortlist, get applications for housing from people from as far away as Amsterdam, which we’ve all knocked back because it’s about Liverpool people,” says Ronnie. “What’s happened so far is this huge media storm, but with regards to wanting to come and live in the houses, even though for years people were saying people don’t want to live there or in those kinds of houses anymore, we’ve had no trouble [with demand] at all. Everybody wants to live there because, if you think about it, it’s only a mile from the city centre, it’s right next to Liverpool Women’s Hospital and universities and it’s also 50 yards from Princes Park.”

In addition to far-flung housing applications and an international media spotlight though – in recent weeks the Four Streets have drawn interest from a French TV crew, a German journalist and the New York Times as well as the BBC and local press – the CLT is also hopeful that new broader attention prompted by the art world can help open up new funding streams to realise more of its vision.

“We’ve got Heritage Lottery money starting to come to us now,” adds Ronnie, looking ahead to the next steps of the project. “We’re working on ideas but we want to get the shops done because, maybe by the middle of next year, we’ll have 200 sparkly new, well-done houses with a derelict corner shop at the end of every street and that just won’t work.

“Also, in their drawings our architects Assemble made a vision of a winter garden. We’ve always suspected there might be one or two houses that are too far gone to do up as houses, but we never thought we’d actually be able to do Assemble’s dream because it was going to cost money and we didn’t want to take any money off the housing.

“Now we think we might be able to get the funding through one of these art channels we’ve never approached before and actually build a winter garden. That will help us preserve the street planting that’s always happened and will also provide us with a place of interest to bring visitors to the area.”

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