St Oswald's House

Lots of things have changed in Liverpool in my lifetime, some of them have more impact than others, the ones that happen while you watching are gradual but sometimes you return to a place after many years and something has totally changed the place for me one of those was the demolition of St Oswald House in Old Swan. You can see it as the curved building in the centre of this map, where the Tesco car park is now. If you search of Old Swan on Tenements page of Inacity Living you'll find pictures of a lot of Liverpool's old tenements including St Oswald's House. Hardly any survive today but they were iconic.

St Oswald House

My first memory of it was in the mid to late 70s my mum went to a fabric shop on Prescot Road, there were other shops in St Oswald's. It is a fairly typical 1920/30s Art Deco building, built as Liverpool reached its zenith, the posher end of the market in London is Du Cane Court,  Balham. Home to the legendary comedian Arthur Smith, its interior was used a lot in Poirot.

Du Cane court by https://www.flickr.com/photos/139223434@N08/

Balham also has the more downmarket Ivanhoe House.

Ivanhoe House

Same kind of age, slightly more conservative, designed. I'm sure there are many more examples, and you have to ask why they have survived, but so few of Liverpool's have? It may be something as simple as those that survive have no chimneys! Besides eating into space, they suggest a less modern ethos in the building. They perhaps also show they were designed for further down the market and were less adaptable to modern needs. It may just be civic vandalism or the effects of a decreasing population in Liverpool and a growing one in London. Whatever the reason, they used the space better than the current Tesco's in Old Swan.

As seems to be typical of these buildings, there is a lot of fond nostalgia for them from residents, but there is also the occasional voice who didn't like living there. I'm inclined to think that the interior design was heavily dated and not up to modern standards, so in no way am I proposing a return to the internal layout, the recreation or emulation I'm looking for is the street scene, and so I'm not really that concerned with the blocks that were of similar design behind the front building.

Replacement

There is no end to modern buildings which conform to the 4 storey layout, though of course, it doesn't have to be four. The main reason for the height would have been the lack of lifts, which were at the time luxurious and expensive objects. It is as good a location today as it ever was, it has some good transport connections. It is less than a mile from Wavertree Technology Park with its railway station and not far from the M62.

The use of the space for Tesco's and a car park is a waste. A building could be easily designed that incorporated the perimeter building with a supermarket entrance on the ground floor and perhaps some other retail units. Using both the remaining space and the roof of the Tesco for car parking would serve both the shop and the residents, and save the rest of us from having to look at it.

The roof

The roof of the building doesn't have to go unused, all across the world small hydroponic vegetable farms are being installed on roofs, the produce often being sold in the shops below. With the development of St Oswald's House replacement, Tesco could give itself 200 flats of potential customers and the means to produce some of what they sell and at the same down cut down some of the push into the green belt. Hopefully, the city council can find a way in the future of preventing this gross under-use of land. It is better to leave a portion of a site unused and available for future development than to spread low-density buildings across it, as well as assuage some of the horrors the new Old Swan now induces in me, with this building.