‘Hideous’ Liverpool Lime Street development awarded 2024 Carbuncle Cup

A development on Liverpool’s Lime Street has been crowned the UK’s ugliest new building in the 2024 Carbuncle Cup, a competition organised by magazine The Fence. Designed by British studio Broadway Malyan and completed in 2019, the project replaced historic buildings with a hotel and student accommodation. The award citation called it the “very worst new building in Britain” since the competition last run in 2018. One particularly aspect that wound up the judges is the façade, featuring metal panels etched with images of the buildings in Liverpool that were demolished for the redevelopment.

The withering put down by the magazine had this to say: “From the very first viewing, two of our panel had this as their number one selection, and as the longlist was narrowed to a shortlist, this hideous bit of architectural misadventure continued to stick out. By the end of the adjudication, everyone was in total agreement – the 2024 Carbuncle Cup goes to Broadway Malyan’s mixed-use redevelopment of Lime Street in Liverpool, opened in January 2019.

“Now dominating the entire left-hand thoroughfare from Liverpool Lime Street station, this mass-scale redevelopment demolished a century of businesses and buildings, replacing them with sheet-metal etchings of the cinemas and bars that once stood. Behind that façade, much like everything else in Liverpool, is a 412-bed student accommodation block and a 101-room Premier Inn hotel – two new additions that the city’s residents have never asked for or benefited from.”

A Joker-like stink bomb of local boosterism and cynical nostalgia. Get stuffed.

“People aren’t hopeless romantics,” said Jury Chair Tim Abrahams. “Most of us understand that sometimes, buildings need to be knocked down and replaced with better ones. This is the nature of dynamic, forward looking cities: things change. Here, though, a bunch of developers have been allowed to knock down a happy, eclectic row of buildings – including the much-loved, sorely-missed Futurist cinema – and replaced it with such nothingness, such banality that their only option is to cover it with a screen. Upon which, they have drawn portraits of those same old demolished buildings.

“Greed has rarely looked so greedy. In a city of architectural wonders, hawkers and vagabonds have tried to mask a reductive square metrage to profit equation with a Joker-like stink bomb of local boosterism and cynical nostalgia. Get, as they used to say in the old days, stuffed.”

Image: Barnabas Calder