There have been some pie in the sky schemes to transform parts of the city over the years and one such plan was to create a 'Manhattan on the Mersey'.
While many big money schemes, such as Liverpool One, have by-and-large been welcomed and even credited with regenerating parts of the city, there have been others that should have travelled from the drawing board straight to the bin. But who knows, perhaps if plans for the "cloud" fourth grace, or the 140-story waterfront tower proposed as Coca Cola's international headquarters had been built, they would have eventually become regarded as integral parts of the city's landscape, much like St Johns Tower.
In the 1970s, an incredibly ambitious £100m project, should it have come to fruition, would have completely altered Liverpool's waterfront vista. The Aquarius City project revealed plans to fill in the Albert Dock and knock down the now-iconic surrounding warehouses.
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At the time, the derelict state of the South Docks proved irresistible to developers. In 1970 Harry Hyams, known as "the shy millionaire", unveiled plans for the £100m vista of 44-storey skyscrapers as part of the Aquarius City office complex.
Remarkably, the plan involved keeping the docks but filling in Albert, Canning and Salthouse Docks to become underground car parks topped with water. In a report in the Liverpool Echo on June 30, 1970, it outlined the millionaire's mammoth plans for the redevelopment of the city's docklands. Along with the office complex, plans included shops, restaurants and a Maritime Museum.
The Echo report states: "A feature of the scheme will be the filling in of the three dock basins for underground car parks. They will then be covered by water to a depth of about four feet and the tallest tower block will rise out of the water covering the Albert Dock."
The scheme, had it gone ahead, would have also meant pulling down the surrounding historic warehouses. The city's planning officer at the time, Francis Amos, is quoted by the Echo as having said: "There is no case for saying the building's should be preserved at the expense of jobs in an area of high unemployment."
It was proposed that had the scheme gone ahead, it would have brought 40,000 new jobs, and attracted firms outside the take residence in the ambitious office complex. However, by January 1971, the time had passed for the millionaire developer to purchase the land and the project sunk without trace.
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Of course, the rest is history, and by 1981 new plans had begun to take shape to reclaim and regenerate the Albert Dock which became the Royal Albert Dock in 2018. The historic buildings that could be saved were restored and the long proposed, newly built Maritime Museum opened to the public in 1986.
