Community activists have a vision for Lodge Lane as part of a "housing revolution".
"It might be after we've both popped off", Sonia Bassey told the ECHO while stood on a patch of grass set to be transformed in a community-led housing project she's campaigned years for, "but you are developing an infrastructure that enables people to thrive beyond your lifetime."
The site of Lodge Lane Public Baths has been vacant since the building was demolished in 1996, six years after the facility closed during council cutbacks. Once a vital part of the community, where generations learnt to swim, washed their clothes and played water polo, it was part of Liverpool's pioneering public health programmes when it opened in 1878.
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Now it's part of a scheme offering people an escape from damp, insecure and expensive homes in a city starved of council housing. Local activists hope it will form a bulwark against the "slow creep" of the city centre into the low-rise residential neighbours like Toxteth.
Linda Freeman is chair of L8 Matters Community Land Trust (CLT), a community member-led not-for-profit preparing plans for the site's regeneration. She said plots of land in Toxteth have "been getting snapped up thick and fast over the years" by private developers who build student accommodation or high rent flats, and sometimes label properties as 'Georgian Quarter' to boost market value.
Last year, the CLT, which Sonia and Linda co-founded in March 2021, successfully campaigned against plans to build 180 student bedrooms and 105 apartments across two six storey buildings, on the site of a former church and probation centre. They said there was "no need for more student accommodation in the local community", and the plans included no affordable housing.
Sonia fears such developments price locals out and harm community integration. She told the ECHO: "They can't afford those properties, and often the people who live in the community already, and the people who move in, may not necessarily have to communicate with each other because they come from different worlds, different class structures, so that causes some tensions.
"Often the newbuild areas are gated - they have their own contained car parks and access routes, so whilst they're within communities, they're set up in a way that makes it look like people need to be protected from the places they're living in and around, and the people who live there."
She added: "It marginalises local people, and it prevents local families from growing and continuing to live next to each other and retain that sense of community. It breaks communities up."
L8 Matters CLT is just under two years old, but these problems- around gentrification, affordable housing and a lack of investment in the communities developers build in - have been around for years.
What sparked these women to take a stand against private developers they say marginalise local people, break communities up and disperse the people who call it home to the cheaper peripheries of the city? "It was Ducie Street", Sonia said before the question was finished.
Faded murals adorn the boarded-up windows along the yellow-brick terrace, once part of the vibrant community centred around Granby Street before its decline in the 1970s and 1980s.
Much of the Victorian housing off Granby was demolished, which community activists campaigned to stop. A change in government in 2010 saved surrounding streets from the wave of demolition.
Granby Street's commercial units, and the homes on three of the Granby Four Streets, have been refurbished. It's a prime spot for housing in an area with desperate need for it, but the fourth - Ducie Street - stays derelict.
The roofs are falling in, the fronts are overgrown, the street feels forgotten. Sonia was "disgusted" by the dog dirt and dumped rubbish she saw on a walk in December 2020. She said: "I was really horrified with how bad it was, and then I found out the site had been gifted to a developer."
Gifted for nil value to West Tree Estates Ltd in 2017, the street was part of a portfolio of 50 properties and plots in the Granby area which Liverpool Council gave to the developer for nil or close to nil value. Sonia said: "We didn't know these sites were available. We didn't know they were being bought off or offered to developers for silly, ridiculous amounts of money."
The decision, carried out under delegated authority by the Head of Regeneration, was made in 2017 and subject to planning permission, which was subsequently granted in 2019. West Tree Estates planned to demolition the houses on the north side of the road and build 90 mostly one-bed units.
Local residents opposed the plans because they felt they didn't reflect the needs of the local community. As of yet, no work has begun on the site. Sonia believes the local community should've been given the chance to own and develop it, so she launched a petition calling on the city council to do so.
More than 5,000 people signed the petition, which asked: "'Juicy' Street or 'Ducie' Street? Depends on how you look at it....rent for profit or rent for future community investment."
For now, Ducie Street remains out of reach, but it sparked a conversation in Toxteth about how the community can take back its own fortunes. Sonia and Linda started a mapping exercise, identifying sites in Liverpool 8 that could be look at by the CLT.
After a public meeting at Unity Youth and Community Centre picked the former site of Lodge Lane Baths as the CLT's priority, the group emailed Liverpool Council to express interest in taking it on. To their surprise, the council said yes.
It's taken more than a year of meetings, but Sonia was excited when the council announced the site was one of the first seven being handed to community groups in a "community-led housing revolution" last month. Cabinet member for housing and regeneration, Sarah Doyle, said it would give people in Liverpool "the opportunity to start shaping the housing offer in their own neighbourhoods".
Linda said: "I was fearful. I thought, 'Oh god, what have we done?' I didn't realise it would happen that quick. I did expect some opposition from the council, and I think that's only because no matter what we do within this community, as activists and as residents, there's always opposition to us, so that's what the fear was."
She added: "It was like the current administration opened the door wide for communities to get in. It's never been open as wide, and that's empowered particularly CLTs, and smaller groups as well just to start engaging with their councillors again, and not to be afraid of what goes on down in Cunard. People feel quite confident now."
Her and Sonia's vision for the site has affordable housing at its core, with sustainable energy to keep costs down, rent income to reinvest in the local community, and opportunities for apprenticeships and training to empower young people "to do this for themselves".
It will be preserved as community wealth through an asset lock preventing sale, so "it will never belong to any individual within the community or any individual developer or investor or anything", according to Sonia. She said: "That's what we strive for, to make sure beyond our lifetime, people are secure. Unable to continue to live a decent life"
The actual shape of the project will be formed by the local community through a series of public meetings, big and small, over the next four months. L8 Matters CLT, which has 60 members, is looking for people to help develop designs and a business plan, and it's securing funding from the Liverpool City Region to carry out a feasability study and pre-development work on the site.
While they continue work on Lodge Lane to show "this community is not up for sale", in Linda's words, they've still got their eyes on Ducie Street.
Sonia said: "Ducie Street was like a red herring in many ways, because as much as as that was the catalyst for what we're doing, we can't get that site for the community. We're still trying to support the community to get that site, but in the meantime, we've got to carry on."
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