Happy days: The early 90s, Urban Splash and a time of creativity and risk

For the past couple of years I have been writing occasional pieces for the Manchester Mill. This is one of the new breed of online papers running long-form local journalism. I have become their unofficial planning correspondent,  trying to explain to a non-built environment readership how Manchester came to be the way it is.

To that end I did an interview last week with Jonathan Falkingham who, in the early 1990s, with Tom Bloxham founded Urban Splash. It made me nostalgic for a time when, as another Urban Splash associate Nick Johnson once said, property was the new rock and roll.

The story starts with Falkingham buttonholing Bloxham after he had bought a three-storey building on Wood Street in Liverpool for just £40,000. Jonathan, together with his brother Miles, was part of the architects Shed KM and decided that they were going to see this guy Bloxham, and offer to design his bar.

Bloxham thought using an architect sounded expensive but gave them a budget and they went away to try and make it work. In the end Shed designed everything – the interior, the furniture, the name and the logo for what would become Baa Bar.

Tom had a company called Splash Posters, so I [Jonathan Falkingham] said, ‘we’re going to call it Urban Splash’, thinking it was a totally shit name, but it was just a placeholder and, if we got anywhere, we would review it

“This was soon after Dry Bar, designed by Ben Kelly, had opened in Manchester and so that kind of industrial chic was a thing.” Within a year it had become the coolest place in Liverpool.

Soon afterwards, a building came up for auction behind the bar and they decided to set up a development company. As Falkingham told me: “Tom had a company called Splash Posters, so I said, ‘we’re going to call it Urban Splash’, thinking it was a totally shit name, but it was just a placeholder and, if we got anywhere, we would review it.”

They bought the 50,000sq ft warehouse for £150,000. “The fact that we could buy such a big building in good nick for £3 a foot just speaks to the fact that nobody had any idea what to do with stuff in the city centre.”

Falkingham invested his time while Bloxham put in some money and a scheme was drawn up for 18 loft apartments, three bars, a radio station and a gallery. “People said that no one wanted to live in a space like that, but we thought there are only 18 apartments, there must be 18 people in Liverpool who want something like this.”

They sold out before the scheme was finished, the smallest apartment going for £27,000 and the luxury penthouse loft for a cool £67,000.

To try and create a sense of place in an area that was almost entirely derelict, they suggested to the council that they clear a couple of smaller buildings to create a public space which would become Concert Square. “We decided that the bars would have tables out in the square, which was again something that was apparently impossible in northern England…

“Within a month it had had just gone bananas. I am actually quite embarrassed by it, I was thinking of something civilised and there ended up with loads of people getting pissed.”

Planning was submitted just before Christmas 1993 and approved by the end of February. But the thing that made me realise that this really was from a different age was the way that they secured their grant. The head of city grant at the Department of the Environment came to Liverpool and sat down with Falkingham and Bloxham  in a cafe on Bold Street to review their numbers (printed on a single A4 sheet). He knocked half a per cent off the fees, increased the marketing budget and said, ‘if you can agree that, we have a deal’.”

There are still people being creative in property, but the last part of my conversation with Jonathan Falkingham was about how difficult it has become

Today you would need a full business case. The capital costs would be benchmarked against those of a volume housebuilder and the projected sales values would not be believed because there were no comparators. Today the scheme would not have been funded and the planning application would have cost a couple of hundred grand and would have taken a year to determine. Today you would have had no scheme – and probably no Urban Splash.

There are still people being creative in property, but the last part of my conversation with Jonathan Falkingham was about how difficult it has become. Funding regimes, planning policy, regulations of every kind, affordable housing requirements and procurement rules are all stifling not just innovation but choking-off housing supply.

Creating Urban Splash today would be almost impossible. His hobby horse, he said, was the fact that the two greatest buildings in Liverpool – the Anglican cathedral and St Georges Hall – were awarded to architects in their early 20s (Giles Gilbert Scott and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes). This when Liverpool was at the height of its powers. How do we rediscover that openness to creativity and risk today?