Today UNESCO published on their website details of the Draft Decision that will be put before the World Heritage Committee (WHC) at their next meeting in June in Bahrain. It is very good news for Liverpool and is a vindication of an enormous amount of hard work done by the City Council, the Mayor’s Task Force and Historic England as well as the State Party (DCMS).

Surprisingly we at Engage Liverpool receive a significant mention in paragraph 4:

  • Acknowledges the increasing engagement of civil society in the care of the World
    Heritage property and its status, in particular the organization “Engage Liverpool”

That is a welcome acknowledgement of the important but quiet and seemingly insignificant work we have done in attending the WHC last year in Krakow, Poland and then in organising the extremely successful WHS Seminar Series, where we invited 3 UNESCO officials to come to Liverpool. We then helped the prestigious world architecture prize which supports the work of UNESCO, the Prix Versailles, choose Liverpool as the location for the first in a new series of student awards to encourage good design in heritage sensitive areas of UNESCO WHS.

This year Engage is raising the funds to attend the WHC meeting in Bahrain to try and get full backing from the 21-member WHC, which includes 12 new countries not present at last year’s meeting in Krakow, for the Draft Decision. Become a part of this historic effort to save Liverpool’s WHS status for ours and future generations. Help Engage try and persuade all 21 members to leave Liverpool on the At-Risk register for a further 12 months. Your voice matters to us and to the city. Help us carry it to Bahrain in June.

Later this year we will hold our 2018 Seminar Series which again will focus on the World Heritage Site bringing 3 WHS cities to Liverpool so we can explore together how they make the best use of their designation as UNESCO WHS: Strasbourg, Hamburg and Bordeaux. It will prove to be another fascinating and significant contribution to Liverpool as we gradually become more positive about our inscription as a WHS city.

Contribute to our crowdfunding page here.

Read the full Draft Decision of UNESCO for Bahrain WHC meeting here (pages 4-7).

Read Engage’s submission to the World Heritage Watch Forum 2018 here.

You can discover all the award winners at the 2018 Prix Versailles HERE

The image above is of Dr Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel in Liverpool’s Town Hall last year, who will present the Draft Decision about Liverpool to UNESCO’s WHC in Bahrain.