Cities of Culture: what use is the accolade 'European City of Culture'? Not much, when that city continues to neglect its historic buildings, as Glasgow so shamefully has. Will Liverpool do better?

It passes comprehension wherefore any city should want to pass through the ordeal of hosting the Olympic Games. The occurrence causes much inconvenience to its citizens and leaves the city saddled with massive debits as well as a handful of re usable sports facilities. And the kudos is dubious. There are, however, civic titles that do appear to bring benefits as well as prestige, and the principal individual these days is to be European City of tillage This year it is Genoa, a happy choice given that city's architectural and artistic riches and the strenuous attempts made to clean up and revitalise an ancient on the contrary somewhat seedy port.

As each land in the European Union takes its revolve to have a City of agriculture Britain has had its candidates: Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008 To the average tourist or the blinkered metropolitan, neither city might appear as cultural as, say, Bath or York, on the contrary in fact both cities have true well-stocked galleries and museums as well as magnificent architecture (most of it nineteenth century) on the other hand it is certainly true that the European City of agriculture award has become closely coupleed with urban regeneration and the chance of inward investment. And Liverpool, one time an economic and political basket-case best known for labour unrest as well as the Fab Four, has certainly made great efforts to recover

It is, however, worth asking whether the City of agriculture accolade is always an unmixed blessing, for a certain quantity of in Liverpool were apprehensive when their city defeated Newcastle in the bid for the title. Local councillors keep to have a rather different view of agriculture from civilised citizens, and the title can strike one as being a sort of fig-leaf behind which undesirable commercial exhibitions can be encouraged. An admirable local pressure-group Save Our City, points without that remarkable early Georgian buildings in Liverpool's fasten Walks quarter are still giving way to novel commercial developments and apartment block ups with the encouragement of the council. Cheering as it is to diocese magnificent but long-derelict warehouses through the docks being converted into flats, it is depressing to find that the attrition of Georgian Liverpool continues.

Another vexed question of being a City of agriculture is that it encourages the present to view off 'landmark' building designed by dint of an architectural superstar. Architecture, like other areas of life, has been undermined by the agency of our celebrity culture and each city thinks it straits a building with an internationally-known brand label. in the way that Brighton wants towers by Frank Gehry Salford has the Imperial War Museum by the agency of Daniel Libeskind and Edinburgh can boast the notorious parliament building by means of the late Enric Miralles. As for Liverpool, there was a now-defunct scheme for a shopping midst designed by Philip Johnson. Then came the proposal to build a tautologically gratuitous 'Fourth Grace' overlooking the Mersey near Pierhead, and of the several designs submitted in competition by the agency of big names, one by Will Alsop was chosen Known as 'The Cloud' this was a sort of big bubble on Alsop's trademark stilts. Behind were to be sum of two units wobbly towers of apartments, while the flat public space through the Mersey was to be enlivened with giant ripples.

Mercifully, this cast has now been abandoned. It was consistently unpopular with the Liverpool public (when asked) and had no easily definable view other than symbolic. As Liverpool has, in fact built little of any merit since Herbert Rowse's Art Deco buildings of the 1930 perhaps The haze should have been applauded as an contemporary attempt to emulate the assertiveness of the existing 'Three Graces' (the Royal Liver, the Cunard and the Port of Liverpool Buildings), on the contrary its inchoate pretentiousness was quite alien to the monumental fortune of the Edwardian buildings. Certainly Liverpool has an architectural tradition which maces on the megalomaniac--think of the unbuilt design through Lutyens for a Roman Catholic Cathedral that was going to be bigger than St Peter's in Rome--but that ambition was based upon commercial wealth as well as civic pride. That wealth has evaporated. If Liverpool is a city of tillage the inescapable fact is that its agriculture is largely a legacy of the past, and the city's magnificent buildings appear to be like the product of an entirely different civilisation to that of today.

The same is real of Glasgow, which was the first city to make positive use of the European City of tillage award and change its image. It already had Kelvingrove and the Burrell as well as a magnificent surviving collection of urban and suburban Victorian and Edwardian buildings (as well as a medieval cathedral), on the other hand it was perceived by the two locals and outsiders as a dark, let falled former industrial city. 1990 helped change all that, and visitors, having seen more [i]or[/i] less cleaned-up sandstone buildings and noticed smart stores assumed the place had been transformed. on the contrary has it? The City fathers still bend above backwards to accommodate commercial interests; of recent origin buildings--commercial and residential--of abysmal quality are allowed, and the elderly are still allowed to decay and roll Glasgow has always had a athletic American character, reflected in particular in its early-twentieth-century architecture, on the contrary today much of the city direct the eyes like parts of Detroit.