Mersey Ferries off for 'several weeks' as commuters in limbo

Dear readers – welcome to your Monday edition. It’s Ethan here, huddled by our office heater after a cold, blustery weekend, which I mostly spent trying to connect to Premier League live streams from trains halted by fallen trees. 

Laurence’s weekend review of some of the big names leading Liverpool’s pastry renaissance made for lovely Saturday reading – though it did expose the artisanal bias of our viennoiserie safari:

Well, look at all of you with your cardamom cruffins and functioning gallbladders. I’ll just sit here with my groutcake from Cromwell’s Bakehouse – Jo.

Before we launch into the review of this week’s top news items on Merseyside, we’d like to remind you to share our writing far and wide. 

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Your Post briefing

🚧 Work is to begin this week on the long-awaited Pall Mall project. Plans were approved for 100,000 sq ft of offices on the site of Bixteth Street gardens back in 2019. The gardens were levelled, but the development stalled during the pandemic, and the site has lain dormant behind fences for the last seven years. 

The project would provide the first new office space in the Commercial District since St Paul’s Square was built on the former Liverpool Stadium site fourteen years ago. 

Enabling works, including groundworks, drainage and the removal of a substation on Bixteth Street will begin this week, Liverpool City Council confirmed, ahead of building work expected to commence at the beginning of next year. 

In July, The Post reported that no private investors had been found for the project, which has an estimated cost of £60m. No investor has been found since, so the project will be financed entirely with public money.

The development will be completed by Vinci – which attentive readers might remember as the plucky contractor behind Southport’s Marine Lake Events Centre. The French company now holds a vast stock of Merseyside building projects, including the Bootle Strand, St Helens town centre regeneration, LJMU’s Henry Cotton Building redevelopment, and 2024 work on Festival Gardens. 

🚌 The weather made for a testing debut for the Wirral’s new publicly controlled buses, which launched yesterday. But Merseytravel boasted that the throes of Storm Boelo didn’t hold up the buses’ maiden journeys, including on new routes to local hospitals. Commuters on X seem to be less convinced, as the Merseytravel comms team appear quite busy apologising for the lack of live information updates, justifying late arrivals, and explaining new diversions. 

⛈️ Not everyone in Merseyside could boast of their storm resilience this weekend. Aintree racecourse abandoned its Halloween fun day due to high winds, and Visit Liverpool’s River of Light event hosted across the city centre was cancelled for its first three nights. Up the Mersey at New Brighton, a flood alert was in place as waves breached shoreline defences yesterday. According to organisers, tonight’s River of Light event will go ahead.

⚖️ Family says inquest exposed “gap” in police duties after drugs search death. During the search in August 2024, David Brown told officers he had swallowed a wrap of cocaine. Because he had only been detained for the search, not arrested, the inquest heard that officers had no clear duty to seek medical attention for him.

In a statement after the inquest, the family said there was a “gap in the duties the police have towards a person detained for the purpose of a search when it is suspected that drugs have been swallowed.” The coroner said he intends to send a prevention of future deaths report to Merseyside Police, and possibly the College of Policing, after officers said they had not been trained to deal with this situation.

The big story: Mersey Ferries off for ‘several weeks’