Liverpool building named 'ugliest in UK' as it wins 2024 Carbuncle Cup

A key redevelopment project in Liverpool city centre has been crowned winner of the 2024 Carbuncle Cup after being voted the ugliest new building in the UK.

The Carbuncle Cup is an architecture prize, handed out as a humorous response to the prestigious Stirling Prize, given by the Royal Institute of British Architects to the country’s best buildings.

Revived by UK magazine The Fence for 2024, Liverpool’s Lime Street Redevelopment, close to Lime Street Station, was chosen by a jury as the ‘very worst new building in Britain’ to be built since the annual prize was last awarded in 2018.

The ‘banal’ modern redevelopment replaced a row of buildings dating back more than a century - including the Georgian façade of the old Futurist cinema - and features sheet-metal cladding etched with images of the buildings that once stood there.

"From the very first viewing, two of our panel had this as their number one selection, and as the longlist was narrowed to a shortlist, this hideous bit of architectural misadventure continued to stick out," said The Fence.

Completed in 2019, Lime Street Redevelopment, designed by Broadway Malyan, topped a publicly-nominated shortlist of six, which included another of the city’s buildings - the new Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

Also on the shortlist were: W Hotel, Edinburgh; Virgin Hotel, Glasgow; Mast Quay II, London and Ilona Rose House, London. However, the judges were in ‘total agreement’ that Lime Street Redevelopment should win.

Jury Chair, Tim Abrahams, said: “People aren’t hopeless romantics. Most of us understand that sometimes, buildings need to be knocked down and replaced with better ones. This is the nature of dynamic, forward looking cities: things change.

“Here, though, a bunch of developers have been allowed to knock down a happy, eclectic row of buildings – including the much-loved, sorely-missed Futurist cinema – and replaced it with such nothingness, such banality that their only option is to cover it with a screen. Upon which, they have drawn portraits of those same old demolished buildings.”