Forgotten Plans for Heliports

Last week I went over to the University of Liverpool to give a seminar in the Department of Geography and Planning. It was a friendly event and I tried out a new talk on the historical geography of the helicopter and unrealised planning for city centre heliports in the 1950s. This is a fairly new strand of research coming out of the broader Mapping Manchester project and more directly from the successful Infra_MANC exhibition that I co-curated last spring.

If you're interested you can browse through the slides on 'Vertical Urbanism and the Forgotten Plans for Heliports'. The image above is an example of the kinds of unrealised plans for rooftop heliports that I am examining. This particular drawing, from the early 1950s, was for a helicopter station in the centre of Liverpool but was not actually built. (Image courtesy of Liverpool City Archives.)

I am giving an amended version of this heliport talk at a one-day workshop in Birmingham next week on Infrastructure and the Rebuilt Post-war City, where I will drop the Liverpool-specific examples and add in a little bit more on London and Birmingham. I plan to write this material up as a full paper in the next few months, but in the meantime you might want to read the 'helicopter dreaming' chapter in the print catalogue from our Infra_MANC exhibition - copies still available for just £10.