DAILY POST COMMENT: Prize symbol of city's lost opportunity.

TODAY we report that Liverpool's International Garden Festival site has won a major national award -a fact that will startle anyone who has driven past it in the last tenyears. The tangled,overgrown wasteland that you see today could comfortably win an award as Liverpool's big gest wasted opportunity,as it grows more neglected,derelict and overgrown with every passing year.

But the prize presented in Nottingham by the Landscape Institution at its awards ceremony celebrates the site in its heyday, not the eyesore that has become its unfortunate legacy to the city.

The Garden Festival has won the accolade of ``the most influential landscape scheme undertaken betw een 1970 and 2004".Around 5,000 members nominated and voted for their favourite projects for the special prize, to mark the Institute's 75th anniversary.

It beat off some very prestigious opponents,including the Canary Wharf dock lands estate in London and Royal Exchange Squarein Glasgow.

The festival was, without doubt, a remarkable success. After being opened by the Queen in 1984,it attracted well over 3m visitors to the city in one heady summer,and did a considerable amount to heal Liverpool's bru is ed image in the wake of the Toxteth riots which were still so prominent in the public consciousness.

Regretfully, the rebellious La bour council that was running Liverpool at the time shunned the festival, regarding it as a cosmetic gimmick in a city that had deep social problems, rather than the opportunity it clearly represented to try to improve things. Since then, successive commercial attempts to bring the site bac

into use have flopped.

Recently,a new local company took over the site,pledging to develop it for residential purposes, while bringing at least part of the gardens bac

into public use.

When you look at the kind of projects the festival site has beaten,and you consider how some of them have since prospered while the Garden Festival site has simply withered away, you realise the scale of the neglect that has taken place here.

But there is some cause for optimism in the words of the man who dreamed up and designed the festival project,Richard Cass, of Liverpool-based design consultancy Cass Associates. He points out that he presented his original proposal just 2 1/ 2 years bef ore the festival opened, reminding us of the widespread scepticism that it could be achieved. There is a lesson there for those who are sceptical ab out what can be achieved by 2008, if the will, the imagination and the energy are there.