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The potential future of a city centre road that has been shut for 10 years has been revealed. For decades, Ainsworth Street allowed access to a Royal Mail depot from Brownlow Hill and was a useful shortcut to get to Lime Street Station via Hawke Street and Copperas Hill.
There was a field on one side and a car park on the other. However, Google Street View images show that, by June 2016, the road had been shut off and a gate placed across it.
This was because construction on a new campus for Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) had started on the side of Ainsworth Street where the field used to be. The Copperas Hill campus is made up of The Sports Building, which includes an eight-court sports hall, two multi-purpose halls and a gym with 120 training stations, as well as The Student Life Building which has places to work, student advice services and a cafe.
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Ainsworth Street was not built on during construction. But, by September 2022, it was still closed, even though the two buildings had been completed.
Four years on, grass has now grown through the tarmac, with road blockers and litter visible through the rusting white gate. Earlier this month, the road was highlighted on a ‘ghost roads’ group on Facebook, which documents roads that have been shut for years.
The poster said: “Located behind the Adelphi Hotel Liverpool off Brownlow Hill is Ainsworth Street. I don’t know why this road is closed.”
People in the comments speculated about why it had been shut for nearly a decade. One said: “JMU now owns it.
“It was used for the building of parts of the uni. Before that, it was an access to the old Royal Mail sorting office and warehousing that was in the car park.”
Another argued: “LJMU was built over part of it, so it became defunct I guess.”
According to findmystreet.co.uk, it is classed as “neither M, A, B or C”. This refers to roads which have a classification other than M, A, B or C.
These are typically streets considered as unclassified highways that are maintainable at public expense, or streets that are not maintainable at public expense.
The ECHO approached Liverpool City Council and LJMU to ask who was responsible for Ainsworth Street, why it has been closed for so long and if there are plans to re-open it.
In response, LJMU said it wants to use the road for further expansion to its campus. A spokesperson said: “We have applied for a road closure of Ainsworth Street with a view to it being part of wider redevelopment of the university site.
“The road is fenced off for security and our team undertakes regular checks to clear rubbish and vegetation growth.”
A Liverpool City Council spokesperson confirmed they were looking into our query but we did not receive a response before publication.
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