Paradise Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Eldonian Dream

A few hundred yards from the shiny new waterfront of the City Centre you’ll find a unique urban oasis, carved out of the post-industrial dereliction of 80’s Liverpool. The Eldonian Village was designed to create community the residents would be proud to call home, and to cater for their lives from the cradle to the grave. But 40 years on there are questions around what was a shining example of community-lead regeneration - so what has happened to this example of urban living which caught the eye of the then Prince Charles? Why is the urban idyll now a dilapidated weed-strewn shadow of its former self and how is it that the assets which made it such an enviable place to live now held thousands of miles away in off-shore accounts in the Caribbean? The Eldonian Dream - Paradise Lost, BBC Radio 4, Produced and Presented for BBC Audio North by Matt O'Donoghue