Liverpool and beyond 'Right place at the right time'

Since the last shift at Parkside colliery in St Helens clocked off in 1993 and its two shafts were capped, nature has taken over: scrubby silver birches have seeded themselves on the hardstanding all over the huge site alongside the M6, that once employed 2,000 local people.

- Heather Stewart

But peer through the trees and piles of fly-tipped junk and there are signs of life: bulldozers busy working on a taxpayer-funded access road, to join this long-neglected site to the adjacent motorway. It is the first stage of what St Helens council, which owns a 50/50 stake in the project with the local developer Langtree, hopes will be a im sq ft distribution hub, and ultimately an even larger manufacturing centre, bringing thousands of new jobs.

"For us, employment and high-value jobs is what this site is really all about," says the council's director of place, Lisa Harris. "We want to make sure that there are local benefits for local people."

The Parkside project was conceived almost a decade ago, and it is one of the hundreds of schemes around the UK poised to benefit from the tax cuts and other incentives that form a central part of the Tories' dash for growth.

It may be a good 20 miles from the sea, but Parkside is part of the Liverpool city region's freeport, which takes in not just the port of Liverpool itself but a 45km area around it.