Kim Cattrall takes on Liverpool mayor over green spaces

Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall has taken on the mayor of Liverpool over plans to sell off a piece of land to make way for a housing development.

Cattrall, who played Samantha Jones in the hit US TV series, voiced her support for the Save Sefton Park Meadows campaign as she visited her home city to pick up a magazine award.

She described the park, which is situated in the Mossley Hill area of the city, as a “refuge” during her childhood years and said proposals to turn it into a housing development were “very sad”.

Unhappy with the actresses comments, Liverpool mayor and Labour councillor, Joe Anderson, blasted her comments as “ill-informed” and “out of context” and questioned what she really knew of the issues that Liverpool faces.

The row started earlier this week when Kim expressed her disappointed over the plans to build on the 11 acres of land.

“I love Sefton Park. I was lucky enough to grow up playing there,” she told the Liverpool Echo.

“Sefton Park was a refuge for my mother during her childhood years, it was Dickensian really because her father disappeared and she didn’t have much so Sefton Park represented every holiday that she ever had.

“So it’s very sad what’s going on right now with the meadows, and I feel that my involvement with that, it feels from my mum as well. I first told her about it and she said “that’s just not right, this is the people’s land” and I believe that as well.”

Visiting the park on Saturday, she added: “It’s so pastoral, it’s so beautiful and it gives people a place to contemplate and play and walk and we need that barrier between the houses and the park.”

Mayor Anderson hit out at her comments, saying “it’s all very well for a Hollywood superstar to shout from the sidelines.”

“She may have played in Sefton Park when she briefly lived in the city as a girl, but she left.

“I am still here and having to deal with massive and savage Tory government cuts to our budget while devising ways to grow and sustain the city and protect its most vulnerable citizens.

“I’d be interested to hear what Kim Cattrall has to say on care packages for the elderly and disabled adults, mental health provision, crumbling schools or repairing our roads, for example,” said the Mayor.

“Her comments are totally out of context and ill-informed. The fact is that since I became mayor we have created more green space and there is more of it now than at any time in Liverpool’s history.

“We’re selling off 5.5 acres on Park Avenue. It’s adjacent to, but not in, the 300 acres of Sefton Park in which people, as she suggests, can walk, play and contemplate.

“We’re putting in 28 houses, of which 15 are villas, and 24 apartments and the money we get from that will be invested in our city and our parks.”

However, the row didn’t end there and Cattrall fired back to Mr Anderson via her Twitter account that his calculations on the number of houses to be built weren’t correct.