Lord Hestletine has forecast that Liverpool will be ‘unrecognisable’ by the midway point of this century.
Hestletine served as Minister for Merseyside in Margaret Thatcher’s Tory cabinet in the 1980s and is credited with helping the region’s renaissance.
Around 200 people attended the University of Liverpool’s conference in which Lord Hestletine spoke of an ‘historic opportunity’ for the city to transform itself again by 2050 in spite of Brexit.
He said: “Remember the Albert Dock of 1979 and all that it symbolised – rotting, derelict, toxic, 600 acres of it and written off.
“Look at it today: the site itself transformed, there’s the city transformed.
“If I had stood here in 1979 when I listed this building and I said ‘Don’t worry Liverpool, six million people a year are going to visit this shell,’ you’d have had me bundled away by the men in white coats.
“But that’s what does happen here. Did I know it? No, I didn’t know it. How could I have known it?
“That’s the hardest problem. You cannot know. What you have to do is get up early in the morning to find out what the opportunities are and go for them.
“There’s never been such footloose investment, such footloose cash around the world.
“I know the work that Joe and Ged and other local authority leaders in this part of the world are doing: negotiating.
“The cruise liners, the Panamax, the motor industry, the tropical institute – all these things are alive with opportunities.
“Liverpool is unrecognisable from the Liverpool I knew of the early 1980s and by half way through this century, it will be unrecognisable again.”