Six projects were nominated for the infamous Carbuncle Cup this year, including Edinburgh’s W Hotel and Glasgow’s Virgin Hotel.

The Fence invited members of the public to submit buildings to a panel of experts, including Dundee University lecturer and Carbuncle Awards co-founder Dr Penny Lewis, to allow the award to be presented for the first time since 2018.

Victory ultimately went to the redevelopment of Liverpool’s Lime Street in 2019, which “demolished a century of businesses and buildings, replacing them with sheet-metal etchings of the cinemas and bars that once stood”.

Jury chair Tim Abrahams said: “People aren’t hopeless romantics. Most of us understand that sometimes, buildings need to be knocked down and replaced with better ones. This is the nature of dynamic, forward looking cities: things change.

“Here, though, a bunch of developers have been allowed to knock down a happy, eclectic row of buildings — including the much-loved, sorely-missed Futurist cinema — and replaced it with such nothingness, such banality that their only option is to cover it with a screen. Upon which, they have drawn portraits of those same old demolished buildings.

“Greed has rarely looked so greedy. In a city of architectural wonders, hawkers and vagabonds have tried to mask a reductive square metrage to profit equation with a Joker-like stink bomb of local boosterism and cynical nostalgia. Get, as they used to say in the old days, stuffed.”