TIME has not been kind to Liverpool airport's 60-year-old art deco terminal through which stylish passengers once passed to board Dragon Rapides and Vickers Viscounts.

Incontinent pigeons reside in the departure lounge and the windows in the control tower are smashed. The terraces where screaming fans once greeted the Beatles are empty and there is nothing to record that Liverpool FC flew back here with the European cup in 1977 and that the Pope kissed the tarmac in 1981.

But after 15 years of decay, the terminal and nine-storey control tower are to become a four-star hotel with bedrooms in new wings offering views over the Mersey estuary.

Renovation is expected to begin within two months and to be completed within a year. Work to convert a huge adjacent hangar into a leisure centre, with paintwork restored to its original colours of magnolia and blue, has nearly ended. The scheme is seen as an essential part of the regeneration of the Speke area of Liverpool, with a business park on the old airfield made redundant when a runway and terminal were built further east.

The hotel is expected to be used by local businesses - Jaguar is to build its new small car at Speke - and by passengers travelling on the growing number of discount flight operators. The re-use of the airport buildings, erected between 1937 and 1940, and all of them listed grade II, has won the approval of English Heritage.

"These are the most monumental and most ambitious civic airport buildings to have been constructed between the wars and continued a tradition of great civic architecture in Liverpool," Roger Bowlder, an English Heritage historian, said. Liverpool airport opened as a grass strip in 1933. But city councillors, determined to hang on to the city's reputation, went shopping for a prestige terminal in 1935.

"They toured Europe and settled on a copy of a design used in Hamburg," Dr Bowdler said. Recently, he joined historians and conservationists from France, Hungary, Italy, Germany and Britain on a visit to the terminal and hangars as part of L'Europe de l'Air. This is a three-year project to safeguard historic airports. They will tour Speke as an example of how new uses can be devised for historic airport buildings.