Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall clashes with mayor of Liverpool over green space in the city

Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall has got into a bizarre row with the mayor of Liverpool over a park she played in as a child.

Liverpool-born Cattrall, who played confident and highly sexualised Samantha Jones in the hit American drama, said plans to sell-off Sefton Park Meadows and build a new stadium for Everton FC at Walton Hall Park would "encroach on the people's land".

The council wants to build on the land to raise money to pay for services.

But 58-year-old Cattrall, who lives in New York, said: "I love Sefton Park. I was lucky enough to grow up playing there.

"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 she ever had.

When I first told her about it she said 'that's just not right, this is the people's land' and I believe that as well.

"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. So I'm very disappointed that the mayor has made the decisions that he has."

Mayor Joe Anderson had tweeted pictures of his grandson in the meadow, quoting him as saying: "Grandad you always bring me to the meadows and there's never anyone here it is always empty can't we go the park".

Cattrall described the tweet as "desperate and sad" but the mayor hit back at the A-lister.

He said: "It's all very well for a Hollywood superstar to shout from the sidelines, but what does she really know of the issues that Liverpool faces?

"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.

"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 11 acres. 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 about 15 villas around it and the money we get from that will be invested in our city and our parks."

Cattrall has shown her support for the Save Sefton Park Meadow campaign on Twitter.

The Liverpool FC fan added: "I am aware how much the beautiful parks mean to the children in this city. This is why I have spoken out against the plans to develop on our wonderful green spaces here in Liverpool.

"Honestly, I don't know what depresses me more, for the city to bring traffic to a place of such contemplation and play or that that devastating development will turn the park into a stadium for Everton!

"I was living in Liverpool in the late Sixties which was a very exciting time and I was too young to really understand everything that was going on, but I always define myself as Liverpool-born, Canadian-bred New Yorker and I feel very comfortable with that.

"While I didn't spend the totality of my childhood in this great city, I was raised by parents and grandparents who are quintessentially Scouse. Liverpool is in my blood."