Satellite
Show on map
  • Day 8

    Liverpool

    August 24, 2019 in England ⋅ ⛅ 19 °C

    We caught the train from Edinburgh to Liverpool and installed ourselves near its very historic waterfront for three nights.

    From there we visited a few different places, each in some way related to the history of the city and the disproportionate contribution it has made to the modern world.

    The Beatles Experience proved to be a very interesting, if sanitised, telling of the Fab Four story, especially the early years in Liverpool itself. It was quite a feeling standing in an exact replica of the Cavern Club circa 1962. Too bad about 80% of the population wasn’t even born then.

    Liverpool the port proved to be a very pleasant place to wander around. The waterfront area was originally home to the trade in cotton and slaves then emigration and of course later the flow of materiel into Britain during World War Two. It was saved from redevelopment in the eighties and is realistically and faithfully preserved.

    We ate a couple of times on the Royal Albert Dock, steeped in history, and generally wandered the shoreline from Pier Head. The architecture was spectacular, befitting a pre-eminent port city and one with a UNESCO listing.

    Liverpool Cathedral was spectacular too, in a dark, square, brutal way. The UK’s largest, it was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, whose eclectic body of work also includes the red telephone box.

    Finally, unable to resist the siren sound of Gerry and The Pacemakers any longer, we took a cruise on the Mersey Ferry and spent some time on the Wirral Peninsula opposite the city.

    Mersey Ferries, in a bizarre and maybe vengeful effort to diversify, bought a salvaged U-Boat - U534 - and sliced it up for display at their Woodhead Terminal. It was interesting peering into the rusted hulk and reading the history of the boat.

    Then we caught a train a few stops down to Bebington and visited Port Sunlight, a village built by William Lever to house the workers at his soap factory.

    By all accounts a humane and enlightened man - as well as a master soap marketer - he provided his employees with houses with separate bedrooms, plumbed-in baths and a toilet each, all otherwise rarities for working class people. Of course, he was also pretty much guaranteed his workers would turn up to work on time (and sober) as loss of their job also meant loss of their house.

    The Port Sunlight Museum was a small but informative hour or so, the preserved cottage next door very interesting and our walk through the local streets of a beautifully laid out and pleasant village was excellent.

    We did find the poor side of Liverpool wasn’t far from the surface, too. There were people sleeping rough all through the shopping precinct, and once away from the river it wasn’t quite so clean. There were quite a few beggars. Despite that, though, we thoroughly enjoyed this extremely interesting, attractive and historic city.
    Read more