Liverpool's dock - V McGarvey cc-by 2024
We had not visited Liverpool since PC (pre-Covid), and we had the opportunity of an excuse to visit to see Stuart Lee the comedian, at the Philharmonic Hall. The above photo shows a picture of Liverpool's dockland looking towards Mann Island, you can just about see the Liver Building trying to muscle in at the back. The building in Black is RIBA North, which is the National Architectural Centre, it reminds me of the Royal Danish Library which is on the river in Copenhagen, and the white building to the left is the Liverpool Museum. In 2021 UNESCO stripped Liverpool of its heritage status like an unruly child because of the “irreversible loss” of the historic value of its Victorian docks." after years of development (The Guardian). Not only does Liverpool have some beautiful Victorian buildings on the docks and also throughout the city, but it also has a troubled past that cannot be separated from these buildings, these buildings of beauty are memorials to the slave trade, which brought the City vast amounts of income during the Victorian era. Liverpool reminds me so much of other European ports I have visited Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, so I can see why the Fab Four felt at home in Hamburg, even if they were mostly in a haze of uppers and downs, and emersed in the sleep-deprived musicality of the Reeperbahn. These ports had to be rebuilt after their bombing in the Second World War, and are the backdrops to some incredible modernist buildings, the Cities could have chosen a more traditional architectural design approach but decided not to. Like many industrial cities in the north of Britain Liverpool is no longer a rich city, it has had to think of ways to attract people, and has capitalised on a range of cultural offerings, from the Fab Four to its reinvented Georgian quarter and its quirky bars, as well as its more challenging examples of modernist architecture. It is a city that battles parochialism which to me makes it an international city and nonconformist in its totality.