Tag: Liverpool

How to explore the newest part of the King Charles III England Coast Path near Liverpool

While the focus was on Eurovision this week, a little bit of history was made on another part of Merseyside.

The opening of the Merseyside section of the King Charles III England Coast Path follows the recent renaming of the path for the Coronation.

It leads from Southport [Southport prom pictured above via i Newspaper] via Crosby and Formby to the Liverpool waterfront.

It also adds to plans throughout the year to celebrate the Year of the Coast as designated by the National Coastal Tourism Academy.

The highlight of the new section follows the lesser-known coast to the north of Liverpool, an undiscovered landscape of beaches, dunes and heathland supporting many wildlife habitats.

Several sections are designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest with rare examples of flora and fauna.

John Corbett, a Liverpool Blue Badge Tourist Guide, based in Crosby, said:

“This is an area of big sky and statement sunsets.”

“I regularly walk this section of coast and love the long-distance views, looking as far as the Lake District and back towards Snowdonia on clear days, plus watching the ships coming in.”

Read the full story via the i Newspaper: Merseyside’s new King Charles III England Coast Path opens up.

Tick off your bucket list travels with my new guides to Liverpool and Snowdonia

 

Bucket List Travels has now gone live and I’m one of their travel experts.

My writer profile is here.

The travel site, which curates content for bucket list experiences by local experts, has launched with guides from Sydney to Straford-upon-Avon.

I’ve drawn on my local-knowledge expertise as a travel writer and tourist guide to write two of the guides from my home patch in the Northwest of England and North Wales.

Read my Snowdonia guide here; and my Liverpool guide here.

Here’s a taster of the Snowdonia text:

The anchor point is Mount Snowdon (Eryri in Welsh), Wales’ highest peak at 3,000ft. The mountain Mecca is the small, Alpine-style town of Llanberis but other honeypot hubs offer alternative takes on the park. The Victorian resort town of Betws-y-Coed is the primary base for many visitors, its high street packed with outdoors shops and food-fuel cafes. Given the bucolic setting, you can see why artists and Romantic writers were first drawn here.

Timely, given that the Snowdonia National Park Authority recently voted to use the Welsh names Yr Wyddfa and Eryri rather than Snowdon and Snowdonia.

The decision that Wales’ highest mountain will be referred to by its Welsh name, rather than the English equivalent, came after a petition of 5,000 people called for change.

Read more about the decision here.

And read more travel guides at Bucket List Travels.

Why Liverpool could survive loosing its Unesco World heritage status

It looks like an own goal for Liverpool — not Klopp’s team facing the wrath of The Kop but the announcement by Unesco that it could strip Liverpool of its World Heritage status.

The port city of Liverpool is currently one of 32 Unesco World Heritage sites in the UK. The area stretching along the city’s historic waterfront and onto St George’s Hall was granted World Heritage status in 2004.

Yet controversy has raged in recent years about a series of dockland developments, leading to Liverpool being placed “at risk” by Unesco in 2012.

The heritage body this week expressed further concerns about the Liverpool Waters regeneration scheme and plans for the new Everton football stadium in a former dockland site, citing the developments had resulted in

“serious deterioration and irreversible loss of attributes”.

The City Council hit back, saying some £1.5bn had been invested in upgrading Liverpool’s heritage assets.

Living city

The delisting would be a blow to the city, of course.

Post-industrial Liverpool has reinvented itself as a city of tourism, culture, and nightlife. Some 37m visitor arrivals each year contribute to an annual economic impact of £3.3bn for the city, according to pre-Covid figures from Marketing Liverpool.

The Covid-battered cruise industry has just set sail again with around 80 cruise calls planned this year, including Anthem of the Seas amongst other.

Liverpool has a proud maritime history, serving as a global port during the Industrial Revolution and a hub for transatlantic crossings at the turn of the 20th century. The city boasts 27 Grade I-listed buildings and is touchstone for Britain’s seafaring story.

In 1912, the Titanic disaster was even announced to the world from the balcony of what is now room 22 at the Signature Hotel, the former headquarters of the White Star Line company.

Laura Pye, Director of National Museums Liverpool, says the Unesco debate is more nuanced than a simple heritage-versus-regeneration trade off.

“We want future generations to learn about the city’s maritime heritage, of course, but Liverpool is a living, breathing city. It’s about finding new ways,” she says, “of using heritage to evolve.”

So, can sites survive a delisting? Two places so far met that fate: the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman and the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany.

There are currently 53 locations on its heritage danger list, including the Bolivian city of Potosi and the Everglades National Park in the United States.

Unesco also warned that Stonehenge could be added to the danger list at its 2022 review if plans to reroute the A303 road in Wiltshire are not modified. Yet, Covid aside, these destinations continue to draw visitors.

Moreover, Liverpool has an innate ability to rise phoenix-like from the ashes.

As a teenager, growing up in the Northwest of England, I saw Liverpool through the wilderness years of the Eighties, bowed and monochrome.

I also witnessed the green shoots of recovery when the International Garden Festival converted a former household tip into the UK’s first ever garden festival in 1984.

And I watched from the crowd gathered in front of St Georges Hall as the former Beatle, Ringo Starr, played live on the roof to launch Liverpool’s transformative tenure as the European Capital of Culture in 2008.

I find the city reborn these days. Tate Liverpool will host a summer-blockbuster Lucian Freud exhibition from July 24, hotels are relentlessly booked out for Premiership home games for both city teams and Bold Street bars are buzzing again with post-pandemic revellers.

Liverpool has some fight in her yet.

Seeking solutions

There’s one month left to reach a compromise before the final decision. Joanne Anderson, Liverpool’s newly elected mayor, says heritage and regeneration are not mutually exclusive and has invited Unesco to see the developments first-hand. She wrote on Twitter:

So, can Liverpool salvage its status as a maritime-heritage hub?

I hope so. It would be a shame for cruise arrivals, disembarking from the Cruise Terminal on the waterfront this July, to find that their gentle stroll through Liverpool’s Mersey-docked history, walking from the Three Graces to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in the Albert Dock, no longer gets the Unesco nod.

But I’m sure that Liverpool would rise again.

As Peter Colyer, Chair of the Liverpool City Region Tourist Guides Association, told me:

“Liverpool moves onwards and upwards. We would be saddened but the loss of status, but it would not impact significantly on visitor numbers.”

“The regeneration of Liverpool,” he added, “is an ongoing work in progress.”

So Unesco be damned. As any football fan knows, Liverpool may go one down at home sometimes — but they always fight back.

Read the edited story at Telegrpah Travel.

Imagine: what’s happening in Liverpool to mark John Lennon’s 80th birthday

This week would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday. His home city of Liverpool is marking the anniversary with a series of events and exhibitions this week and beyond in memory of its favourite son.

Beatles tourism is hugely important to the city, generating £82m and created nearly 2,500 jobs, according to a 2016 report by the University of Liverpool.

The events starting this week include:
  • Sgt. Pepper Way, a new photographic exhibition of unseen Lennon images at the Beatles Story Museum by the New York-based photographer Bob Deutsch
  • a one-off Magical Mystery walking tour of places associated with the Beatles, starting from the Albert Dock and ending at The Cavern Club for live acoustic music
  • Strawberry Field, the former Salvation Army children’s home where the young Lennon played in the garden while living nearby, will be unveiled as the new home of the famous piano that John Lennon used to compose and record the song Imagine. The piano will be on loan to Strawberry Field courtesy of the estate of the late George Michael.
  • the retrospective of photography by Linda McCartney at the Walker Art Gallery, featuring candid images of the Fab Four, has been extended until January next year
Liverpool was subsequently placed under tier-three restrictions and my follow-up feature was published by Telegraph Travel. Read Postcard from Liverpool: ‘We’re facing a long, dark winter of cancellations ahead’.
Read the latest restrictions in Liverpool here.