The Magical Church of St. Luke
I am not a religious person, but I like some places of worship.
St. Luke in Liverpool or the bombed-out church, is one such place for many reasons. It stands proudly at the end of Bold Street, and its state due to a Nazi firebomb, says to many, that times may get bad, but I’ll still be here to cheer you on your way.
On Friday night, as I passed it was open. It was C’s favourite church and she’d always wanted to enter, but it was always locked. So I went in to see the party and auction that was going on.
Long after we’re all gone, St. Luke will still be there, putting two fingers up to the despots, oligarchs, stupid politicians, religious bigots and cruel people of this world.
But St. Luke is winning. Type bombed-out church into Google and you find it immediately. It really is a unique place in the world. And it appears in cyberspace too!
Narrowboats in Liverpool City Centre
Who’d have thought it?
Narrowboats in Liverpool City Centre
But they are here within walking distance of the Pierhead and the new shopping of Liverpool One.
Billy Fury
History has forgotten Billy Fury, who was one of the first real pop stars to come out of Liverpool.
It was good to see this statue at the Albert Dock, by the Tate Liverpool.
Ferries Across The Mersey
In the 1960s, the Mersey Ferries were an important transport link, that in truth has been superceded by the railway from Liverpool Lime Street and Central stations to the Wirral.
When I was in Liverpool, the ferries were then named Mountwood and Overchurch. Now the same ships are called Royal Iris of the Mersey and the Royal Daffodil. I remember one night in about 1966, the two boats hit each other in a particularly bad storm. For months, you could still sea the damage.
I was also roaring drunk on a ferry once. Never again. Drink and swells from the sea don’t mix. Boy was I sick.
If it can be managed on my my trip around the 92 clubs I should visit Tranmere on the 27th October. It looks like it might just be possible to use the ferry one way.
Around Liverpool Pierhead
I walked through the shopping centre, got my hotel for the night and then moved on to the Pierhead and the new Museum of Liverpool.
In the 1960s, the Pierhead was the bus terminal and much of the area was just bus parking. Now it is much better.
Around Liverpool’s Shopping Centre
Liverpool’s shopping area has changed a lot since the 1960s. The main change is that the buses no longer roar up the middle, like they used to and still do on Oxford Street in London. Liverpool shows just how poor Oxford Street is and how the latter would benefit from pedestrianisation.
I took these pictures on Friday afternoon and early on Saturday morning.
You will notice that buildings like Marks and Spencer are quite old, but well preserved. Although since the 1960s a lot has been torn down and rebuilt. And of course if you move towards the Pierhead, you come to Liverpool One, the new shopping area.
Sadly though the Kong Nam, where generations of students ate seems to have gone. In those days it was often you ate your Chinese meal with a bottle of Guinness.
The hotel above St. John’s market was the place, where C and I virtually had our first holiday without the children. It was terrible, but I could place the date exactly, as on the Saturday night, Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo. The link says it was the 6th April 1974. Breakfast was so awful, I can still see the restaurant manager wringing liquid out of the scrambled egg, when I complained.
An Old Cinema in Liverpool
Liverpool is a city, where I can walk about the city centre and find loads of memories from my time in the 1960s, there both post and after the time I met C.
An Old Cinema in Liverpool
This cinema in Lime Street, was a bit smaller than most of the others and generally showed less mainstream films. I’m trying to remember what I saw there with C, although I can remember seeing The Collector there with another girl.
One memory of the cinema was that in 1968 or so, a film called Sixteen or something like that was released. It was a feature length film made with sex education in mind. You had the strange site of nuns herding school-girls into the cinema to see it.
I wonder if it had any positive effects. No-one knew what the nuns thought of it.
Why Not?
I found this telephone cable cabinet behind Waitrose in the Barbican.
A Painted Telephone Cable Cabinet
Perhaps all of these cabinets, which are always getting damaged by metal thieves should be painted in other designs. After all, it would make them very traceable, if they were stolen.
A Recce to Barnet
Barnet is a surprisingly difficult club, as it lies between Aston Villa and Barnsley. So it’ll have to be done quickly on a trip between Euston and St. Pancras. In other words it’ll be two trips on the Northern line to High Barnet. I’d only ever been once before, when I was about seven to see Enfield play them with my father, but C as a child used to go regularly with her father, on their bicycles.
So to see how difficult it was, I took a trip from Euston to High Barnet and then back to St. Pancras. The times were as follows.
18:22 Left Euston
19:00 Arrived High Barnet
19:25 Left High Barnet
20:10 Arrived St. Pancras
So that short trip took just 12 minutes short of two hours.
It could be a bit quicker if soomeone was with me to hold the lights on Barnet Hill and get the platform right there. I got the wrong train out of High Barnet and had to wait for one at Camden Town, which probably cost 15 minutes.
At least the ground is well-signposted and easy to find, as these pictures show.
At least though the walk isn’t too difficult.
92 Clubs – A Recce to Ipswich
I had to go to Ipswich to have some pictures taken for the 92 Clubs challenge.
Here’s a few I took from Ipswich Station to the ground.
As the pictures were all taken from a similar position, it just shows how close the station and the ground are.
The Anonymous Widower 