An Open Letter To The Lord Mayor Of Liverpool
I spent four years in Liverpool in the 1960s and as I met my late wife there, although like me, she was a Londoner and we had forty good years together, I have a great affection for the Second City. I also know the city well, although that is in part memory from nearly fifty years ago.
On Friday, I took the Virgin train up from Euston for a meeting with Liverpool University. As I had an hour to spare, instead of going straight to my meeting, I decided to awake an old memory by going to see the Richard Huws fountain by the Pier Head. I took the Wirral Line to James Street station and I must say, the Underground looks very good after refurbishment.
The fountain didn’t disappoint, especially as it was working.
I then needed to find my way up to the University. As I’m 66 and have a free bus pass, I remembered that in the 1960s, there was a bus from the Pier Head up Brownlow Hill. But I also know, that traffic layouts in Liverpool have changed a lot. So I did what I would do in London and found a bus stop. I tried several and there was no information that I could find that told me how to get up the hill. So in the end, I took a taxi and got entertained by one of Liverpool’s many comedians.
I know the city from a walking point of view well, but I didn’t see any serious walking maps like those in London, Ipswich or Bristol. I even gave directions to a group of alumni from my university, who were looking for the same fountain.
On the subject of information about the city, you rarely find any adverts or posters in London, directing tourists to visit Liverpool. Only recently, I finally persuaded an old friend, to have a couple of days with her husband in Liverpool and they returned thoroughly impressed with what they had visited. I recently came up to see the Chagall exhibition and the floor of St. George’s Hall, but I only heard about the latter by accident. I’m glad I didn’t miss it!
Unlike some cities I won’t name, you have the attractions, the hotels and the restaurants, but they just need to be linked with more and better information.
A First Trip To Liverpool
As I went to Liverpool yesterday, I realised it will soon be fifty years since I first went to the Second City. I suppose it must have been in September 1965. I was just eighteen and as I’d had an unconditional offer to go to Liverpool University to read Electrical Engineering and Electronics, I hadn’t even had an interview. I remember, I had a large cheap cardboard suitcase with all my clothes and books and I had digs in Huyton, which meant I needed to lug that case up Copperas Hill to find the H13 Crossville bus to get there. I could afford a taxi, but didn’t take one. I’m still a bit like that!
In those days the West Coast Main Line was only electrified to Liverpool from Crewe, so I suspect they changed engines from diesel to electric there. According to this section in Wikipedia, electric trains didn’t run all the way until April 1966. I can’t remember how long the journey took, but I think it was of the order of over four hours. Compare this to the train I took yesterday, which did the journey with two stops in two hours and eight minutes.
If you think four hours was bad, I have a vague memory of a late night journey from Liverpool to London a few months later, that took five hours and forty minutes. I remember on that trip, I was so tired I climbed into the luggage rack of the compartment train to get some sleep.
One memory of that first trip north, I do have, is of arriving in Liverpool through a very dark and wet cutting that leads into Lime Street station from Edge Hill. I took this picture of the same cutting yesterday.
The Approach To Liverpool Lime Street
But in 1965, it resembled some place from Hell and I wondered hard about what I was getting myself into.
I survived that first day and the rest as they say is history!
The Unreserved Coach E On Virgin Trains
I came back from Liverpool on the 14:48 train from the City. It wouldn’t have been my preferred choice, as it dropped me in the dreaded Euston at the start of the evening rush.
As I didn’t have a reservation and was travelling on an on-line off peak ticket at just £25.50, I made my way to Virgin’s unreserved coach E. There I sat in state in a backward facing window seat in a set of four with a table on which I laid out my paper and Private Eye. A young lady did sit opposite, but for much of the journey we were the only passengers in the coach.
After an hour or so, I went for some water from the shop in Coach C. It was a real obstacle course as the train was quite full and most of the coach in between was fully reserved, with a group of Scouse totties trying to find seats and blocking the gangway with their cases.
On Sunday, I’ll be coming back from Wigan after the Ipswich match. Again, I’ve not got a reservation and I’ll be checking out coach E first. If there is no space, I will probably pay for a Weekend First Upgrade. If the train’s occupancy is true to form, First won’t be very full!
If you want to know more about Virgin’s Unreserved Coach E, it’s all here.
John Lennon Gets A Building
I don’t know what John Lennon would have thought about this building at Liverpool John Moores University.
But at least it’s an impressive one in a prominent place in the City!
Liverpool’s Bucket Fountain
I mentioned this in the comments on an earlier post. So today, instead of going direct to my meeting at the Unversity, I took the Wirral line to James Street station to see the Bucket fountain.
It was actually working, although I have read that normally the water is turned off.
A Gluten Free Breakfast On Virgin Trains
I went to Liverpool today on the 08:07 Virgin train from Euston. I was in First and got this gluten free breakfast as part of the ticket.
A Gluten Free Breakfast On Virgin Trains
It came with lots of tea and an orange juice, and very good it was too! Sadly, I think it is only served Monday to Friday until 09:59, as I reported here.
The scrambled egg was particularly nice and was some of the best I’d had that wasn’t home cooked or in a top class hotel. It certainly gave the impression that it was freshly cooked and hadn’t been stewing for a couple of hours.
An interesting point on the price of train tickets is that it cost me £42.90 to go up in First and £25.50 to come back in Standard. So my comfortable seat, breakfast and extra tea, cost me £17.40.
It Was A Good Day Out!
In my view, Liverpool is always one of the best days out in the UK. It is an easy train journey from London. I went First Class, but a ticket in Standard costs fifty one pounds with Virgin Trains, if you book a few days before.
The three exhibitions; St. George’s Hall, Tom Murphy and the Chagall cost me four pounds for entry in total (I’m a Member at the Tate in London) and my only other expenses were lunch at Carluccio’s and a sandwich and a drink for the journey home in Marks and Spencer.
The walking was easy, as it’s gently downhill from the station and St. George’s Hall to the Pier Head, the Ferries and the museums there.
Even walking back up isn’t a steep climb, but it is totally pedestrianised and if you know Liverpool like I do, you can even cross into the station by a subway and an escalator. Or should I say, you normally can, but at present the underground part of Lime Street station is being refurbished. This refurbishment will also mean you can get the train back to the main station using James Street station at the Pier Head.
If you want to visit the cathedrals and the University, there is a bus at the Pier Head, which takes you right up the hill. So it’s then an easy walk downhill back to the station.
If ever a city, was laid out for visitors, it is Liverpool. It’s also difficult to get lost as generally from most of the city centre, you can see the cathedrals and/or the Liver Building.
There are lots of finger posts, but a few maps and better information on the buses would be a great help for visitors.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I’d gone to the Tate Liverpool to see the Chagall exhibition.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I found it very enlightening and it showed me how little I know about art and especially artists like Marc Chagall. But don’t take my word for it, that it is good, read this report from the Telegraph. It starts like this.
Forty years ago, Marc Chagall was one of the uncontested masters of modern art. Living out his old age on the Cote d’Azur, immersed in his magic-realist memories of the old Russian-Jewish world, Chagall seemed fully the equal – well, almost the equal – of his sometime Riviera neighbours Picasso and Matisse.
Since then his critical stock has inexorably declined. He’s come to be seen as a whimsical fellow-traveller of Modernism who produced an overabundance of self-consciously poetic and rather sugary images. His trademark flying postmen, mooning lovers and bearded violinists have come to seem questionable in their sincerity, never mind their artistic quality.
This exhibition, the largest Chagall show in Britain for 15 years, gives us the chance to look again at this long derided figure and decide whether he should be reinstated as a major 20th- century figure or left quietly in his corner.
I think that it is definitely a must-see exhibition and unless you saw it in Zurich earlier, you’ll have to travel to Liverpool. Someone said to me, that they’ll catch the exhibition when it comes to London. It won’t and it’ll probably be many years before an exhibition of this scope is mounted again.
So go and decide, where you think Chagall should be placed in the history of art. i liked the exhibition a lot, and his work to me, is almost a progression of the various styles of art through the twentieth century. Just like any great artist, Chagall seemed to be a complex person, who the more you look at his work, the more you see in it.
Walking To The Tate Liverpool
After visiting St. George’s Hall, I walked down to the Tate Liverpool, having lunch at Carluccio’s on the way. I took these pictures on the way.
They show how much public art and the number of clocks there are in the city.
I think it is true to say that you could spend a couple of days looking at all the public art in Liverpool.
Tom Murphy
Tom Murphy‘s work is all over Liverpool. but at the present time there is an exhibition in St. George’s Hall.
What surprised me was the range of subjects in his sculpture and paintings, including surprisingly to me, Margaret Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales.
Funnily enough, when I arrived in Liverpool, I had had to explain who the people were in his twin statues entitled “Chance Meeting” of Ken Dodd and Bessie Braddock, to some puzzled Chinese tourists.
Liverpool incidentally has more public works of art, than any other location except Westminster. There is a list here and Tom Murphy has done twelve of them. He is certainly very prolific!
The Anonymous Widower 