What Do You Think of it So Far, Ma’am?
Queen Victoria surveys the scene from Derby Square.
What Do You Think of it So Far, Ma’am?
There is also another statue of Queen Victoria, in Liverpool City Centre. It is outside St. George’s Hall and she is portrayed riding side-saddle. How many of our Queens could do that? Queen Elizabeth used to do in public regularly, and Queen Victoria is in the statue, but could she actually do it?
I suspect her Jubilee wasn’t as manic and of course the Olympics were a few years later.
Liverpool’s Main Shopping Street in the Sun
The picture shows Liverpool’s main shopping street yesterday.
Liverpool’s Main Shopping Street in the Sun
Note, how much better these streets are when fully pedestrianised. Compare this to Oxford Street with all the traffic and clutter.
I Tried to Use A Phone-Box
For the first time in many years, I tried to use a phone box, as my Junkberry had run out of charge, after only a couple of hours of use.
A Phone Box That Didn’t Work
It wasn’t a happy experience, as it cost me fifty pence and I never got a dial tone.
Location, Location, Location
With a house, business premises or a restaurant, it’s all about location.
As a coeliac and lover of Italian food, I like Carluccio’s restaurants and eat out in them fairly often.
However, the location of their Liverpool restaurant, is in one of the best places I’ve seen for a restaurant of its type.
I just went out of Lime Street Station walked down the hill for about four minutes, through the bus station and then I was on Whitechapel, a pedestrianised street, that leads between the bus and train stations to Liverpool One Shopping Centre and the Pier Head. The restaurant, is also not far from the Walker Art Gallery and St. George’s Hall.
Incidentally, just round the corner is a taxi rank and Tommy Steele’s statue of Eleanor Rigby.
So it’s in a great location to either start or finish your visit to Liverpool City Centre.
It was also much busier than I expected, as I was at an odd time for lunch. But then I seem to remember that Liverpudlians tend to be very efficient in their trips to a restaurant, as they’ve always got something important to do afterwards.
Bus and Tube Information at Euston Station
When you arrive at the station in a city or town, you often need information to complete your journey to your final destination.
Bus and Tube Information at Euston Station
Most London stations have information booths like this provided by Transport for London at Euston station. I’ve never found such a booth in Manchester Piccadilly and I meant to check Liverpool Lime Street today, but forgot.
They say this about buses at Liverpool Lime Street on the National Rail website.
‘Arriva’ and ‘Stagecoach’ operate a network of daily, frequent bus routes around the city and also to nearby towns. For route maps and timetables: http://www.arrivabus.co.uk and http://www.stagecoachbus.com/merseyside
Liverpools main bus station (on Roe Street) is about 4 minutes walk from Lime Street station.
So should I assume there is no booth. How do you find out what bus company you need?
The same web site gives this for Euston.
Bus route maps are available from Transport for London’s website.
There is no mention of the excellent booth, although the link does point to bus maps for Camden.
There is also no way to contact the National Rail web site, to kick them into line. So we are just Self Loading Cargo left to our own devices.
The BBC’s Description of Today’s Torch Relay Leg
The Olympic Torch is going from Bolton to Liverpool today. I was drawn to their description of the leg on the BBC’s web site.
Through Lancashire and down the coast to Knotty Ash, made famous by Ken Dodd and his Diddy Men characters, via Aintree Racecourse to Liverpool, home of The Beatles, two top football clubs and once known for its wealth as the “Second City of Empire”.
In my view Liverpool may not now be the “Second City of Empire”, but it’s certainly the Second City in the UK.
The description is accompanied by a picture of a horse jumping to victory in the Grand National. I thought for a moment the horse was Red Rum, but the picture is more recent, the colours are wrong and the horse doesn’t have a sheepskin noseband.
Eat your heart out Manchester!
Where’s your historic city centre, world-famous racecourse and amazing river? To name but three!
Off to Liverpool Today
I’m going to watch the Olympic Torch Relay in Liverpool today. It’s going straight through the University, where C and I met. I will just walk up the hill to the Victoria Building.
The weather looks to be reasonably good.
If you are watching the relay on the Internet, today promises to be one of the most architecturally spectacular days so far. The flame is going past the two cathedrals, through the City Centre, past St. George’s Hall, under and over the Mersey and then the evening celebration will be in front of The Three Graces at the Pier Head. Remember that a lot of the centre of Liverpool is a World Heritage Site called the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City.
The Olympic Torch will feel at home as it passes St. George’s Hall, which has been described by Nicholas Pevsner as one of the finest neo-Grecian buildings in the world. In 1967 or 1968, during Panto Week, the students organised a hog roast in front of the hall. I doubt anybody would be allowed to do that now!
Getting Into the Habit
This was one of the headlines in the second part of The Times on Tuesday and it described why more women are becoming nuns.
I would say it is their choice, but surely in these days there are much better things that people can do for the general good of society. There was a Catholic chaplain in Alder Hey hospital in Angels of Mersey. She was doing the practical things that benefit those in emotional difficulties, rather than being out of it all in a Convent.
I do feel that some who go into closed orders are just opting out of real life to the detriment of society.
Angels of Mersey
I missed Angels of Mersey about the work of chaplains in Liverpool and caught up with the first episode last night on the iPlayer.
It showed the University in Freshers Week and in some respects it hasn’t changed much since I went to my Freshers Week in 1965.
We often talk about bad building in the 1960s, but Liverpool University seems to have avoided some of the worst examples.
The Mersey Ferries in the 1970s
They’ve just shown the opening clip of the Liver Birds on BBC2, with its picture of the back of the Mersey Ferry, Mountwood, which is still going, but after being renamed Royal Iris of the Mersey. In three years time, I will have known those boats for sixty years.
Incidentally, I don’t remember much of the first series or two of the Liver Birds, as C and I didn’t have a television until about 1973, although we had seen the odd episode at our parents respective houses. I think the first series we really saw was about 1975, when Elizabeth Estensen joined the show.
The Anonymous Widower 