Intersecting journeys

A few weeks ago we were down south visiting my parents. A moment came, at the top of the Devil’s Dyke, when we looked north west across the Weald, across most of the landscape I still have to walk: More recently, we attended Journey of the Bride, the opening of an exhibition by Alice Lenkiewicz. [...]

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Worlds Apart: Edge Hill to Edge Hill

Today’s walk was another spur line added to my main walk from Southport to Brighton – so that I can connect Edge Hills: University, Liverpool district and battlefield. I walked from Liverpool Central (included on the main route) out to Edge Hill (the place), having previously walked to Edge Hill Uni – so it all [...]

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Concrete sermon: Mersey Ferry

Itinerant puppeteer and social commentator Walter Wilkinson visited Liverpool in the mid-Thirties. In the brief account of the visit (in Puppets through Lancashire, 1936) he and his partner Winifred remark on the Merseyside penchant for building on a massive scale: “The Mersey Tunnel is the largest sub-aqueous work of its kind in the world. The [...]

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Walk the Line II: Liverpool Central to Docks

I meant to stroll, drift and dream the city around me. In fact I rushed, like a droplet in a torrent, following any green man crossing chance, snatching blurry pictures in the evening light. Liverpool’s outdoor spaces didn’t feel like places to linger, more like places to move. I first came here nearly 20 years [...]

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Vast Map: Approaching Liverpool II

Paul Morley describes Liverpool as ‘…An island set in a sea of dreams and nightmares that’s forever taking shape in the imagination, more a mysterious place jutting out into time between the practical, stabilising pull of history and the sweeping, shuffling force of myth’ (in Living, Mersey Minis Volume Two). My journey needs to include [...]

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