Liverpool - Land of the Unexpected

First stop the North-West: land of dour Lowry streetscapes? Clogs, cobbles and serried pit worker houses? Nup. Unexpected statuary and social phenomena - yup.

Iron Men

On the coast at Sefton, the golden sand beach is home to the “Iron Men”; not surfers/sand sprinters but an installation by Anthony Gormley called Another Place comprising 100 naked identical iron figures (casts of his own body - a little narcissistic?) set along the beach and in the sea, gazing towards Ireland. They cry out for customisation with hats and pullovers but also exude a strange serenity.

Liverpool alive with demonstrations of true love

Liverpool on a hot sunny Saturday showed off its beautiful imperial civic buildings; glowing red sandstone echoing back the waves of sea gull calls to remind us that this city was the biggest port at the centre of Great Britains’s empire’s trade.

True love locks along the Albert Dock waterfront

Albert Dock doesn’t hum to cries of trading ships hooters or wharfie vernacular any more - but to a swirling and constant stream of hen parties dressed in mini-veils, shoestring straps, lettered sashes, fake tan and false eyelashes. I counted 8 on our visit and they were all so identically sashed etc that I kept thinking I was seeing the same party.

The great white dream

“I thought we might go and see Dream,” suggested brother-in-law Mark on Sunday morning.

“Umm, sure.”

“You don’t know what Dream is, do you?”

And that’s when I went to one of the strangest most surreal and lesser-known modern day sights of the north-west.

When Sutton Manor coal mine closed in 1991, the local community lost its centre and reason for being.

Local people wanted the industry and their ‘own’ mine to be remembered in a concrete way. Somehow the Dream memorial that arose, in consultation with the mining community that now had no mine and no obvious direction, was a massive visual thumbs up to the future: a giant white marble dream-distorted head of a peaceful girl rising up out of the rehabilitated mound above the mine site.

And the the slopes below the head are filled with wild flowers and butterflies and active groups of locals cycling, walking their dogs, picnicking with their kids. And dropping litter.