Liverpool

Hope Street and where to stay

The gentlemen's toilets at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms are a listed attraction. Not the pub — the toilets, specifically, all marble and mosaic, a listed attraction in their own right. The Phil stands on the corner of Hope Street and Hardman Street, opposite the concert hall it's named after, and it was built between 1898 and 1900 by a local architect called Walter W. Thomas. Historic England later upgraded it to Grade I on the strength of its carving, its Art Nouveau metal gates by Henry Bloomfield Bare, and the stone musicians worked in low relief around the rooms. John Lennon reputedly said the price of fame was not being able to go to the Phil for a drink. This is where a lot of visitors to Liverpool start, and it's not a bad idea.

Hope Street, which the Phil sits on, is worth understanding early, because it does something no other street in the country manages. It has a cathedral at each end. At the top is the Anglican Liverpool Cathedral, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott — who was twenty-two when he won the commission — and built slowly between 1904 and 1978. At 189 metres it is the longest cathedral in the world, an enormous slab of Gothic sandstone that you can climb for the view. At the other end is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, a modernist circular thing consecrated in 1967, designed by Frederick Gibberd and known to everyone locally as Paddy's Wigwam, or the Mersey Funnel. It was not the original plan. Edwin Lutyens had drawn up a cathedral that would have been the second-largest church on earth with the biggest dome anywhere, and the war and the money stopped it. His vast crypt got built, and it survives down there beneath the current building.

For where to base yourself, the city sorts fairly cleanly into a few districts. The Georgian Quarter, around Hope Street, is rows of townhouses from around 1800, when this was the money end of town; it's quieter than the centre, thick with old pubs and good restaurants, and it suits couples and anyone who cares about the buildings. Ropewalks, named for the long thin streets where rope was twisted for the sailing ships, is the food-and-nightlife district — former warehouses now full of cafés, bars and music venues, with Bold Street running through it and the FACT arthouse cinema and media centre in the middle. The Baltic Triangle, south of the centre, was industrial wasteland not long ago and is now breweries, street art, food markets and a heavy weekend crowd; it skews young. And then there's the waterfront, which is the Liverpool of postcards — central, museum-heavy, and the place most people picture when they picture the city at all.

Bold Street tables and a bowl of scouse

Bold Street is where you eat. It's the densest run of independent restaurants in Liverpool, and a few names come up again and again. Maray does Middle Eastern and North African small plates, and its cauliflower shawarma has become the sort of dish people order before they've sat down. Bakchich, next door in spirit if not in cuisine, does simple Lebanese; its lunchtime falafel wrap is cited as one of the best-value meals in the city. Mowgli was founded by Nisha Katona, a Liverpool-born barrister who left the bar for Indian street food, and the chat bombs and Bunny Chow are the things to order. Leaf, a tearoom and events space, and Mamasan sit in the same stretch.

If you want to spend more, the city can absorb it. sō-lō in the Baltic Triangle is Michelin-starred, the first solo restaurant from chef Tim Allen, with dishes like native lobster with Iberico lardo and Isle of Skye scallops — though it's been closed for refurbishment, so check it's open before you plan an evening around it. The Art School Restaurant, tucked off Hope Street on Sugnall Street, does high-end British cooking: a twice-baked cheese soufflé with Ormskirk leek and Wirral watercress, salt-aged miso duck. Manifest is a thirty-cover wine bar and restaurant whose chef trained at Moor Hall and Edinburgh's 21212. NORD, over in the Baltic Triangle, is seasonal and local, with fresh fazzoletti pasta and cod kievs.

But the dish that actually belongs to the city is scouse. It's a stew — beef or lamb slow-cooked with potatoes, carrots and onion, served with pickled red cabbage or beetroot and crusty bread — and it was originally a thrift meal, whatever veg you had with the cheapest cut of meat. The name comes from lobscouse, a sailors' dish of meat and ship's biscuit brought into the port by Scandinavian and Irish crews, and by the late eighteenth century the potato version had become the regional staple. It gave the city everything, in the end: the accent is Scouse, the people are Scousers, all of it named after a sailors' stew. The meatless version, for people who couldn't afford the meat, is blind scouse. There's a Global Scouse Day, on 28 February, which tells you how seriously it's taken. Traditional cafés and pubs are where to find a bowl.

Markets, pubs and the waterfront

For a market meal, Baltic Market was the city's first street-food market and still runs Thursday to Sunday on the old Cains Brewery site, with wood-fired pizza, halloumi fries, a full bar and a frozen gin slush for anyone who wants one. And a few streets away is Chinatown, home to the oldest Chinese community in Europe, which grew out of nineteenth-century shipping links with Shanghai. The Chinese Arch on Nelson Street is about fifteen metres high, the largest outside mainland China, and the streets around it are where to go for dim sum.

The pubs reward wandering. Ye Cracke, on Rice Street in the Georgian Quarter, was Lennon's local during his art-college days, a small backstreet boozer with a back room called the War Office. Peter Kavanagh's, off Catharine Street, is named for a landlord who ran it for fifty-three years, from 1897 to 1950; he redid the interior himself in 1929 with murals by the Scottish artist Eric Robinson, stained glass by William English, and furniture of his own design. The décor includes a grand piano and, among the oddments, crocodile skin. The Baltic Fleet is a wedge-shaped free house near the docks on Wapping, with its own microbrewery, Wapping Beers, in the cellar — a rare independent survivor down by the water.

The waterfront itself is where you'll spend a good part of a stay. The Three Graces stand in a row at Pier Head: the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building. The Liver Building is topped by two birds, Bella and Bertie, each five and a half metres tall, designed by Carl Bernard Bartels. Legend says that if they fly away the city will cease to exist; the Scouse gloss is that Bertie faces inland to check the pubs are open while Bella watches the sea for handsome sailors. Just south is the Royal Albert Dock, opened in 1846, whose fireproof warehouses and hydraulic cranes halved the time it took to turn a ship around. It fell derelict in the twentieth century, was regenerated from 1981, and got its Royal in 2018. Its warehouses now hold most of the city's waterfront museums.

Museums, the Beatles and open air

Nearly all of them are free. National Museums Liverpool runs nine sites on free general admission, several of them clustered here. The Museum of Liverpool at Pier Head tells the city's story in a sharp modern building. The Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum sit in the dock; the second confronts, directly and without softening it, the port's central role in the transatlantic slave trade. Tate Liverpool occupies a warehouse converted by James Stirling and opened in 1988, though it's mid-renewal, so check the status. The Beatles Story is here too. Over on William Brown Street, the Walker Art Gallery holds one of the best collections in England outside London, and the World Museum has five floors, a live aquarium and a planetarium — the reliable rainy-afternoon answer if you've brought children.

You can't avoid the Beatles here and there's no reason to try. The Cavern Club on Mathew Street opened in 1957 as a jazz club; the band played it 292 times between 1961 and 1963, and it was here that Brian Epstein first saw them and signed on as manager. The original was filled in during Merseyrail construction in 1973 and rebuilt in 1984 on about three-quarters of the old site, using fifteen thousand of the original bricks. Penny Lane is a real street in the south of the city, near where Lennon and McCartney grew up, and the shelter in the middle of the roundabout and the barber were real things on their bus route into town. Strawberry Field, out in Woolton, was a Salvation Army children's home near Lennon's boyhood house; he played in its garden and looked forward to its summer fête, and the red gate now fronts a visitor centre. The airport is named after him, the first British airport named after a person, with the strapline "Above us only sky."

For open air, Sefton Park is 235 acres of Victorian parkland in the south with a boating lake and a glass Palm House built in 1896, now given over to a café, a playground and free events. St Luke's, at the top of Bold Street, is the church people call the Bombed Out Church — built between 1811 and 1832, gutted in the Blitz of 1941, and left a roofless shell ever since, now used for open-air exhibitions and film. Otterspool Promenade runs along the Mersey, and a little further north Crosby Beach holds Antony Gormley's Another Place, a hundred cast-iron figures standing along the tideline and looking out to sea.

Moving through the pool of life

The city moves easily. Lime Street is the main station, the oldest grand terminus main-line station still working anywhere in the world, with direct trains to Manchester and London. Merseyrail is the electric metro underneath, its Wirral line diving under the river through the Mersey Railway Tunnel to New Brighton, West Kirby and Chester. Two road tunnels run under the river as well — Queensway, opened in 1934 and hailed at the time as the eighth wonder of the world, and Kingsway. The airport is about seven miles south. Beyond the city, Chester's Roman walls are forty minutes by train, Knowsley Safari Park's five-mile drive-through is twenty minutes away, and the Mersey Ferry still crosses from Pier Head to the Wirral — the same fifty-minute run that Gerry Marsden put in a song, and the reason the Pier Head terminal now carries his name.

Carl Jung, who dreamed about Liverpool in 1927 and never once visited, called it "the pool of life." It's the kind of thing a city likes to have said about it, and Liverpool has kept it. The birds on the Liver Building have kept their side too, facing carefully apart — one to the pubs, one to the sea — so that the city can go on standing, which by local reckoning is the whole point of them.