Museum Day.

 Wednesday 9th August 2023 in Liverpool.

On our walk later yesterday evening, M managed to photograph Billy Fury with some light on his face. With the way the statue is positioned, his face is almost always in shadow.

This morning heralded a lovely day. This is the view from our "Hotel", MM. Total cost for our stay here = £20!

We decided to do some museums today, and there are certainly plenty to choose from! We started with the Maritime Museum behind the colonnaded building in the middle of the picture.

A fascinating museum with the top floor telling the story of the connection with the "Titanic"; the White Star Line was based in Liverpool and most of her crew hailed from this city. It had another floor devoted to the Lusitania disaster and one devoted to the history of slavery.

One exhibit showed the history of the docks, including this 1920s picture of the Albert Dock with Salthouse Dock behind. MM's mooring is shown with an arrow. The dockside behind Salthouse Dock is covered end to end with warehouses where the main road called the "Strand" now runs.

M liked this thought on the floor of the museum café. How lovely it would be if more folk took heed.

After wandering round the museum, it was time for coffee and cake in the museum café overlooking Albert Dock.

Next stop was the Museum of Liverpool, just a few hundred yards away. This museum is devoted to the history and development of Liverpool. It's a striking building, architecturally speaking.

A large montage on the wall featured so many well known faces of people who hailed from the city. Spot your favourites!

On another wall was a full size replica of one of the "Liver Birds". They are each 18ft tall and with a wing span of 24 ft. Each one carries a sprig of seaweed in its beak. They were supposed to be eagles but the artist had never seen an eagle, so he copied a cormorant instead (rather badly!).

From one end of the museum, you can see part of the canal link where it goes under the statue of the Beatles in the distance and then under this museum.

There was a cruise ship called "Silver Moon" docked at the cruise terminal, so we wandered down to have a look at it. 47,000 tons to carry 596 passengers and 440 crew. It had just arrived from Falmouth..

Next to the cruise terminal is this memorial that was originally erected in memory of the 244 engineroom staff who lost their lives on the "Titanic", staying at their posts to keep the lights on so that others could escape. By the time that the memorial was erected, the "Empress of Ireland" and the "Lusitania" had both sunk with the combined loss of 2,213 lives. So, the memorial became one to remember all maritime engineers and engineroom staff who died at sea. It is believed to be the first public memorial devoted to working class people.

In the afternoon we had booked to go on the "Old Dock" tour. The Old Dock was opened in 1715 and was the first commercial "wet" dock in the world. The dock had gates so that ships could sail in on a high tide and then the gates were closed so that the water level didn't drop when the tide went down. This way ships could stay moored by the quayside and be unloaded and reloaded in just a day. Previously ships had to stay out in the middle of the river and be unloaded and loaded by "lighters", little flat bottom boats that were rowed in and out carrying bits of cargo, a process that could take two weeks!

Building the first wet dock was a huge risk as the cost was £12,000, an immense sum at the time, and the city fathers had to mortgage the whole city to meet the cost. The population of Liverpool at the time was less than 700. However, when it opened it was incredibly successful and recovered its investment in less than six months. The dock was 660 ft long, 300 ft wide and could accomodate up to 100 ships with a maximum tonnage of 150 tons each.

The population rocketed and Liverpool became a boom town. This map of the surrounding area is colour coded for the type of businesses that grew up around the dock to cater to the needs of sailors and dockers. All the red squares are pubs and all the yellow ones are owned by ladies (predictably of "ill repute" or perhaps of great reputation!)

 You can see that the roads system of modern Liverpool still radiates from the site of the Old Dock. The financial success of Old Dock meant that other docks were soon built, starting with "South Dock", which was later renamed "Salthouse Dock" when many more docks were built further south. Old Dock is in the centre of this picture with "South Dock" below it to the right. Albert Dock had not yet been built.

 

As ships got bigger and more docks were built, Old Dock, that could only take 150 tonners, gradually became less and less used and after 111 years, in 1826, it was closed and filled in. An impressive Customs House was built on the site, which survived until it was destroyed by bombing in World War II. When it was decided to redevelop the site in 2001, a major archaeological project was undertaken to expose and preserve the whole of the Old Dock under the new "Liverpool 1" shopping centre.

When you visit, you stand on a gantry so that your head is at about the old water level and the brick side wall of the dock is exposed from the coping stones at the top to the sandstone bedrock below.

Only one section is open to the public, but the whole dock has been excavated and preserved except for the entrance and the gates, which are under the main road.

There used to be a castle in mediaeval Liverpool and in the side of the dock they found this 800 year old bricked up sally port with behind it a tunnel that connected to the site of the old castle.

As you can imagine, the archaeologists had a field day with all the thousands of interesting things that they found at the bottom of the Old Dock, including a considerable amount of Victoran sewage!