My first visit to Albert
Dock in Liverpool was blessed by a fine sunny day and after a good walk around
and a visit to the Tate I settled down for a glass of cask ale outside the Pump
House pub and looked out on the hotchpotch of old and new, smart and scruffy,
high art and pop culture: on one side the old dock buildings themselves, square
and functional in their brick uniformity while on the other side the new
commercial blocks of glass, steel and concrete competed with each other for
eccentricity of angle, curve or other form, designed to attract the investor
even at some detriment to functionality; in between the two sectors an isthmus
of post-industrial detritus dotted with cast iron reminders of the former
functionality – beached marker buoys, winches, davits, lock gates, swing foot
bridges, and even an anchor - left there for effect or just forsaken; and at a
respectable distance from the Tate, the Beatles Story attraction outside which
the outsized figure of the fab four was attracting more attention than anything
I had seen in the aforementioned gallery of modern art.
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