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Book specifications:
For details of Cities500 books contact publisher Guy Woodland on: + 44 (0) 151 632 3280 or email: info@cities500.com
Published October 2008
240pp - 210x265mm Hardback (landscape) with a laminated cover and dust jacket
RRP: £15.00
ISBN: 978-1-905547-07-4
Liverpool:
World Waterfront City
Putting the focus on one of the world's
most memorable maritime cities
LIVERPOOL'S waterfront is an exciting, breathtaking vista and one of the most memorable in the world, easily compared with Sydney, New York or Shanghai, its sister city in China.
Now this lavish, hardback book photo essay book puts a modern perspective on the city's waterfront whilst also embracing its historical legacy. It paints a striking and panoramic kaleidoscope of the waterfront and all its evocative, atmospheric and often erratic moods and shapes from dawn to dusk and throughout the night.
The 240 pages capture the very essence of the waterfront that is renowned the world over. They also span the wider reaches of the river Mersey, on both banks from downriver at Hale lighthouse up to the radar station at Seaforth and on to Crosby beach, now famous for the Antony Gormley Iron Men statues, and across to Liverpool's nearest neighbour, Wirral.
A stunning and eclectic collection of images is interspersed with a number of essays by writers who reflect on the feelings and emotions that the waterfront, the river and the city itself has on them. They include showbusiness personality and photographer Mike McCartney; writer and artist Peter Grant and acclaimed journalist Peter Elson; the director of Tate Liverpool Christoph Grunenberg; Andrew Harrison, the associate editor of best-selling music magazine The Word; the master of the brigantine Zebu, Susan Hanley-Place who is also honorary chief executive of the Mersey Heritage; internationally acclaimed sculptor Stephen Broadbent; Lord Michael Heseltine; and writer and QE2 expert Tony Storey, amongst many others.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries this remarkable waterfront was the lifeblood of Liverpool and defined its visual identity on a global scale. It is renowned amongst residents, sailors and tourists alike for the imposing architectural trinity of the elegant Three Graces buildings that hold court over the Pier Head and the river Mersey.
This awe-inspiring waterfront is even more impressive in the 21st century as it takes on the mantle of a modern metropolis while also revelling in its status as a UNESCO World Heritage site. And within the waterfront�s World Heritage boundary can also be found Jesse Hartley's wonderful Grade I listed Albert Dock.
The book - the latest in the 21st Century Cities series - has forewords by The Duke of Westminster, Lord Heseltine, who was Minister for Merseyside in the early 1980s, and Francesco Bandarin, Director of UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in Paris who comments: The city's outstanding universal value is embodied in its panoramic waterfront and other key architectural features, and is reflected in its historical contribution to the major mercantile systems throughout the British Commonwealth.
Indeed, the river Mersey - one of the world's great waterways - has been a magnet for people for centuries; the swirling occasionally unruly tides reflecting Liverpool's own historical and contemporary ebbs and flows: socially, economically and politically; and in the past was pivotal to the emergence of the city as probably the most important seaport in the world.
The Duke of Westminster observes: 'Liverpool is now most definitely a world waterfront city in every respect.'
Phil Redmond, TV mogul and chairman of National Museums Liverpool, observes: 'Liverpool is a place that is always anticipating the turn of the tide. Looking for the new idea that will sweep away the old and usher in the new. Ignore it and you will be ignored. Embrace it and you will be embraced, regardless of political hue.'