Liverpool Audio Tour: Below the Liver Birds

Liverpool's waterfront looks like an empire of merchants but is really a working hierarchy in disguise — clerks pen-pushing at Pier Head, sailors paid off on the dock road, dockers picked at the seven-o'clock pen, and women, children and Black seafarers cut out of the wage but doing the unpaid labour that ran the port. This self-guided audio tour walks the working day of a port city — from the Sailors' Church on Chapel Street, past the Cunard clerks' palace and the Royal Liver Friendly Society founded by nine working men in a pub, into the Albert Dock warehouses that handled bonded tobacco and the gates of the Sailors' Home that tried to break the crimps' racket, through the Bluecoat charity school for the orphans of the port, into the Cotton Brokers' Ring that ran the world cotton market from Old Hall Street, through the Cavern's lunchtime sessions where typists and apprentices spent their dinner-hour, onto the very plateau where on 13 August 1911 the police hidden inside St George's Hall baton-charged a strike rally of eighty-five thousand, up the steps of the Walker — free to the working public since 1877 — past Lewis's 'Friend to the People' department store, into the Catholic Cathedral built on the floor of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse where the city's poor picked oakum twelve hours a day, and finishing at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms — a pub built for the wage-earner by trade-school craftsmen and listed Grade I for its trouble. Walk slowly. The Liverpool you came to see was made by people who paid for it with their working day.