Liverpool’s waterfront was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2004. The three graces — the Liver, Cunard and Port of Liverpool buildings — dominate the waterfront, with the Liver Bird perched on top of the Liver Building.
The Albert Dock is home to the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Tate Liverpool and the Beatles Story, and is also the most popular free tourist attraction outside London. The Mersey Ferries offer trips on the river, including the famous Ferry Cross the Mersey.
The Three Graces
The three buildings on the Pier Head were built within twenty years of each other and between them say almost everything about what Liverpool was in the early twentieth century. The Port of Liverpool Building came first, completed in 1907, with its dome and Portland stone. The Royal Liver Building followed in 1911, and is the one everybody knows: two clock faces larger than those of Big Ben, and two copper liver birds on top, one looking out to sea and one looking inland over the city.
The Cunard Building completed the group in 1917, in a plainer Italian Renaissance style. Together they were the offices of the companies that ran the port and the shipping lines, and they stand on the site of the old George’s Dock, which had been filled in to create the Pier Head.
The Albert Dock
The Albert Dock opened in 1846 and was revolutionary for its time: the first dock in the world built with warehouses around the water rather than beside it, and the first to be built of brick, iron and stone with no structural timber, which made it fireproof. It closed to shipping in 1972 and was derelict for a decade before its redevelopment opened in 1988.
What is there now is a museum quarter rather than a working dock. The Merseyside Maritime Museum occupies part of the original warehouses, Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 in a converted warehouse, and the Beatles Story deals with the city’s other export.
Across the Mersey
The Mersey Ferries have run since 1150 or thereabouts and are the reason the song exists: the ferry across the Mersey from the Pier Head to Birkenhead and Seacombe. The route is now largely a pleasure trip rather than a commuter service, but it remains the best way to see the waterfront, because the waterfront is not visible from the waterfront.
From the water you can also see how the city relates to the Manchester Ship Canal, whose entrance at Eastham is a few miles upriver: the canal was built specifically to take trade away from Liverpool, and the bitterness between the two cities over it lasted most of a century.