Five on Friday

It's Friday so once again I'm joining in with Amy at Love Made my Home for this week's Five on Friday.

Last week we spent a few days on the Wirral visiting such places as Ness Gardens, Port Sunlight and the Lady Lever Art Gallery, the Williamson Art Gallery and Birkenhead Priory. We also spent a day in Liverpool.

Above is a view of Liverpool taken from New Brighton Beach. My husband wanted to visit New Brighton as he remembered going there as a child arriving on a ferry from Liverpool taken there by his Uncle who worked in the building below.

He also remembers being taken on a tour of the Liver building by his Uncle with his brother and cousins and standing on one of the columns underneath one of the Liver birds.

I'm going to share five things we saw on our day in Liverpool with you.

1. The Dazzle Mersey Ferry

I was so pleased to see the ferry because of its decoration but also because it is The Snowdrop and that is the ferry we travelled on when we sailed up the Manchester Ship Canal from Salford to Liverpool a few years ago. It has been created by artist Sir Peter Blake to commemorate the designs first used on vessels during WW1. The designs worked by 'baffling the eye' and made them hard for an enemy to target. Sir Peter Blake is well known for his design for the sleeve of the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Which leads me nicely to......

2. The Fab Four

This is a fairly new sculpture by Stoke-on-Trent sculptor Andrew Edwards who I introduced to you a few posts ago when I showed you his sculpture of the WW1 VAD nurse on a bench on The Brampton in Newcastle-under-Lyme with a quote from Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. The figures in the sculpture are larger than life size and it was quite difficult to get a photo of them with no one posing next to the figures. I was never a huge fan of the Beatles, never saw them live, only ever had one of their records, but they were a backdrop to my early teenage years and certainly the world did seem to change a lot at that time.

3. The Liver Birds

Such an iconic building and the symbol of the bird is found all over the city. It was wonderful to see this building in the distance from The Snowdrop at the end of our trip up the Manchester Ship Canal and out onto the River Mersey before docking nearly opposite the building. He is a link to the blog post I wrote then.

4. The Lambananas

Another thing that is newly symbolic of Liverpool and presumably the catalyst for all the other decorated animals and birds that seem to appear every year in towns and cities across the country. The first Lambanana the Super Lambanana first appeared on the streets of Liverpool in 1998. Here is a -link- to its history.
The figure above is Mandy Mandala Lambanana and she was one of 125 of which in 2008 appeared on the streets of Liverpool as part of the city's year of being the European Capital of Culture.

5. The Pterosaur

We visited Liverpool on my husband's birthday as a treat because for ages he'd wanted to see the cast of the Pterosaur (Quetzalcoatlus northropi) hanging in the foyer of the World Museum and photograph it for his website. We arrived in Liverpool at Lime Street station and crossed the gardens near St George's Hall to the World Museum where we had a good look around before moving on to the the Walker Art Gallery which is close by. Here is a link to Paul's Pterosaur Database Blog and Website.

Below are some more photos of things spotted on our visit to Liverpool.