Historic Liverpool is now open for your contributions
Today I’m going to introduce a new feature to this blog’s sister site, Historic Liverpool: I want you to help me write articles for it, and build a map of Liverpool history. Read more
Posts tagged ‘map’
Feb 23
Feb 15
New Museum is empty, Liverpool Map goes on display, work begins on Liverpool’s Garden Festival site
New Museum Liverpool, by pixiepic, via Flickr
The keys were handed over to National Museums Liverpool from the developers last week, and now the pristine Museum of Liverpool is preparing for the installation of its exhibits ahead of the 2011 opening. The Liverpool Echo has a great slideshow of the museum, including the main entrance, the giant picture window, and the central spiral staircase.
You can also sponsor part of the Jura stone cladding, or one of the seats in the auditorium. Just pop over to www.liverpool museums.org.uk/about/development/mol for more information.
I’m looking forward to seeing it when it opens!
Liverpool Map to go on display
Speaking of the museum, a new fused glass map which will take pride of place in the galleries when MoL opens next year is to go on display at the Daily Post’s offices in the city centre. There’s a blog on the Daily Post web site to keep you up to date with progress with the map.
Now if only they’d do an electronic version I could stick on my site!
Work begins on the International Garden Festival site.
After 26 years, work is finally to start on the site of the 1984 Garden Festival. The Oriental gardens will be restored, lakes dredged and undergrowth cleared. Plenty of people in the Liverpool Echo article are ‘delighted’ at the ‘milestone’. 600 homes were built straight after the Festival, and Pleasure Island gave many a young schoolkid a fun Bank Holiday in the 1990s, but developers Langtree hope that this latest phase of building will create a worthy leisure facility for Merseyside and kick-start the collapsed apartment project from 2008.
Oct 1
New Map of Liverpool
OK, so I’ve already done a post today. But I want to show you this blog post about Stephen Walter’s map of Liverpool. This map is the product of a two year project, and Stephen visiting and falling in love in/with the city.
The most interesting thing about it from my point of view is that the map is geographically accurate, so potentially I could scan it in, geo-rectify it, and add it as a layer on Historic Liverpool. All I’d need is a really big scanner…
It’s on display at the Blue Coat hub. What do you think of it?
Sep 27
I saw three (or more) ships…
Mersey Ferry Snowdrop turning into Pier Head, by Boilerbill via Wikipedia
I’m currently doing a little bit of research for the River Mersey page on Historic Liverpool, and have come across a quite anoraky, but truly amazing site about shipping. It’s called ShipAIS, and is run by “A group of ShipPlotter enthusiasts”. The site, like my own I suppose, is based around a map tracking all the shipping (or as much as possible) in UK waters, from Orkney to the coast of mainland Europe. The site built up from one man experimenting with motion detecting photography from his own window, and now includes the AIS information (identification and callsign info broadcast over the radiowaves). The ships are plotted on the map, including a couple of tracks (I noticed a track for the Mersey ferry Royal Iris when I was on the site today).
My recommendation for readers of this blog would be to look at the map of Liverpool Bay, then click on one of the ships you see in the port for a detailed view of that area. In many cases you get a small photo of the ship in question, and in all cases you get the name of the ship, its speed, type, tonnage and a couple of other details.
The site could do with a few more controls to zoom and pan round the map, but this is a fascinating insight into Liverpool’s current role as a port, and the national context in which it sits. I could quite happily while a way an hour or so each day just exploring the map, and the site as a whole clearly has Merseyside origins and a Mersey focus. Go and have a look!
