Liverpool Self-Guided Walking Audio Tour

The walk stop by stop: World Museum, the Cavern Club, the Three Graces, Liverpool Cathedral

10 stops · about 61 min walking · start: World Museum · finish: Liverpool Cathedral

William Brown Street opens the walk, with the World Museum and the columns of St George's Hall side by side. Radio City Tower marks the turn towards Mathew Street and the Cavern Club, and then the river takes over: the Three Graces, Pier Head and the warehouses of the Royal Albert Dock around Tate Liverpool. Turning inland, the route reaches the Nordic Church and the arch of Chinatown before the climb up St James' Mount to Liverpool Cathedral. A different first stop or a different order is a setting in the app, and no stop asks for a ticket.

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1. 

   1World MuseumStart

   World Museum stands on William Brown Street, named after the merchant who paid for the museum and library building that opened here in 1860. Its collections range from natural history and ancient Egypt to space, and it sits beside the Walker Art Gallery and the Central Library in a row of grand classical buildings.

2. 

   2St George's Hall

   St George's Hall was designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, who won the competition in his twenties, and completed by Charles Cockerell after his early death. Opened in 1854, it combined a concert hall and law courts behind rows of huge Corinthian columns, and stone lions guard the plateau on its Lime Street side.

3. 

   3Radio City Tower (St John's Beacon)

   Also known as St John's Beacon, this concrete tower rises about 138 metres above the city centre and opened in 1969. It was built as a ventilation shaft for the shopping centre below, with a revolving restaurant at the top, and today it houses the studios of the Radio City station.

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4. 

   4The Cavern Club

   The Cavern Club opened on Mathew Street in 1957 as a jazz club in a cellar, and the Beatles played here nearly 300 times between 1961 and 1963. Brian Epstein first saw them on this stage in November 1961. The original cellar was filled in during the 1970s, and today's club was rebuilt in the 1980s on much of the original site.

5. 

   5The Three Graces

   The Three Graces are the waterfront trio of the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building, completed between 1907 and 1917. Look up at the two Liver Birds on the clock towers of the Royal Liver Building: legend says that if they ever flew away, the city would cease to exist.

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6. 

   6Pier Head

   Pier Head is Liverpool's waterfront promenade on the River Mersey, where the Mersey Ferries leave for Birkenhead and Wallasey. Here you find the bronze statue of the four Beatles striding along the river, unveiled in 2015, the modern Museum of Liverpool and memorials to the city's seafarers.

7. 

   7Tate Liverpool and the Royal Albert Dock

   Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 in a converted warehouse of the Royal Albert Dock, as the first Tate gallery outside London. The dock itself was designed by Jesse Hartley and opened in 1846, and it was the first structure in Britain built only of cast iron, brick and stone, without structural timber, so that it could not burn.

8. 

   8Nordic Church (Gustav Adolf's Church)

   Gustav Adolf's Church, today the Nordic Church and Cultural Centre, opened in 1884 for the Scandinavian sailors and emigrants who passed through the port of Liverpool. It was an early work of the architect William Douglas Caröe, and its stepped brick gables give it a distinctly Scandinavian look.

9. 

   9Chinatown

   Liverpool's Chinatown is home to one of the oldest Chinese communities in Europe, which grew from seafarers who came with the shipping lines in the 19th century. Its entrance on Nelson Street is marked by a Chinese arch, made in Shanghai and put up in 2000, one of the largest of its kind outside China.

10. 

    10Liverpool CathedralFinish

    Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, the largest cathedral in Britain, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who won the competition in 1903 aged just 22. Building began in 1904 and was only completed in 1978, long after Scott's death in 1960. Scott also designed the red telephone box, and one of them stands inside the cathedral.