Liverpool, and the sea roads that leave from it

Arriving at Liverpool by water still means arriving at the Pier Head, where three large early twentieth-century buildings stand in a row along the Mersey: the Royal Liver Building, topped by two copper birds that local tradition insists watch in opposite directions, one out to sea for returning sailors and one inland to check on the pubs; the Cunard Building, once the shipping line's own headquarters; and the domed Port of Liverpool Building. Together they are known as the Three Graces, and they were built to be the first and last thing anyone leaving or arriving by sea would see of the city, which for the best part of a century was exactly what they were.

A city built on people leaving

Between the 1830s and the 1930s, Liverpool was the principal port through which British and Irish emigrants left for North America, Australia and elsewhere, with millions passing through its docks over that century, many of them Irish families fleeing famine and poverty rather than seeking adventure. The docks that handled this traffic, laid out from the 1840s by the engineer Jesse Hartley in a system of enclosed basins and warehouses, were among the most advanced in the world, and much of that Georgian and Victorian dockland still stands along the waterfront. It was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 for exactly this reason, though the city was removed from the list in 2021 after new waterfront development was judged to have damaged the setting that had earned the listing in the first place, a decision that still divides opinion locally.

The grandest survivor of Hartley's system is the Albert Dock, opened in 1846 as a complex of warehouses built entirely from cast iron, brick and stone, with no structural timber at all, which made it effectively fireproof at a time when dock fires were a constant hazard to valuable cargo. It fell out of commercial use in the twentieth century as ships grew too large for its narrow entrance, and stood largely empty for decades before its restoration in the 1980s turned it into museums, galleries and restaurants, a repurposing that has since become the template for waterfront regeneration in port cities well beyond Liverpool.

The same waterfront was the base for the great transatlantic shipping lines. Cunard's headquarters building at the Pier Head dates from the years when its liners, and White Star's before it moved its main operations to Southampton, made Liverpool a household name across the English-speaking world, a place people had heard of, whether or not they had ever seen it, because it was where the boat left from.

A working harbour again

Liverpool's modern cruise terminal, opened in the early twenty-first century on the river close to the Pier Head, has given the city a role that would have been recognisable to its Victorian dockers, if not to its passengers: a place ships leave from, rather than a place people leave for good. From here, sailings run in almost every direction the Irish Sea and the wider Atlantic offer. Fred. Olsen's Scenic Landscapes of Ireland, eight nights, follows the west coast down past Belfast to Dún Laoghaire, Galway and the Cliffs of Moher, using sail-bys of Fingal's Cave and the Dutchman's Cap on the way out. A shorter version, Cultural Charm of Ireland, spends six nights taking in Cobh, Galway and Killybegs, a fair sample of Ireland's Atlantic coast for a first visit by sea.

The Irish Sea's other crossing

Liverpool has also, for longer than almost any other British port, been the gateway to the Isle of Man, whose steam packet service to Douglas has run from the city's docks since the nineteenth century and still does, alongside the newer business of cruise sailings that call there in passing rather than in direct service. Ambassador's Springtime Shores: Hebrides and Isle of Man Discovery, eight nights out of Belfast, brings that older Irish Sea route into a modern itinerary, calling at Douglas on its way between Shetland and a final call at Liverpool itself before returning south.

None of this requires much imagination to see from the water. A ship easing away from the Liverpool cruise terminal passes directly beneath the Three Graces, and for a few minutes gives its passengers the same view that greeted, or farewelled, most of the nine million people who left through this port over the century when Liverpool's whole reason for existing was the sea road out.