I just want to post a quick photo blitz from our long weekend in Liverpool. We had a really fun four days there. Our trip coincided with the tail end of the LOOK/17 photography festival. We didn’t catch all of it but our favourite was Ho Fan‘s photos of Hong Kong at the Museum of Liverpool (which is a lot like the M Shed in Bristol but much bigger).

We took advantage of the sunshine last Sunday to pop up the coast to Crosby Beach to see Antony Gormley’s art installation Another Place. It’s so effective, even surrounded by beachgoers.

Our other reason for choosing Liverpool was the Writing on the Wall festival, or WowFest. We only saw a very small part of it – Tonight At Noon, an exhibition at the Liverpool Central Library about the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrien Henri. I grew up with McGough’s poems for children but didn’t know much about the other two, so was surprised to see that they had been such a big deal. There were lots of original manuscripts on show, from which I discovered that I really like the work of all three men (not a huge surprise, as they were heavily influenced by the Beat poets, who I also love). But best of all, visiting the exhibition meant being ushered into one of the very beautiful reading rooms at the library, which is itself a gorgeous building.

We also squeezed in the Open Eye Gallery, the Tate Liverpool, the World Museum (which was surprisingly great) and the Walker Art Gallery, where I mostly took photos of artworks of women reading. But there was other cool art too.

We left plenty of the stuff on our list for a future visit. On that occasion we’d really like some good restaurant recommendations, as that was our one failure last weekend. Send your suggestions this way please!