Dave Evans has sent over an image of Sir Paul McCartney at LIPA from last week.
Macca was speaking at a graduation ceremony for LIPA, er, graduates last week – with Will Yojng and Joe McGann also in attendance.
Presumably Paul got a better reception than Ringo the last time he was here.
If you follow the view of the blogosphere, the Mann Island developments buildings, together with the new Merseytravel ferry terminal building (that also doubles as the Beatles Story’s second outlet) and Liverpool Museum, amount to nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Indeed, that’s what architects seem to think too.
Such judgements are necessarily subjective, and though I’m reserving judgement for now on the new Liverpool Museum, I can’t possibly see how the Mann Island Developments buildings or new ferry terminal can be judged to be sympathetic to the surrounding area.
In some ways I quite like the Mann Island buildings, but they seem to me totally at odds with the surrounding areas, as if two damaged Borg cubes have suddenly crashed down to Earth on the site of the ill-fated Fourth Grace.
The buildings, along with the museum, almost completely obscure the view of the Three Graces from the viewpoint of the Albert Dock, and add an intrusive full stop to the waterfront’s narrative from Birkenhead.
Stevie G’s entirely proper acquittal last week for delivering up to three uppercuts to a DJ in what was termed ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ – a term that could have been coined by George Bush – was not due to a friendly local jury, according to the prosecutor in the case.
In an article in the Daily Post’s legal section, Ben Schofield writes that Exchange Chambers was surprised that Gerrard chose not to employ their services, but lavished a reported £250K on London QC John Kelsey-Fry rather than the eventual prosecutor David Turner.
Turner, a former cabaret director of the Cambridge footlights, is described in the article as ‘charismatic raconteur’ and thought the evidence that Gerrard acted in self-defence in the Southport punch-up ‘strong’.
Liverpool Crown Court has heard that Steven Gerrard ‘totally lost it’ with a DJ who supposedly refused to play a Phil Collins record for the Scouse boy wonder, with CCTV footage showing the scuffle from 2008.
Gerrard allegedly hit out at businessman Marcus McGee “with a succession of well-aimed uppercut punches delivered with the style and speed of a boxer” at the Lounge Inn, Southport.
Gerrard pleads self-defence, which the prosecution disputes. Gerrard’s codefendents all plead guilty.
Here’s how the prosecution see the incident, after Gerrard allegedly demands a card that controls the music system with the words “Here y’are lad. Give me that lad.” McGee objected to the expression ‘lad’, which given that he lives on Merseyside must pose a lot of problems.
The summer always makes me realise how much work goes into making Sefton Park looking tidy and pretty.
At the end of a weekend the park looks like a bomb has hit it, with discarded bags of rubbish lying around bins like scallies surrounding a newsagents.
Everyone seems to make a beeline for Sefton Park in the summer, and there are endless amounts of festivals, various events and bloody fun runs.
The park’s grassy expanses are perfect for lounging in the summer, but the growth in supermarket booze cruises and portable barbecues rather take their toll on public space in the summer, to my mind.
It seems like Jimmy McGovern’s award-winning show The Street is finished, following an interview with the Liverpool writer in which he said he was not interested in producing the series anywhere but the axed Granada Studios.
ITV has closed ITV Productions studios at Manchester, where The Street is made as part of the latest round of cuts. ITV has been badly hit by falling ad revenues and some fairly hopeless decision-making over recent years, with Michael Grade now on the way out too.
The last edition of Black
+White was to have featured an interview with Jimmy as its centrepiece, but our own round of cuts and poor decisions meant we didn’t have the cash, so it now lives on the web, though I also managed to get it in Tribune.
I’ve never printed an interview as a Q&A before or since, but the answers Jimmy gave were so interesting, frank and personable I didn’t feel I had anything to add.
Anyway, the Jimmy McGovern interview is here, along with a fair bit on the genesis of The Street.
The Merseytram project to build a tram route from Liverpool city centre to Kirkby, of all places, is back in the new with Shadow Home Secretary and ‘Minister for Merseyside’ Chris Grayling apparently ruling out the possibility of a Tory government backing the plans.
Grayling, who once claimed that Gary Neville was a good role model for Liverpool youngsters, says that a tram network in the city would need to be based on a successful initial route – saying a South Liverpool route through the suburbs to John Lennon airport would make more sense.
The persistently-favoured first route is the Line One Kirkby route, which seems to amount to an FDR-style social engineering project.
The Tories have made a big thing under Dave Cameron of pretending to be interested in the environment, and Grayling has spent the last couple of years slamming Labour for not pressing ahead with Liverpool’s tram network, while saying the Tories would build trams, ooh, everywhere.
Grayling has probably had a look at the public finances, and at the rubbish plans for Liverpool’s trams network and decided that not backing the plans was probably a good idea on Alistair Darling’s part.
I’ve received some more pictures from Dave Evans of the Liverpool crane collapse at Chandler’s Wharf, which give a better impression of the extent of the damage.
The extent of the damage is more obvious from these pictures. Makes it seem even more extraordinary no-one was killed.
After the success of last year’s Go Superlambananas, which saw loads of superlambananas springing up around the city, this year will feature Go Penguins, which will feature lots of, er, penguins springing up around the city.
No, I’m a big fan of not fixing things that ain’t broke, but this strikes me as a little unimaginative.
However, it also opens up some intriguing possibilities for events around the city in the future.
This extraordinary image comes from Sparkle Media and shows a crane collapsed across a building near the Albert Dock in Liverpool.
This is by my reckoning the third crane collapse in Liverpool in recent years. There are reports that the driver is injured but alive and there are people trapped in the building. Here’s hoping everyone gets out unscathed.
Liverpool’s citizen journalists are providing superb coverage of the event, which you can follow here.
