If you are someone who likes to walk a city and experience the topography of the townscape, Liverpool offers many options for you to get the best out of an urban hike. a relaxing introduction would be Sefton Park a perfect way to spend a few hours relaxed walking, a large area in the southern suburbs of the city it has numerous paths that twist in and around its many splendours from, ‘Old Nick’s caves’ to the beautiful Fairy Glen and Aviary viewing point it has ornamental lakes, the Shaftsbury Memorial, Eros Fountain and Peter Pan statue, there is also a Victorian era bandstand, that some say is the inspiration for the song Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Aviary Cafe serves refreshments to have in or take away and enjoy whilst resting on the acres of lawn.
The wrought-iron Palm House is home to many exotic fronds and ferns and hosts an impressive variety of events and concerts throughout the year that can be enjoyed with food and drink within its unique setting.
Everton brow, with its lofty vantage point just to the north of the city centre has arguably the best view in the city. From here, you are rewarded a Birdseye panoramic of the Mersey, as it glints from between the spires of old and skyscrapers of the present. If blessed with a truly clear day the Wirral and north Wales create a stunning horizon.
Walking down the many steep steps of Everton Brow, always preferable to walking up them, affords you the wonderful feeling of the city’s Victorian buildings of Shaw Street pulling you towards Liverpool’s historic architectural wonders that lie within the city centre.
By now you could well be in the grip of what is known as the “moment” a place that urban walkers call the essence and the essential weirdness you encounter as great termite hordes of people, scurry this way and that as you walk with a sense of total freedom, how do these people function? Where are they going? Once in the moment, each dank, even derelict Victorian terrace can seem a numinous experience.
A short walk from Shaw street leads to London Road, St. Andrews Gardens, across Brownlow Hill around the Metropolitan Cathedral and science park and into the bohemian treasures of Hope Street, with its Everyman theatre, Philharmonic Pub, Concert Hall, Blackburn House and numerous restaurants and cobbled streets with beautiful Georgian town houses will bring you eventually to the rewards of St James Gardens, Liverpool’s own Père Lachaise, with its magnificent Anglican cathedral towering above seemingly teetering on a cliff face.
once a cemetery for the city’s great and good, a walk down its stone path which is lined with recycled grave stones as it descends through a short tunnel, brings you to the garden, a place of many fascinating features including the Huskinsson memorial, Liverpool’s last natural spring and system of broad ramps that are lined with catacombs. This sunken garden offers a genuinely peaceful, some would say spiritual escape from the rattle and hum of the city above.
The only way to round off your time spent in the garden is to take a genteel 15 minute walk to Peter Kavanagh’s Pub, Egerton street, with its the ornate wooden carvings, tiling and fireplaces, the Eric Robertson murals on the walls in the back and front rooms and numerous curio bric a brac dangling from its ceilings and walls, finished off with stained glass and leaded windows, you will never put your feet up in a finer pub.
