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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Mike FC
Mike FC – Poetry forged where personal space meets public crisis. Liverpool has a habit of producing artists who don’t just create, but bear witness. Mike FC is firmly in that lineage. His work—whether spoken, staged or sung—always feels tethered to the streets he walks and the people he listens to. With MY FRONT DOOR, his contribution to the 52 for 26 Poetry Project, Mike turns that instinctive sense of social radar onto a night that left an…
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Theatre in Liverpool
In Conversation: Elizabeth Huskisson
Rage, Reckoning, and BSL: Huskinson Refuses Your Complacency. On 13 March, Unity Theatre hosts a one-night-only performance that refuses to let its audience sit back in passive comfort. Where Have All Our Women Gone? is written and performed by Elizabeth Huskisson, and it arrives with a clear intention: to disrupt, to confront and to demand something of the people in the room. This is not theatre as escapism. Huskisson’s solo show tackles male violence against women and girls,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Stephanie Trujillo
Finding Belonging Beyond Blood: How Stephanie Trujillo’s “Apples and Oranges” Celebrates the Families We Choose and the Connections That Heal. Stephanie Trujillo’s poem Apples and Oranges is a quietly powerful meditation on family — not the kind you’re born into, but the kind you choose. It’s about belonging, about building a support network when your blood family isn’t safe, supportive, or present. For anyone who has felt estranged, overlooked, or out of step with inherited expectations, the poem offers recognition…
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Theatre in Liverpool
Review: Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes at Liverpool Empire
A Stage Lit by Obsession, Beauty and Brilliance. There’s a particular electricity when Matthew Bourne arrives at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. Not polite anticipation. Expectation. Bourne doesn’t do decorative ballet; he does storytelling with teeth. And The Red Shoes remains one of his most psychologically loaded works. Inspired by the 1948 Powell and Pressburger classic, Bourne strips away any lingering romantic haze and gets to the bruise beneath the beauty. This isn’t a fairy tale about artistic destiny. It’s about…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Hope Savage
Love, Waiting, and New Beginnings: Hope Savage’s Intimate Celebration of Adoption. Hope Savage’s poem Introductions (1) is a quiet, heart-stopping glimpse into the first meeting between her and her daughter before she came to live with them. It’s the kind of moment that lingers long after it passes — full of anticipation, tenderness, and the strange, electric weight of new beginnings. Savage writes with a clarity that feels immediate and unpolished, but that’s the point. Her poetry doesn’t need heavy…
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Arts and Culture
The Access Manifesto: Turning Inclusion Into Action In The Arts
The Access Manifesto – From Lived Experience to Sector-Wide Action Change in the arts rarely arrives by accident. It comes from lived experience, from frustration, from conversations that refuse to be ignored — and from people prepared to turn those conversations into action. For Maisy Gordon, The Access Manifesto began with precisely that urgency. “As a disabled person myself, I have first-hand experience of the barriers disabled people face within the arts,” she says. But…
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Music
Neil Campbell Unites Six Years of Work on New Double Album ‘Diagonals’
Acoustic form, visual thinking and collaborative continuity shape a new double album release from Liverpool’s world-class guitarist. Neil Campbell’s Diagonals: An Anthology (2020–2026) arrives as a quietly assured statement of intent — a double album that resists the pull of immediacy in favour of patience, form and long-view listening. Released Friday 6 March 2026, Diagonals gathers together four short-form releases issued between 2020 and 2026 and presents them, for the first time, as a unified…
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Theatre in Liverpool
Preview: Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes at Liverpool Empire
Matthew Bourne’s Dark Fairytale of Obsession, Sacrifice and the Dangerous Allure of Applause. Few contemporary choreographers have reshaped the landscape of British dance theatre quite like Matthew Bourne. Over the past three decades, he has taken familiar stories and turned them inside out, revealing their darker undercurrents while making them thrillingly accessible to modern audiences. Among his most striking achievements is The Red Shoes, a production that returns to the Liverpool Empire stage as part of a major UK tour from…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Paul Pike
Paul Pike finds the everyday magic in the lost objects and the poetry of Merseyside streets. In the swirl of everyday London—or Merseyside, or perhaps somewhere between wherever poetry lives—Paul Pyke finds wonder. His submitted poem Dance Battle came to life not from grand inspiration, but from something as small and concrete as an abandoned bangle beside a pigeon flock. That quiet moment, waiting for trains and sausage rolls, sparked a poem about collision, imagination, and possibility. As Pyke…
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Music
Preview: Liverpool International Jazz Festival 2026
Liverpool International Jazz festival – Crossing borders with Jazz without boundaries. Liverpool’s relationship with jazz runs deep. Long before the Merseybeat explosion, the city was one of the first UK ports to welcome the sound of early jazz across the Atlantic. In 2026, that spirit of musical exchange returns in full force as the Liverpool International Jazz Festival (LIJF) takes over the Capstone Theatre and venues across the city from Friday 26 February to Sunday 1 March. Established in…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Naive John
From pixels to paint — Naive John builds images that resist meaning and reward patience. On the edge of Liverpool’s Toxteth district, amid terraced streets and the low hum of passing traffic, there’s a studio that feels less like an artist’s room and more like a laboratory. The light is subdued. Brushes are laid out with care. A monitor glows quietly in the corner. At the centre of it all stands Naive John — painter,…
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Arts and Culture
Beyond the Screen: Bruno Castro on Emotion, Discussion and Independent Documentary Film In Liverpool
Liverpool is a city alive with music, theatre, and grassroots storytelling — yet independent cinema, especially documentary, remains under-served. Beyond multiplexes and occasional screenings, there is no permanent, publicly minded space for non commercial film exhibition and discussion. Liverpool Doc Club steps into that gap, not as a conventional venue, but as a curatorial project and a community in formation. Founded by a curator with experience from Lisbon to UK festivals and cineclubs – Bruno…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Matthew Jacobson
Life, Light, and Humanity in a Single Train Ride Matthew Jacobson has always been a writer who sees what others miss. Whether he’s walking the length of County Road or digging into the myth and music of the city, he writes with an instinctive feel for people — their rhythms, their stories, their quiet heroism. In 55 Minutes, his acutely observational poem, that same instinct is directed toward a moving stage: a Northern train carriage, packed with the…
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Arts and Culture
Preview: Brendan Lyons – Discreet Discrete Exhibition At Bridewell Studios
Where paint deceives and asserts itself, Brendan Lyons makes the familiar feel unexpectedly alive… At first glance, Brendan Lyons’ work appears to flirt with the familiar. Tape, plastic, folds, fixings — the everyday language of the studio and the street. But linger for a moment longer and that certainty begins to slip. What looks like one thing quietly reveals itself as another. Paint becomes object, surface becomes substance, and perception is gently but persistently unsettled.…
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Arts and Culture
In Conversation – Elinor Randle
Past, politics, people — Unity carries them all into a future that’s safe and fiercely of it’s own making. There are buildings in Liverpool that don’t just hold memories, they argue back. Unity Theatre is one of them. Tucked just off Hope Street, it’s a space that has always felt slightly out of step with the city’s grander cultural institutions — and proudly so. Born out of the Merseyside Left Theatre in the 1930s, Unity’s roots…
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Arts and Culture
Sober Scribbles: Creating A Space for New Writing at Unity Theatre
How Sober Scribbles Is Reimagining Community, Care and Creativity at the Unity… On Wednesday 21 January, Unity Theatre hosts Sober Scribbles, a scratch night offering something quietly radical in a city where theatre bars and post-show drinks are often taken for granted: a deliberately alcohol-free space for writers, performers and audiences to come together around new work. At its heart, Sober Scribbles is about community. “It’s a space for anyone interested in writing in an…
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Theatre in Liverpool
Preview: Kittel Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich
Kittel – Doktor Faustus of The Third Reich : Guilt, Regret and the Theatre of Moral Collapse… Gerhard Kittel is not an easy man to spend an evening with. He isn’t meant to be. Kittel: Dr Faustus of the Third Reich, playing a tightly focused two-night run, is the kind of theatre that leans into unease rather than smoothing it over. It asks its audience to stay in the room with contradiction, to resist the temptation of moral shortcuts,…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Rowena Gander
Rewriting the Rules: How Rowena Gander Turns the Pole into Power, Memory, and Queer Visibility Gander is quietly rewriting what it means to be a queer performer in Liverpool. And she’s doing it from a pole. Not the kind you see in glossy magazines or nightclub corners, but a pole that doubles as memory, as protest, as stage partner, and as research object. Liverpool’s arts scene has always had its heavyweights, but few artists here…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26: A Year of Poetic Noise Across Merseyside
In January 2026, Liverpool Noise will begin something that looks modest on paper and feels anything but once you scratch the surface. The 52 for 26 Poetry Project will publish one poet a week, every week, for the whole of the year. No grand launch. No competitive framework. Just poems arriving steadily across twelve months — accumulating, conversing, disagreeing, and gradually forming a picture of where Merseyside poetry is as of 2026… From the outset,…
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Liverpool News
The Reader Launches Reading Heroes Christmas Appeal 2025
In the space between reader and child, a future starts to take shape… In a city that knows the power of voices being passed down, shared and amplified, it feels only right that one of the UK’s most quietly radical literacy projects is rooted in Liverpool. The Reader’s Reading Heroes project – launched in 2016 – doesn’t shout. It doesn’t dazzle with tech or gamification. Instead, it does something far more subversive in 2025: it…
