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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Nicola Hardman
Nicola Hardman – Power, Performance and the Cost of Staying Quiet Nicola Hardman’s These Pandas Want You to Die arrives like a pressure valve finally giving way. Furious, funny, confrontational and painfully recognisable, the poem channels the exhaustion of existing within systems that continually demand more whilst offering less in return. Written originally as a journal entry, the piece grows out of Hardman’s frustrations around the misuse of power — particularly within the creative industries, where conversations around fairness, opportunity…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Kenneth Hesketh
Where Sound Becomes Structure — Kenneth Hesketh on architecture, atmosphere and the strange emotional power of composition. For Kenneth Hesketh, music was never simply something he did — it was an environment he inhabited. Born in Liverpool in 1968, his earliest formative experiences came as a chorister at Liverpool Cathedral, where sound itself became something physical, architectural and psychologically charged. Reflecting on those years, Hesketh says becoming a chorister at nine placed him inside “an…
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Arts and Culture
Art in the Ev Continues with Julie Lawrence’s Walking Through Seasons
Where shadow and light fold together, and return reshapes what is seen. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, visual art has become part of the building’s everyday rhythm rather than a separate event—and that’s largely down to its ongoing partnership with dot-art. Their collaboration continues to open up the theatre’s spaces to a rolling programme of contemporary artists, inviting audiences to encounter new work in passing as much as by intention. It’s within this quietly evolving setting that Julie Lawrence’s latest…
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Arts and Culture
Exhibition Preview: The Diamond — Brian O’Hanlon’s Powerful Portrait of Working-Class Nightlife
The Diamond – Holding On to Something Real in a Fading Nightlife Culture. Brian O’Hanlon is a Liverpool-based photographer whose work bridges documentary storytelling and commercial image-making. Originally trained in graphic design and art direction, he spent over two decades in the creative industries before returning to photography, a shift that continues to shape his distinctive visual style. His work focuses on people, place and identity, often exploring working-class culture and contemporary British life with both sensitivity and structure.…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Rebbeca Riley
Rebecca Riley – A candid exploration of crisis, recovery and creative return. Rebecca Riley describes herself first and foremost as a performance poet, shaped by early training in dance and drama and by a creative instinct that favours collaboration. She has worked alongside musicians in recent years, developing a style in which language and rhythm are inseparable, each shaping the emotional weight of the other. Away from performance, her focus turns inward: long walks in…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Joseph Barrow
Joseph Barrow – From soil to stanza, a life lived in earth and words. Joseph Barrow has carved out a quiet but distinctive presence in Liverpool’s poetry landscape. A long-time gardener with two decades of experience running his own small business, Barrow brings an eye for detail and a naturalist’s patience to his writing. Much of his work leans toward autobiography—glimpses of lived experience shaped by the cycles of nature, the rhythm of work, and the reflective spaces in…
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Art Exhibitions in Liverpool
Preview: Being There At Bridewell Studios & Gallery
Process over polish, lines still in motion… At Bridewell Studios and Gallery this May, the line between studio and exhibition space is being deliberately blurred. Being There – Conversations in Drawing isn’t a show in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a three-week residency that invites the public into the process itself—into the uncertainty, repetition and quiet decisions that sit behind finished work. Featuring Colette Lilley, Jon Barraclough and Sarah Jane Richards, the gallery will operate as an open, working studio,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Dr Pauline Rowe
Dr Pauline Rowe – When Canada geese and a night sky offer quiet reassurance. Some poems arrive quietly, slipping into the room almost unnoticed, until their stillness makes you stop. That is very much the case with the new piece from Dr Pauline Rowe for this year’s 52 for 26 Poetry Project. Rooted in a single moment of exhausted reflection and unexpected grace, the poem grew from an evening when one of her sons was struggling. Standing in the…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Ian Martin
Ian Martin – A poet reflects on the city’s split allegiances and shared passion. Football in Liverpool has a habit of shaping more than matchdays. It settles into families, histories, and the small rituals that last far longer than any 90 minutes. Ian Martin’s contribution to the 52 for 26 Poetry Project explores exactly that: the split loyalties, the banter, and the unspoken understanding that comes from being a family divided between red and blue. Martin writes from a…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Alia Boquash
Alia Boquash – A poet shaped by heritage, community, and Liverpool’s creative undercurrents. Alia Boquash – known to many as Alia Breeze – writes with an instinct that comes straight from lived experience. Her work is shaped by realism, by the grit of south Liverpool streets, and by emotions that don’t soften themselves before arriving on the page. She describes herself as “emotionally charged, heartfelt, and slightly hard faced,” and her poetry carries that same unfiltered energy. For Alia,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Dan Cullinan
Dan Cullinan – A reflective piece from a poet who finds calm in stillness. Dan Cullinan is a poet quietly working his way through Liverpool’s spoken-word and grassroots poetry scene. Since beginning to write seriously in 2017, Cullinan has published two collections, The Vietnam Collection and Accidentally Poetic. Beyond writing, he’s the founder and curator of the open-mic series Give Poetry A Chance, a regular fixture offering free-to-attend nights that bring together seasoned and emerging voices in poetry. With this…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Aaron Murdoch
Aaron Murdoch – a conceptual duel between typewriter and sound. Aaron Murdoch has spent three decades reading and writing material across open floors, cultivating a practice that is both iterative and restless. For Murdoch, repetition is not stagnation; every new piece is an evolving process, a reason to leave the house rather than simply retrace familiar paths. His work has appeared in underground anthologies and publications including antivirus productions’ Lastbench series, Twenty From Ten (2012), and The First Page of…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Eleanor Rees
Eleanor Rees: Where Place Becomes Voice For Eleanor Rees, poetry has never been a performance of the self. It is something quieter, more porous — a practice of attention rooted in landscape, language and the subtle negotiations between the human and the more-than-human. Across more than two decades of work, the Birkenhead-born poet has traced rivers, parks, mythic figures and post-industrial terrains, building a body of writing that listens as much as it speaks. Rees’s…
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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…
