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Arts and Culture
Brendan Lyons Brings Reel to Real to Birkenhead’s Hamilton Vault
Paint escapes the canvas as Brendan Lyons plays with perception, material and the architecture of an extraordinary space. A former bank vault beneath Hamilton Square in Birkenhead seems an appropriately strange place to encounter the work of Brendan Lyons. Concrete walls, concrete floors and the lingering suggestion of what the space once contained provide considerably more than a backdrop for Reel to Real, his new solo exhibition in Birkenhead. For an artist who has spent much of his practice asking…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: Prof. Seán Street
Seán Street: Eighty Years of Curiosity and the Art of Paying Attention… A four-year-old boy stands in a garden in Wittering, Sussex, as the summer light begins to fade. Beyond the garden is woodland and, from somewhere among the trees, comes a scream. Perhaps a fox, perhaps an owl killing some smaller creature; whatever made it, the boy doesn’t know. What matters is that he hears it, wonders about it, and remembers. More than seven…
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Arts and Culture
52 Ways of Seeing: Liverpool Noise Launches Art 52 for 27
One year, 52 artists and 52 different ways of looking at the world. A year is a surprisingly useful unit of measurement. Long enough for something to develop its own character, short enough to retain a sense of momentum and, conveniently, made up of 52 weeks. Throughout 2026, Liverpool Noise used those weeks to publish 52 poems by 52 poets. 52 for 26 began with a very simple idea: each week we would give one poet a little space…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Patrick Long
A Moment of Calm in the Midst of Chaos: Poetry from Recovery Patrick Long’s poem for Project 52 for 26 is a quiet, unflinching snapshot of a moment both ordinary and extraordinary. Penned a few months into recovery, it captures the fragile space between fear and relief, between anxiety and an almost accidental serenity. It’s Liverpool, but not in the usual landmarks of heritage or nightlife. This is Liverpool ONE, outside the changing rooms of…
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Theatre in Liverpool
Preview: Valley Theatre’s A Moveable Feast Comes To The Hope Street Theatre
Valley Theatre brings a year of performance, local writing and a little Dario Fo inspired irreverence to Hope Street. Community theatre has always occupied an important place within Liverpool’s creative landscape, not least because it offers something that larger productions cannot always replicate: the opportunity for people to discover performance by actually doing it, working together and eventually taking that work in front of an audience. For Valley Theatre, based in Belle Vale and Netherley,…
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Music
Preview: Grace Elizabeth Harvey Brings Songs Of Devotion to Rough Trade Liverpool
Grace Elizabeth Harvey brings intimacy, imperfection and Songs Of Devotion to Rough Trade Liverpool. Grace Elizabeth Harvey’s relationship with Liverpool seems to have deepened at much the same time as her songwriting has begun looking more closely at another kind of relationship: the difficult, imperfect business of trying to connect with other people. On 15 October, those two strands come together when the Wirral-born singer-songwriter plays her headline show to date at Rough Trade Liverpool,…
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Arts and Culture
Mandela8: Journey to South Africa – Liverpool’s Young Filmmakers Follow in Mandela’s Footsteps
More than 6,000 miles separate Liverpool from Cape Town, but for a group of young filmmakers from Liverpool 8, a journey to South Africa offered something considerably more meaningful than distance: the opportunity to encounter the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela in the country where that extraordinary story unfolded, and to discover what it might mean to a generation born into a very different world. Their experiences have become Mandela8: Journey to South Africa, a documentary screening at…
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Arts and Culture
Joe Campbell On Culture City, Creative Relationships and Why Good People Remain At The Heart of Everything
There was a point in Joe Campbell’s life when the future of Culture City had to compete with the considerably more immediate demands of stacking shelves in Morrisons. University occupied the daytime, supermarket shifts took care of the evenings, and whatever remained belonged to the increasingly consuming business of filming bands, interviewing artists and discovering, largely by doing it, how to make the kind of work he wanted to make. Then The Anfield Wrap came…
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Arts and Culture
Comedian Alex Tighe On Anxiety, Second Chances And The Strange Magic of Making Strangers Laugh
Long before Alex Tighe thought seriously about becoming a comedian, he discovered what it felt like to make a room laugh entirely by accident. He was around 14, sitting in a Spanish lesson, a painfully shy teenager who reckons half the class had probably never heard him speak. Somewhere next door came the sudden crash of a table. Before he had time to stop himself, Tighe announced: “Sounds like Miss next door has fallen over…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Charlie Lambert
A Day to Live, a Day to Die: Poetry as a Countdown on Climate Charlie Lambert’s contributing poem for Project 52 arrives with the kind of quiet force that catches you off guard. It begins not with catastrophe, but with a question many of us have pushed to the edges of our minds: what happens when the countdown on climate change is no longer theoretical? Lambert is struck by how calmly we talk about rising temperatures, melting ice,…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Toni Burns
Toni Burns – Stars, Self-Worth, and the Space We All Deserve to Shine In In There Might Be Others (and still, I’m here), Toni Burns traces a quietly luminous line between the cosmic and the personal. The spark arrives in an unlikely moment: a priest at Liverpool Cathedral wondering aloud about life beyond Earth, and whether the presence of “others”—whoever they may be—would diminish the goodness of God. His answer is a gentle, resonant no.…
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Arts and Culture
Becky Beasley’s A Gentle Man (Part II) Comes To The Bluecoat
An exhibition that begins beneath your feet and eventually arrives at the subject of dying is clearly asking rather more of its audience than simply to look… Opening at Bluecoat this September, Becky Beasley’s A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975– 2029) brings together photography, sculpture, ceramics, furniture and moving image within an installation that transforms the gallery into what Bluecoat describes as a “contemplative and immersive landscape”. It is an ambitious proposition, concerned not only with the…
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Arts and Culture
Liverpool Independent Art School At 10: This Is What Art School Was Supposed To Be Like
There is a story about Liverpool Independent Art School (LIAS) that probably tells you more about its philosophy than any mission statement ever could. It involves two artists, a load of drawing equipment, Sefton Park and lots and lots of rain… Founders Paul Gatenby and his colleague Tony O’Connell had been teaching at what was then the Community College for almost twenty years when they began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the direction education was…
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Arts and Culture
Poetry on the Fringe: Give Poetry A Chance Returns to The Ship & Mitre
Give Poetry A Chance (GPAC) began, by Dan Cullinan’s own admission, without any grand plan to become a Liverpool poetry institution. He started writing poems as thoughts in the notes section of his phone and had never intended to become a poet, let alone an event organiser. Yet since 2019, Give Poetry A Chance has developed into a regular platform for Liverpool’s poetry community, bringing together established voices, emerging writers and audiences in an environment that feels deliberately different…
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Theatre in Liverpool
English National Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet Comes to Liverpool Empire This October
Nearly 50 years on, Nureyev’s Romeo & Juliet still knows exactly where it hurts. Some stories survive because they are good. Others survive because they refuse to stop hurting. Nearly 50 years after Rudolf Nureyev created his Romeo & Juliet, English National Ballet brings the production to Liverpool Empire for three days this October, opening a national tour that will ultimately culminate at the London Coliseum, where it premiered in 1977. Shakespeare’s tale of forbidden…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project – Paul Reid
Speaking out when silence feels safer… Paul Reid’s route into writing has taken in school classrooms, punk rock stages, spoken word performances and creative writing groups across Liverpool. Throughout those different chapters, one thing has remained constant: a desire to connect with people, whether through humour, observation or reflections on the world around him. Writing has remained a constant presence since childhood, when he enjoyed reading his stories aloud in class. In his younger years,…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Michelle Wright
Michelle Wright – After Eden: A Poetic Journey Into What Remains When Paradise Falls Silent In The Caretaker, Michelle Wright turns her gaze toward one of the oldest stories we inherit: the Fall, the moment when Eden’s perfection collapses and humanity is cast into a world forever changed. But rather than retell the familiar account of Eve, desire, and punishment, Wright positions her poem in the uncanny stillness after the exile. Eden remains, but its…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: Caroline Gorick
Caroline Gorick – Holding onto the moment… Caroline Gorick has been painting for as long as she can remember. There is no neat moment of discovery in her story, no sudden realisation that art might become a career, because painting was never really something she decided to do. It was simply there, embedded in her life from childhood onwards, becoming more serious and more demanding as the years passed. “I haven’t stopped painting since I…
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Music
Sumud: A Night of Solidarity and Song Comes to Liverpool
There are plenty of gigs coming to Liverpool this September, but few arrive with quite the sense of purpose surrounding Sumud, a special fundraising concert at The Dome at Grand Central on Friday 11 September, organised by Amos Trust in support of its Gaza Appeal. Bringing together an unusually strong line-up of established names, Palestinian voices and emerging talent, the evening promises music, solidarity and, importantly, a direct contribution towards humanitarian relief. Amos Trust describes itself as a creative…
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Arts and Culture
Beckett in the City: Liverpool Welcomes the Return of an International Festival
For many people, the name Samuel Beckett immediately conjures images of two men waiting beneath a lonely tree, hoping against hope that someone called Godot might eventually arrive. Others picture stark stages, long silences and plays that carry a reputation—often unfairly—for being difficult, enigmatic or intimidating. This September, however, Liverpool invites audiences to look at Beckett rather differently. Returning for its third edition, Beckett: Lieben is far more than a celebration of one of the…
