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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…
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Arts and Culture
Adrian Dunbar on Beckett, Liverpool and the Power of Feeling
Samuel Beckett has been part of Adrian Dunbar’s creative life for more than four decades. His first encounter came in 1981, when, as a student at the Guildhall School, he saw Waiting for Godot and became fascinated by a writer who was already something of a legend: an Enniskillen schoolboy who had gone on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and create work that seemed to resist easy understanding. That fascination has endured, and…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Don Brookes
Don Brookes : A Lifetime of Observing Nature, Language, and the Quiet Comedy Between Them In Talk To The Animals, Don Brookes invites us into a gently comic, quietly reflective world where the familiar sayings we attach to creatures great and small are turned over, examined, and playfully unsettled. The poem has travelled a long road to reach its final form—one that began back in the 1990s, when Brookes was working as a Laboratory Technician. A…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Moon
The Power of Performance – why Moon’s poetry truly comes alive when spoken aloud. Project 52 For 26 has always been about voices – singular, striking, often surprising – and this week’s featured poet, Moon, brings all three in abundance. Their chosen piece arrives as an excerpt from a much larger meditation on gender, though it has long since taken on a life of its own. What began as a section within a broader work…
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Arts and Culture
Afloat Theatre: New Songs, New Voices and a New Chapter
Afloat Theatre has been keeping things relatively quiet of late – but, as anyone involved in the organisation will tell you, quiet does not necessarily mean still. Behind the scenes, Afloat has been busy preparing for what feels like a new chapter, one that expands its already distinctive approach to community, creativity and social change into the world of songwriting and music. Now a Community Interest Company, Afloat has unveiled a programme of forthcoming events…
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Theatre in Liverpool
Unity Theatre Announces a Bold Autumn/Winter Season for 2026
Following a summer spent celebrating 100 years of radical theatre in Liverpool, Unity Theatre is looking ahead with an Autumn/Winter 2026 season that feels every bit as ambitious. The Hope Place venue has long occupied a distinctive place in Liverpool’s cultural landscape, combining its reputation as one of the city’s most welcoming theatre spaces with a willingness to take risks, platform underrepresented voices and give emerging artists the same stage as nationally acclaimed touring companies.…
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Theatre in Liverpool
The Archers Come to Liverpool: 75 Years of Ambridge Takes to the Stage
For three generations of listeners, the familiar strains of Barwick Green have been an invitation into another world. A world of village fêtes, family feuds, affairs, farming crises, pub gossip and the endlessly complicated lives of the people of Ambridge. Now, as The Archers celebrates its remarkable 75th anniversary, that world is leaving the radio studio and heading for the stage. On Monday 28 September, The Archers: Live at 75 comes to Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, promising a one-off theatrical…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Chloe Jones
Chloe Jones : Finding Freedom in the Limits of Creativity Creativity often reveals its sharpest edge when it’s hemmed in—when ideas are shaped not by limitless freedom but by the curious discipline of constraint. For Moreton-born writer Chloe Jones, that edge appeared in the form of a playful but demanding exercise at the Spider Project: a list of unrelated words, each contributed by someone in her writing group – Owl. Electricity. Death. Light. Recovery. Cake. Stand. Time. Unicorn.…
