The world's first train stations are surrounded by, or are themselves, works of art. Walk a city centre station loop for public art, grand architecture, and history.

The train stations dotted in a loop around Liverpool's compact city centre are testaments to Victorian age architecture, or are venues for Liverpool's modern art scene. Touring them and the art, architecture, cafes, and history surrounding them is a good way to learn about Liverpool, its past, present, and future.

First, make your way to Liverpool's tourist office, set obscurely off of Williamson Square, for a map.

Recommended Reading

Pevsner's Guide to Liverpool Architecture by the brilliant Liverpool University history professor, Joseph Sharples, details the history and architecture of many of the buildings you'll be passing on this walk. An instructive, fresh, often witty read, its precision is useful when standing in the street gawping at busts of Industry and Commerce set into Greco-Roman facades, and pleasant when curled up in a cafe planning your next sally.

Begin your walk at:

Lime Street Train Station - a fine example of Victorian "Train Station As Cathedral". Its double glass roof (the first built in 1856, the second added in 1880) is arched; its delicate columns, ornamented with Lancashire roses are lacy, the massive stone blocks used in the cut are impressive. Photography is allowed. St. George's Hall was situated just outside the station's front doors to impress the newly arrived with the city's wealth, taste, and power.

A Working Station

An historic gem, but also a working station, run by National Rail. It is airy, has a battery of bank machines, a drug store, Marks and Spencer shop, and a helpful information kiosk. It also has accessible ticket machines and counters, ramps for train access, National Key toilets, and some step-free access (although it's up a hill).

Edge Hill

Liverpool's first train station on Crown Street. Set in what was, in 1830, the pastures above the city, the neighborhood is now a little insalubrious, but the original station and massive stone workings are industrial architecture, sociology, and archaeology at their best. Evidence of a once-thriving station-stoked neighborhood surround the old station, like the Station Pub on Pighue Lane. Here bartender Jimmy Charters got his start before setting off to serve absinthe and lend a sympathetic ear to the 1920s Paris literary set including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Modigliani, Stein, and Wilde. Edge Hill is a little rough around those edges - now mosting industrial parks and a Hollywood Bowl - but its history can be seen poking up through the parking lots and litter.

Moorfields - Step out of Moorfields train station and join everyone else looking up. Across the street is the public art of Richard Wilson called 'Turning the Place Over', a feat of artistic engineering in which the artist, having sawn a two-story disc out of a derelict wine house, makes it rotate and wobble on hydraulic arms. Watching the pedestrians appreciate the display is part of the spectacle. The happy "Surprise!" giggly feel of the instalation, the group experience, and the clever re-use of common materials - in this case the derelict wine house - sum up Liverpool brilliantly.

Turn left to the Town Hall and Castle Street, where the original 13th century castle did once stand. Castle is now a canyon lined at every step with extraordinary architecture of Liverpool-heyday counting houses and merchant banks now restaurants and cafes. From the Starbuck's on the corner the view is of the portico'd, oldest part of the Town Hall and its clock. Further down Castle, the Nero cafe is housed in a turreted, terra-cotta 19th cenury bank -gaudy as a harlot. Follow Castle to Lord. Turn left on Lord Street the newly paved and poliished pedestrian shopping precinct with superb accoustics for trumpet and electric guitar buskers

Central Station and the Luftwaffe

Stroll up Lord Street to the youthful, hip Rope Walks district past John Lewis and Debenham's in their handsome buildings. This part of the city, always a market, was bombed to oblivion in the spring of 1941 during Luftwaffe air raids that wrecked the docks and killed nearly 3000 people in Liverpool, hundreds in Birkenhead and Bootle. The city is only really recovering now, sixty years later. St. John's Shopping Centre hunched and seedy as a troll replaced the airy Victorian market here. The 1970s grim Central Station underground with one entrance on Bold and one on Lord houses a Sainsbury's grocery store and shops in its dim, vaguely grimy, claustrophobic foyer.

Bold Street's Newly Hip 'Rope Walks' Fashion District

Lord Street becomes Bold Street and The Rope Walks district lined with clothes shops and cafes. The cafe on the second floor of Waterstone's book store gives a close-up and stunning view of the columns and acanthus-y capitals of the Lyceum, now a bistro, across narrow Bold Street beside the Central Station entrance. Head up Bold to "News from Nowhere" book shop offering off-the-beaten-path literature, poetry, and incense. At the head of Bold are the beautiful bones of the bombed out St. Luke's church - now a lunch-time music venue.

In the middle of Bold, turn left on little Newington Street, which crosses over Liverpool's original railway cutting - hacked out of solid rock in the late 1820s still carrying Central Station trains. Massive stone blocks wall the street. Just beyond, on the right is a cafe on the second floor for a snack, art by local artists, and a view of original train line from above to end your day.

Liverpool History by Train

An innate, loopy creativity, a lot of money, and a desire to make even more, made Liverpool a crucuible of invention. The steam train, hurtling people, and more importantly, goods like cotton and coal, along at a mind-blowing 30 miles an hour changed not just England, shortening travel time to London from days to hours, but the world. Liverpool's train stations and the art that surround them are testaments to that loopy creativity and marketing hutzpah even now.