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When I disembarked at Blundellsands & Crosby, there was a girl ahead of me. She was about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a loose thin shirt over a crop top and tiny white shorts. In the crook of her right arm was a cooler. She peered into the window of the waiting room and then, when she couldn't see whoever she was meeting, she pulled out her phone and began hastily tapping.
I guessed that she was on study leave from her A-levels and was using the opportunity to go to the beach with her mates. I didn't blame her. It was an incredibly beautiful day. The blue sky seemed to reach up and over us, a huge dome of bright.
Blundellsands Road West, the route to the beach, is a parade of elegant Victorian mansions and classy villas set behind long gardens. Some of them have been converted to flats, but a lot haven't; large cars with personalised number plates park on block paved driveways. In between them are prep schools and junior schools and kindergartens. It meant that I heard, in the mid morning air, nothing but the joyous sound of children playing.
The road ended in a merger between land and nature, a no man's land where the grass and the sand butted right up against the tarmac. There was a sign indicating where the nearest toilets were in both directions, and then, a little way behind it, a memorial bench for someone I never met but none the less mourned.
Seb Patrick was a writer and podcaster who grew up on Merseyside, moved down to London for work, then returned in his thirties with his wife and daughter so that he could give them a better standard of living. I knew him through his podcast, Cinematic Universe, and we followed each other on Twitter. It was a social media relationship, where we would interact, swap jokes, but didn't actually know anything about one another. I found him funny and interesting and the updates on his readjustment to living in Liverpool were charming.
Seb died suddenly in 2020. He was 37. All deaths are tragic, of course, but there was a real loss to this one. He was too young, had too many responsibilities, had too much going on in his life.
Social media is a strange phenomenon. Every day I get small moments from people's lives sent to my phone. Every day I quietly build up a picture of a person, a figure behind an avatar, a real human being with a cat and a house and a job. I don't know them. In many cases I don't even know their real name. But I've been getting these little nuggets of their existence in my world for years now. I've never met them but they are in some ways more real to me than actual relatives. I have cousins I've not seen for thirty years and have no idea what they're doing now, while there are people I've never met at the other end of the country where I could probably write their autobiography for them.
Are these people friends? No, not really. But they do become a valuable marker in your life. Humans are social animals and that social interaction can come from a million different ways. It's why I get annoyed when people talk about the "importance" of social media, of Twitter and Bluesky as agents of change and political forces. Yes that happens, but also, some people are watching a television programme and laughing and want to share it. That's properly important to me.
The path rose up, slowly, over a ridge of dunes, as though it's holding off the view until the very last moment. Then you see the long expanse of wide sandy beach and rolling tides and in amongst them, the Iron Men.
Another Place by Anthony Gormley is 100 iron men, based on his own body, and scattered across the beach staring out to sea. The tide washes over them, deposits barnacles and sand on them, and they remain impassive throughout. It was originally a travelling artwork, with Crosby Beach the third place to host it, but Merseyside fell in love with it. After a good deal of campaigning - and despite resistance from the council - it became a permanent part of the landscape in 2007.
It still unnerves you, to see them staring out to sea, but there's also something hopeful and pleasing about them. Certainly the beach users that day were enjoying playing around them. Small children ran up and stared at them while dogs danced around them. It's a massive draw for the area and really, the best kind of public art; wanted, loved, cherished.
I followed the promenade south, taking in the view. Crosby Beach has a strange mix of idyll and practicality. The sands are long and glowing, but behind them are wind turbines, and oil tankers, and the red cranes of the Liverpool docks are constantly in sight. It's a holiday but there's a reminder of work at all times. It's probably done them a favour. Anywhere else in the country and this stretch of uninterrupted sands would be a major destination. Instead it's a secret Scousers keep to themselves.
Sand had swamped the path at some points, a bone of contention between the locals and the council. They argue that the sand stops access to the promenade, which is true, but the council is forced to point at the sea and say "you know how this works, right?" Sefton Borough Council is not King Cnut, and it can't stop the waves. The beach wants to join the dunes behind it and it's not going to let a strip of paving get in the way.
The path opened up to real the frankly gob-smacking form of Crosby Leisure Centre. It's a scifi vehicle that somehow arrived in suburban Liverpool; you expect a woman with a suspiciously large beehive hairdo to come sashaying out. The architects claimed that the roof is to allow the sands to blow over the top without impediment. I believe this is architect speak for "it looks really cool".
I followed the path round the edge, able to see inside to the swimming pool where people larked about in the water. Sadly the building is not a full flying saucer. Only the front half has the amazing sloped roof; at the back it's a brick block, tucked away from the sea where you can't spot it. Still, what a front that is.
I walked onto Bridge Road, a strip between the railway and the beach that was showing signs of being gentrified. It had a mix of industrial units and shops, garages and cafes. The micropub was alongside an electrical wholesaler; the cash-only Chinese takeaway with the racially suspect cartoon in the window was over the road from a cafe offering breakfast-lunch-gelato.
A roadsign welcomed me to Brighton-le-Sands; I choose to believe they added "le-Sands" as a deliberate two fingers to the more famous Brighton's pebbly beach. (It never fails to astonish me that Brighton's nudist beach is shingle. You must be pulling stones out of crevices for days). Squat office blocks were headquarters to engineering firms and vaguely maritime industries. At some point people are going to spot that you can get a three bed semi a two minute walk from the sea for under £300,000 and suddenly the cash and carry will be a nightclub and the chippy will become a coffee shop but until then it's a nice mix of people.
I turned inland, past a row of neat new houses built with electric chargers and double driveways, and a missing cat poster ("Diddy"). I was approaching the railway line, and a cynical part of me thought that a missing cat within one street of an electrified rail probably isn't coming back. I hope I'm wrong.
The other side of the line counts as Crosby, if not technically than certainly in the minds of the residents, and as such it has no need to be gentrified; it was always like that.
Now we were in a world of elevated chicken shops with expensive burgers, of restaurants designed to be featured on the 'Gram, of "CAMRA Pub of the Year 2025". Women in snatched outfits pushed babies in designer onesies. Salons offered "natural facial rejuvenation". And then, in the middle of it, a football ground.
Marine AFC play in the Northern League North, which, as far as I can work out, is the bit below what in my head is still the Vauxhall Conference. I tried reading the Wikipedia page on it but my brain started closing down through sheer boredom. They're below the proper football teams who play in the four divisions that I'm vaguely aware of, let's put it that way.
They've played here since 1903, but that could all change quite soon: they announced plans for a new stadium in Thornton last year. I'm not sure what's happening there, but Rossett Park will supposedly be retained as a "community resource". A great ambition, if it happens; not to be too cynical but a large space in a sought-after residential area that's no longer being used for its primary purpose screams "flogged to a property developer for a huge profit". Fair play to them either way.
I crossed the road with two yummy mummies to where a Carnegie Library occupied a triangular site. The actual library closed in 2013, in the early days of austerity (ah, the memories of when we were told it was a bit of temporary belt-tightening) but because it's one of the marvellous gifts to the nation from Andrew Carnegie, it sat empty awaiting someone who could treat it with a bit of sympathy to restore it.
That new occupier is going to be Moose Coffee, the local breakfast chain that has people queuing around the block for their food. I have a slight resentment towards Moose because their very first branch was round the corner from me in our village; however, that one rebranded as Home and Moose went on to become a Liverpool phenomenon. It's a bit like seeing a really popular band in their early days. I'm wandering around going "I was having Moose Coffee before they even opened a branch in Dale Street" but unsurprisingly it doesn't have the same cache as the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall.
I darted across the road and into a small oblong of park. It was thick with trees and dog walkers. I paused for a moment and had a drink of water. I realised how much I was enjoying myself. This is going to out me as a terrible snob - well, this and everything I've ever written on this blog - but it was nice to be wandering around an area without worrying a drug dealer was going to leap out and accost me. The run of Leasowe-Kirkby-Walton wasn't exactly showing the city region at its best. Now I was in a nice area with nice shops and parks and it was nice.
I followed Coronation Road into the centre of Great Crosby, another string of cafes and old-fashioned businesses that were somehow clinging on. A carpet shop, a solicitors, a decorator's centre that ironically could've done with a lick of paint.
The centre of the village proper is a Y-shaped section of pedestrianisation. Shops and bars line the pavement, tables spilling out for sunny days like today. Even the Greggs had space outside for your al fresco steak bake. A couple of new developments had inserted blocks of apartments into the centre, with more being constructed further down; a pleasing dose of densification where you'd expect the locals to fight against it.
I wandered through its impeccably clean streets, wondering where to have my lunch. I was tempted to go to Greggs and have one of its chicken sausage rolls in solidarity now that it's become a front in the culture wars (they only introduced them to get Muslims to shop there!!1!!1) but that felt a bit vulgar. Besides I got distracted when I spotted a bookshop.
I need to stop buying books. No, really, I do. It's becoming a terrible, terrible burden. I can't wander past a bookshop without getting the urge to run in and buy another novel I can add to the "unread" pile. It's a total waste of money. I walked round Pritchards, desperately trying to find something to buy, and at the same time, resisting every fibre in my body that said I should. After a full circuit I was able to leave, empty handed, breathing heavily but relieved that I'd spent absolutely nothing. (I have since bought two more books from other shops).
A walk back to the head of the pedestrian area, where there's a Sainsbury's, and I was able to spot a changing of the guard. A phone box had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and the workmen were preparing the way for a flatscreen advertising board - sorry, I mean a BT Street Hub, because you can technically still use them to make a telephone call, not that anyone ever will. I'd never seen a phone box being carted off to the knacker's yard before and it gave me a momentary pang of sadness. Then I tried to remember the last time I'd used one and I don't think it was this side of the millennium.
I'd done a full circuit now and was still no closer to finding somewhere for lunch. I mean, there were obviously a lot of options, but most of them fell between "too posh" or "too generic" (yes, there was a Costa). Finally I realised where to go, where I should've gone right from the start.
My thanks to The George for giving me the lunch I needed.
This trip - and also the pint of beer - was funded by your contributions to my Ko-fi. Thanks once again!
