Liverpool miscellany

To the Lady Lever gallery this morning, to see Another View, an exhibition of C19th and C20th British landscape artists - a small, three-room exhibition (it turned out), largely from stiff in the Whitworth and other Liverpool collections, but there was hardly anything that I'd seen before, and I was glad to have gone.  To be honest, the most fun that I had was when I was waiting for the thick rain to clear, and decided to rework Millais' Spring (Apple Blossoms) and turn it into something much more sinister.  

One of the most interesting things in the exhibition was an album by Anna Holt that included watercolors that she made on a plantation in Savannah in 1851: the Holt family fortunes came in part from cotton produced by enslaved people in the southern states.  

So that was a good prelude for the later part of the day: first to Birkenhead Park, which was designed by Joseph Paxton in the 1840s - before he moved on to the Crystal Palace.  It was opened in 1847: Charles Olmsted came to visit in 1850, and it - designed as a People's Park - inspired Central Park in NYC.  One can see this in the artificial rockery, for a start ...

Then there's the Swiss Bridge - the only covered wooden bridge in the UK;

and a Roman Boathouse.

On to the Liverpool Docks - complete with a monument to the working horses of the port - 

- where I'd really been looking forward to visiting the International Slavery Museum.  In fact, I was a bit disappointed - they told the story well; but there weren't nearly as many primary artifacts as I'd hoped, and I was especially disappointed how badly hung/lit Richard Ansdell's The Hunted Slaves was - I'd really wanted to see it, and to see the detail, but the glare off the glass made that impossible.  The best bits?  The emphasis on African culture at the start of the exhibition;

and some of the new art work at the end of it, like Alison Welsh's By a Lady (2007) which references both a British anti-slavery document from 1847 and today's child trafficking.

A quick scamper through the other floors of the building (the Slavery Museum is on the top floor of the National Maritime Museum) revealed a rather fetching rat, demonstrating that there were lots of them on board ship.

... and then back out onto the more cheerful and entertaining aspects of the docks.