How to spend a day in Liverpool
As the 13th Liverpool Biennial opens, guest curator for this edition, Marie-Anne McQuay, shares her cultural highlights for a day out in the city.
A version of this article first appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
Part of the charm of visiting Liverpool is its sheer walkability, combined with its density of history and culture. Liverpool houses the largest number of museums and galleries outside London, built for the most part by the wealth of empire and augmented with major late-20th-century and millennial regeneration.
Many of these venues are also host to Liverpool Biennial 2025 (LB2025), the UK’s oldest and largest free festival of contemporary visual art, which opens in June. Across 14 weeks, we’ll present new artwork by 30 international artists, with events and performances, taking audiences on a trail from the museum district, between the two cathedrals, and through Chinatown and the Baltic Creative to the iconic Royal Albert Dock.
Start your day in a historic neighbourhood
Liverpool also has historic leafy suburbs, and our day begins at Sudley House, Aigburth, south of the city centre. Built in 1821, the house contains elements of the painting collection once amassed by its wealthiest owner, Liverpool merchant George Holt (1825-96).
Now owned by National Museums Liverpool (NML), the house reveals what 19th-century daily life was like for the Holts, while acknowledging the colonial wealth that is behind Liverpool’s historic sites.
Journey to the city centre's museum quarter
Heading into the city centre, via car, bus or train, we emerge from Lime Street into Liverpool’s main museum quarter on William Brown Street.
This is home to NML’s World Museum with its collections of life sciences, earth sciences and human cultures from across the world; Walker Art Gallery with its nationally renowned art collection, including key Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite works; and Liverpool Central Library. Neoclassical buildings of impressive scale, the Walker and Liverpool Central Library will both host LB2025 exhibitions.
Outside the Walker Art Gallery in St John’s Gardens will also be a new steel-and-concrete public sculpture inspired by stained-glass church windows, by Isabel Nolan (commissioned with Art Fund support).
We’ll pass this as we head up to the Victoria Gallery & Museum, which houses not only a historic art collection, including works by Jacob Epstein and Elisabeth Frink, but also fascinating medical artefacts such as implements used in early dentistry.
Marvel at Liverpool's iconic buildings
Walking between the Modernist Catholic cathedral and the Neo-Gothic Anglican Cathedral – the former being part of the inspiration for a new film by Elizabeth Price and the latter housing works by artists Maria Loizidou and Ana Navas, all for LB2025 – we dip down into Chinatown, home to the oldest Chinese community in the UK.
Passing The Black-E, a former church and now vibrant community centre, once also known as Liverpool’s Third Cathedral, we’ll see historic Cantonese restaurants and a late-20th-century Chinese Arch, gifted by Shanghai, one of Liverpool’s twin cities.
Walking across to Liverpool’s main independent shopping area around Bold Street, we’ll visit internationally renowned new media gallery and cinema FACT, and then head down towards the Bluecoat, the UK’s oldest arts centre, once an 18th-century charity school, which has remained a vibrant hub for artists ever since.
Pausing in its courtyard garden, we’ll walk down to the docks to the Open Eye Gallery, one of the UK’s major photography galleries, committed to a progressive programme of socially engaged photography, to where RIBA North is located, currently host to Tate Liverpool while its main building undergoes a major capital development. All of these are hosting LB2025 exhibitions.
Explore the Royal Albert Dock
While taking in the sights and sounds of the historic Royal Albert Dock, we pop into the Museum of Liverpool to understand its social and cultural history. The city is looking forward to the reopening of the Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum in 2028, also undergoing capital development.
These museums chart the city’s development as one of the major ports of empire, with Liverpool being the first city in the UK to dedicate a museum to the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade.
The dockside underwent major regeneration from the 1980s onwards and offers views over the Mersey, across to the Wirral: our next destination. You might enjoy a ferry ride with 1960s soundtrack or even be able to catch the ‘Dazzle Ferry’ designed by artist Peter Blake, first commissioned by Liverpool Biennial in 2016.
If the weather isn’t suitable for ferry rides, you can take Liverpool’s Merseyrail underground network from James Street, which gets you over to the Wirral in a matter of minutes.
The final stop: discover art galleries in the Wirral
Now on the Wirral we visit the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, in Birkenhead. Built in 1928, its collections include artworks, ceramics, sculptures and maritime history. It is home to the largest public collection of Della Robbia pottery in the UK and has many notable artworks including by JMW Turner and Evelyn de Morgan.
We’ll then head to our final destination, the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, also part of the NML family. The museum was founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, and opened in 1922, set in the garden village of Port Sunlight, originally built for Lever’s factory workers; the Wirral also contains the same histories of private wealth and empire as central Liverpool.
The Lady Lever contains one of the UK’s best collections of fine art and decorative art, including a Wedgwood collection, and classical antiquities. The historic village is also well worth exploring.
Crossing between specific sites and neighbourhoods, we’ve glimpsed public artworks previously commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, including sculpture by Ugo Rondinone (2018) and Rudy Loewe and Eleng Luluan (both 2023).
Perhaps, if staying the weekend, we could head out to Crosby Beach to see Antony Gormley’s Another Place, comprising 100 cast-iron figures that have been installed on the beach since 2005. Similarly, LB2025 will leave behind its own traces as well as reveal new narratives for the city under the title of ‘BEDROCK’.
We hope you can join us to celebrate the city’s rich culture, international connections and works by artists from the UK and beyond.
Beyond art in Liverpool
Eat
Liverpool is blessed with independents. Stop by family-run Moi Bakeshop in FACT and try Chinatown’s latest addition, Man Tsuen Ho’s Restaurant. Squash Liverpool serves delicious veggie breakfasts. In the evening go for delicious seasonal small plates at Maray.
Shop
Liverpool’s standalone shops are thriving. On Bold Street, visit workers’ co-operative bookshop News From Nowhere and shop at international food store Matta’s – which celebrated 40 years of trading last year – as well as buying thoughtful gifts from Utility Gift Store.
Relax
Enjoy quiet time in nature in the Bluecoat’s exquisitely planted courtyard garden and around Liverpool Cathedral’s sunken gardens. Or watch the sunset at historic pub The Baltic Fleet, and then walk around Albert Dock as night falls and the docks sparkle.