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Tunnel








Whenever I lack inspiration or creative direction I head for the coast. Yesterday was hot, and the first proper day of my summer break so I packed my camera, got in the car and headed west. An hour later I was in New Brighton, the bit of The Wirral that looks over the Liverpool skyline. It also has it's own place in photographic history being the location for Martin Parr's The Last Resort. It would seem that the intervening 30 years have been kind to the place and it looks and feels reinvented, even Parr would be hard pressed to update his series now. 

 Liverpool has a magnetic pull for me and so after a couple of hours exploring and seeing the city across the water I zipped through the tunnel to see things from the other side. This journey in itself is a novelty, how many cities in the world can be approached in this way I wonder? It reinforces the grandness of the place, the architecture always makes me feel like I'm in a capital city and being a port there is always the prospect of travel and adventure. 

 I spent quite a bit of time walking around 'Paddy's Wigwam' otherwise known as Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral for no other reason than I realised I never had before. I really love it as a building and it's elevated position adds to it's strangeness. Even for an atheist it just seems so poetic that the city's two cathedrals, one Catholic, one Protestant, anchor either end of Hope Street. 

 My creative work often subconsciously comes back to opposites and this set of images seems to fit within this tradition. Two places on either side of the Mersey, one city, one town. The mundane and the grand sit side by side, hopefully connected by form, light and colour. One side dominated by orange, the other blue.
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