Albert Dock

The Albert Dock is one of Liverpool's most famous landmarks and there are literally thousands of high quality photos of it taken by tourists, available on the internet. For this reason I've never made any serious attempt to photograph it, I want my photographs to have some level of originality and this would be difficult in one of Britain's most photographed locations.

However, I was killing time down there one day without my camera and with the lovely weather, I became inspired to give it a shot, after all what would this site be without any Albert Dock photos? This isn't the most original photo I took that day, but it's the one I like best.

The dock was built in 1846 by Liverpool's famous dock engineer Jesse Hartley, and was the world's first dock fully enclosed by warehouses and the world's first fireproof warehouses. However its operational life was short as ships soon became too large to fit into the dock. It was bombed during the war and spent most of the 20th century in ruins until the late 1980s when the government decided Liverpool had become too much of a blot on the national landscape and had to be given special treatment. The body set up to regenerate the city's flagship project was the renovation of the dock and today it houses cafes, shops, bars, hotels, museums, a TV studio and the Tate Art Gallery, sister of the world famous and often controversial gallery in London. ... and boats.