You never step in the same city twice.

 

Nowhere is walking more surreal varied and trance-inducing than in Liverpool. 

I began by trekking great stretches of docks and canals, relishing the Victorian grandeur of their engineering and the flashes of beauty among the melancholy abandonment. I have boomeranged from Parliament street down to the river, zipped to the centre of  Liverpool One and Chavasse Park with its peerless view of the Albert Dock and Mersey (and evocations of the Beatles) and back to the Baltic Triangle and circuitous routes to the eddying chaos of Baltic public park and Cain's Brewery on up to the circuit round . 

Liverpool is a strange multiverse of extreme character in enclaves cheek-by-jowl with mean streets and tat; a thing of monotone heft inter-cut with ‘hidden’ pocket gardens and squares, and threaded through by the ebb and flow of the canals and Mersey river. It is so alive, this beast, that it changes its skin if you stay away from a spot for longer than a few months: you go back and it’s sprouted anew or been unaccountably razed. It’s an evolving totality that keeps Liverpool quick in all the meanings of that term: live, glowing, swift. It’s as if we’re running to keep up. You never step in the same city twice.