Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ing Anglican Cathedral, designed by Giles Gilbert Scot in 1903 in the
Gothic Revival style, is the fifth largest cathedral in the world. Towering
above the commercial district and Liverpool's Chinatown on St. James's
Mount, it took seventy-four years to build and was finally completed in
1978. Facing it, close to the University of Liverpool's Victoria Building
at the other end of Hope Street, is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ
the King, a modernist building affectionately known locally as “Paddy's
wigwam,” built in the 1960s. Investment in the 1960s sought to improve
road access in and around the city by constructing a second Mersey
tunnel in the midst of the close-knit, inner-city, working-class district
of Scotland Road, close to the first tunnel entrance (opened in 1934) be-
hind St. George's Hall at the botom of William Brown Street. Other de-
velopments included a modern indoor shopping complex opposite Lime
Station on the site of the old fruit and vegetable market; the imposing
tower, topped by a revolving restaurant, now forms part of Liverpool's
iconic skyline. The twenty-first century has witnessed the building of a
new shopping and leisure complex, Liverpool One, opposite the Albert
Docks on the site of the old Customs House (bombed during the Sec-
ond World War), the development of an arena and conference center
on the former Kings Dock, the opening of a new cruise ship terminal at
the Pier Head, and the construction of the largest newly built national
museum in the UK for over a hundred years, the Museum of Liverpool.
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Films made in and about the city focus on many of these develop-
ments, charting changes in the urban landscape and the effects of these
often controversial regeneration schemes on the city's many and varied
communities. The mapping database has been developed in part with
museum curators who, inspired by the City in Film project, have begun
the task of georeferencing and digitizing materials and artifacts relating
to the Merseyside area in the collections of National Museums Liver-
pool. These are being housed in a permanent electronic resource modeled
on a GIS database in the new Museum of Liverpool “history detectives”
gallery (opened in 2011), which enables public access via a map-based
touch-screen interface to images, films, and audio that begin to reveal
the distinctive histories and identities of the people and places of the
Mersey region.
