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Published: February 10th 2018
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The Beatles Story
An great exhibition on the legendary band and its history, located at Albert Dock in Liverpool. My 2017 conference year started in early January—I went to the
Annual Conference of the Division of Occupational Psychology (DOP) in Liverpool from 4th to 6th of January. My wonderful colleagues Lena and Richard, who were currently working in our London office, wanted to join me, so I decided to fly into London Heathrow and go up to Liverpool by car with them. It was a lengthy ride (with great company though) in which we discovered that it does not seem to be common to have service stations close to the motorway in the UK, which made fuelling up the car a little more time-consuming than we are used to, but finally we arrived in Liverpool.
The conference hotel was located right at Albert Dock, thus in a nice location. The dock was considered a very modern one when it opened in the middle of the 19th century because the warehouses could be loaded right from the ships. Moreover, it was built from iron, brick, and stone so that it was the first non-combustible warehouse complex in the world. After the Second World War it went into decline, but it was refurbished and re-opened as a heritage and major tourist attraction in the 1980s. It hosts, among other
The Beatles
... and my dear colleagues Lena and Richie things, the Beatles Museum and the Tate Liverpool. It also has nice bars and restaurants. We had dinner at
The Smuggler’s Cove where they serve dishes like hanging kebabs of all sorts.
The conference programme did not look overly appealing to us, so we had some time to explore the city. One great place to visit was definitely the
Beatles Museum. It consists of two parts, one outlines the story of the band and its members and is located in the basement of a building at Albert Dock, the other is at Pier Head a little further north and hosts for example photographs of the band members and their partners and friends and a 3D Beatles experience.
The part of the museum in Albert Dock I found just awesome. It is like a journey through the history of the band and its members, starting with short introductions of the band members and how they met and then taking visitors through all the important steps in the band’s history. Some of the exhibition rooms are recreations of clubs the Beatles used to play in like The Casbah Coffee Club or The Cavern Club, and there is also a recreation of Abbey Road
Albert Dock III
... with Tate Liverpool to the right - and in cliché English weather. Studios. And of course they play a lot of Beatles songs in the museum. This part of it I really enjoyed and can highly recommend it even to people who are not great Beatles fans, but simply interested in the band. The other part, which is contained in the ticket price, I found a bit disappointing, with a very odd 3D show in which the Beatles did not even appear. We went there the morning before we left Liverpool, and since we were rather quick we had a bit of time to peek into the Tate Liverpool, which is located on Albert Dock as well. We had too little time to really take in any of the works, but I did stop at an exhibition called “Tracey Emin and William Blake In Focus” and learned that William Blake was not only a poet, but also famous for his poetry written very artistically on paintings he had made himself.
As I said, we did by far not have enough time for the museum because we had to leave for London. On the way back there we rode past Birmingham. One of my colleagues told me that the area around the
Albert Dock IV
Merseyside Maritime Museum and a historic ship. city had inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea and description of the dark land of Mordor in his book “The Lord of the Rings”. At the time the surroundings of this industrial city must have looked pretty dark and dirty, and I had the feeling that some of it was still visible. Anyway, after a long but nice ride with my colleagues Lena and Richard they dropped me off at the airport and I flew back home. I guess Liverpool would not have been one of the cities I would have visited out of personal interest, so I was glad the conference had taken me there, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised!
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Dancing Dave
David Hooper
The Beatles
A band with such an extraordinary impact on society that a museum or two is warranted. Leading youth having a voice when before them children were seen not heard...forebears of long hair for men...then there was the music. I hope the museum touched on those issues as well.