Ambitious plans to change the face of part of Liverpool’s historic waterfront have been revealed by National Museums Liverpool. The organisation has a 10-year masterplan to develop the area between the Royal Albert Dock and Mann Island including a new pedestrian link to the Canning Dock and the redevelopment of the imposing former Granada Studios building to create a new entrance for the International Slavery Museum. Currently, there is little access to a large section of the

Liverpool’s Threshold Festival is bowing out this spring with a final event which is hopes will take place both online and – restrictions permitting – in person in the Baltic Triangle. Organisers hope to take over the District live music venue on April 9-10 for the festival which was postponed from last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Threshold is an annual celebration of grassroots music and arts, and the 2021 event will include live performances and original artwork by r

Liverpool is designating 2021 as Year of Writing and is urging people of all ages to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboards – to get creative throughout the next 12 months. #LiverpoolWrites is being staged in association with Writing on the Wall and the first initiative, Write Here Write Now, is underway. As part of it, adults and children will be encouraged invited to get involved in a 10-minute writing burst each day. Video prompts will be given by authors and poets inc

Young people from Liverpool’s Yemeni community will be able to help support their elders to connect with their cultural heritage thanks to a grant made to National Museums Liverpool. The £88,000 from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund will support NML’s House of Memories: Connecting with Yemeni Elders Heritage initiative which has been hailed as the UK’s first community-curated, dual language digital collection. The project - co-created with the Yemeni community and the Kuu

Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse has launched a search for a new creative director who will help shape its future artistic vision. The successful candidate will replace artistic director Gemma Bodinetz who left at the end of December after 17 years at the venues. Her replacement’s role will include guiding the programme for both theatres, telling important and relevant stories for a Liverpool audience and nurturing creative talent. Digital content will also be a key part of t

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is making all its ‘On Demand’ concerts available for audiences to watch and listen to online. The nine concerts filmed in the revised season so far will remain on the orchestra’s site until February 28. Tickets to play the concerts in the comfort of your own home are £10 per performance. The one-hour programmes include violinist Tasmin Little performing Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, Wirral’s Stephen Hough playing Beethoven’s Piano Con

St Helens Theatre Royal is extending its online panto season until the end of January. Beauty and the Beast aims to bring some seasonal cheer to families across Merseyside and beyond. The show, which opened at the theatre on December 11, was due to run for live, socially distanced audiences until January 3 but because of restrictions imposed to tackle Covid infection rates it had to cut its performances short. Theatre bosses decided to take the show online with a specially fi

Thousands of people have signed an online petition to secure the future of the threatened Williamson Art Gallery and Museum. Wirral Council is looking at ways it can save around £16.5m to close the gap in its budget which is says has largely been created by its response to and ongoing measures needed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. These have added unexpected additional costs to the current budget while council bosses say many of the borough’s regular sources of income ha

Liverpool is one of the world’s biggest festival cities with celebrations of music, art, performance and literature attracting hundreds of thousands of people to its streets, parks and venues each year. The last 12 months have been difficult for everyone, not least festival organisers who have been forced to cancel, postpone or work creatively to move their events online because of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. But you can’t keep Liverpool down for long, and plans are afo