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Albert Dock , five minutes' walk south of the Pier Head, was built in 1846 when Liverpool's port was a world leader. It started to decline at the beginning of the last century, as the new deep-draught ships were unable to berth here, and last saw service in 1972. A decade later the site was given a complete scrubdown and refit. Billed as "Liverpool's Historic Waterfront", it's a type of rescued urban heritage that's been copied throughout the country, but rarely as successfully as here. There's free parking - follow the city-centre signs - and buses every twenty minutes during the day from Queen Square bus station. All the museums have admission charges: the Maritime Museum, HM Customs Museum and Museum of Liverpool Life are part of the NMGM Eight Pass scheme, while the Waterfront Pass (GBP9.99) saves you money if you want to see the lot. A trip through the Merseyside Maritime Museum (daily 10am-5pm; GBP3, free with NMGM Eight Pass), filling one wing of the Albert Dock, can easily take two hours. Spread over four floors, it has sections on the history of Liverpool's evolution as a port and shipbuilding centre, and models of seacraft - from Samoan rafts to opulent passenger liners. An illuminating display details Liverpool's role as a springboard for over nine million emigrants - the Irish potato famine and a multiplicity of European wars, combined with the lure of gold and free land, brought people scurrying here to buy their passage to North America or Australia. On board the ships - there's a walk-through example - people were packed into dark, noisy ranks of bunks where they "puffed, groaned, swore, vomited, prayed, moaned and cried". The museum is at its best in its "Transatlantic Slavery" exhibit, which banishes years of Eurocentric excuses to expose the true horror of the exploitation of African slaves who were kidnapped, abused and sold as property. The conditions they endured on the transatlantic voyage are illustrated by a reconstruction of a slave ship, echoing with haunting voices reading from diaries of slaves and slavers. The neighbouring Tate Gallery Liverpool (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; free, special exhibitions usually GBP3-5; ) is the country's national collection of modern art in the north. Popular retrospectives and an ever-changing display of individual works are its bread-and-butter, and there's also a full programme of events, talks and tours. The Museum of Liverpool Life (daily 10am-5pm; GBP3, free with NMGM Eight Pass) lies across the dock. Particularly revealing about the hardships that have moulded the resilient Scouse character, it has excellent sections on the city's traditional work, with investigations of the lives of ordinary shipwrights, stevedores, carters and seamen. In the popular-culture sections, Merseyside football gets good coverage, as does Aintree's Grand National, music from the Sixties to the present day, the homegrown soap Brookside and local writers, including Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell, Beryl Bainbridge and Carla Lane.
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