Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool

Yes.

In the meantime, Sergeant, you might drive towards Royal Albert Dock.

Right you are, sir.

[ship horn] The ship turned out to be the City of Bombay.

Before we drew to a stop at Royal Albert Dock, we passed through what must have been half of the mobile police force of London.

That must be Nelson's car.

Yeah, there he is.

Recording by Expatriate in Bangor, Maine.

Chapter one, From Albert Docks to Shanghai.

The tender light of home behind, dark heathen gloom before, the servants of the Lord go forth to many a foreign shore.

But the true light that cannot pale streams on them from above, a light divine that shall not fail, the smile of Him they love.

A tour guide stands outside 24th Lynn Road, where McCartney grew up.

He tells a bus from Ohio that Pete Best still lives across the city and signs autographs at a museum on the Albert Dock on Saturdays.

165 Broadhurst Gardens, September 2026.

It's Universal Music's London studio now.

And where is the Echo Arena?

Uh, Albert Dock.

Okay.

So yeah, no, that's...

to develop

the Albert Dock.

which was left to rack and ruin for many years.

Which is incredible now, I don't know if you've been...

Maybe they don't want to move on because they just want to blame other people.

And for some reason, they just don't want to move on.

Lastly, and you're right to cite Albert Dock, because when I go to the Labour Party conference, there are extraordinary busy restaurants and wine bars down there.

And it's a very, very buzzy part of town.

Where the exhibition centre is, is right on the Docklands.

hop, skip and jump away from Albert Docks where you can then easily get into the rest of Liverpool.

Like if you want to go to the Cavern, for example, then you absolutely can.

It's only a short walk away.

The Mariner's Church, an old hulk in which divine service was held every Sunday, occupied another corner.

The Albert Dock was filled with East Indiamen discharging their cargoes of sugar, jute, and linseed, and tea clippers from China.

They loaded their outward cargoes in the Salt House Dock, which adjoined.

Further south again, the King's and Queen's Docks were occupied by small foreign vessels trading to the continental ports.

So I think the mythology, the story of the Beatles is like, it's like the Odyssey or the Iliad, you know? It's folkloric.

I went to Liv- I go to Liverpool every so often for work and various things, and I was there a few weeks ago, and I went to The Beatles Story, that museum in the Albert Docks, which is their history.

And, you know, they've got a reconstruction of the trailer that the, um, the Quarrymen were standing on at the Woolton Village fete that summer in the '50s when John first met Paul.

And I thought, you know, from there on, they're war babies.

So Breado's Tacos came down from London, and Northern Chris, and we did a little, a taco night in Belzan, and then went out and drank a million beers and decided that we should open a little taco restaurant in Liverpool.

That little taco restaurant became Madre on the Albert Dock, which was, uh, 200 cover inside and 300 covers outside, so what-

Small, yeah

... really, really small.

That is good.

But how, that, so then how do you make it jump from one city to two? Is it just-

We, as soon as we hit Madre on the Albert Dock in Liverpool, we knew Manchester was next.

Within six weeks of opening, we were looking at site here.

I said, you could probably help him out.

So I think we probably got to know each other over about a year or so, understanding what he wanted to do at Aracroft were best known for city center regeneration, and they're best known for the Albert Dock in Liverpool, which I sort of say took 30 years to become an overnight success, but is probably the first example of true city center regeneration of a landmark site.

And he wanted to move more into asset management trading, which is more of what I was doing for clients than the big strategic development side of things.

And one day we were having lunch and he sort of asked me, what did I want to do? And I said, in an ideal world, I'd love to have my own property company backed by a major player.