Hall Road II

Battered by the sea it is tempting to think of these ruins as the remains of a lost Roman port, a Caesarea or a Tyre, a great town defeated by the sea and rebuilt in a safer harbour. They are more the ruins of Pompeii, overtaken by a disaster, a rain of fire falling from the sky, the ruins cleared from the streets in the rebuilding and hauled away to this desolate coastline, away from the people, away from sight. New uses for lost buildings pounded to rubble. The different stones weather differently. Half a century on the beach has worn the granite not one jot, crisp edges, smooth sides, the sharp edges of window frames. The sandstone carvings are returning to the sea, being broken down and smoothed, each year adding a millimetre to the sand. Marble is blasted by the sand and the wind, turns chalky. Half man-made half stone, concrete is more ambivalent and giant lumps age slowly, trailing old mesh-wires like the legs of octopuses, concrete and rusted iron sculptures of dead sea creatures, unwilling to decay as if still needed. The scale of these ruins is awe-inspiring. Happily now we can skip across rooflines, gigantic pieces of stone designed to be seen from below and from fifty feet below, carvings only visible from the top floor, from the highest offices. Local children are awed by these ruins, this city from before their parents were born, this lost city that their great-grandparents knew; they make small towers of stones and brick, assemble small offerings of marble tiles, glass, brick, and leave them on giant flat shards of city, tilted tables, smashed altars. Here the city is returning to the sea.

Yet this is more than a dumping ground for lost buildings. Four thousand people died in Liverpool in the Blitz, and these bones of the city are a secular shrine to them, a monument to the lost traveller, the ARP warden, the unknown civilian. The heat cooled by years of the tides, their memories soothed by the water, the wind; each year the carving is less crisp, is less visible. In a century it will be gone, this beach of stones, the memories washed away by the sea.