Liverpool Audio Tour: Below the Liver Birds

Explore Liverpool at your own pace

Liverpool's waterfront looks like an empire of merchants but is really a working hierarchy in disguise - clerks pen-pushing at Pier Head, sailors paid off on the dock road, dockers picked at the seven-o'clock pen, and women, children and Black seafarers cut out of the wage but doing the unpaid labour that ran the port. This self-guided audio tour walks the working day of a port city - from the Sailors' Church on Chapel Street, past the Cunard clerks' palace and the Royal Liver Friendly Society founded by nine working men in a pub, into the Albert Dock warehouses that handled bonded tobacco and the gates of the Sailors' Home that tried to break the crimps' racket, through the Bluecoat charity school for the orphans of the port, into the Cotton Brokers' Ring that ran the world cotton market from Old Hall Street, through the Cavern's lunchtime sessions where typists and apprentices spent their dinner-hour, onto the very plateau where on 13 August 1911 the police hidden inside St George's Hall baton-charged a strike rally of eighty-five thousand, up the steps of the Walker - free to the working public since 1877 - past Lewis's 'Friend to the People' department store, into the Catholic Cathedral built on the floor of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse where the city's poor picked oakum twelve hours a day, and finishing at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms - a pub built for the wage-earner by trade-school craftsmen and listed Grade I for its trouble. Walk slowly. The Liverpool you came to see was made by people who paid for it with their working day.

Photo: Frank, Unsplash

Tour details

• Duration: 1 hour 57 minutes, entirely at your own pace
• Distance: around 5.9 km (3.7 miles)
• Stops: 13 landmarks, including The Cavern Club, Liverpool Cotton Exchange Building, Old Hall Street, Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas, Liverpool
• Audio: up to 33 minutes of narration
• Starts at: The Cavern Club

Map data by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors

How it works

• Book here and a redemption code arrives by email within minutes.
• Download the free AudaTours app on your phone and enter the code.
• Download the tour once and the whole thing works offline.
• Walk to the first stop and press play. The audio for each landmark starts automatically as you approach it, so your phone can stay in your pocket.

There is no fixed date and no start time. The date you pick at checkout does not matter, and the tour stays on your phone permanently, so you can use it whenever you next visit and walk it again as often as you like.

What is included

• Professionally narrated audio that plays automatically at each stop
• An interactive map showing the walking route between landmarks
• Full offline access once downloaded, so you need no data or signal
• Freedom to start, pause and resume whenever you like
• Lifetime access - your code never expires

Where you will stop

• The Cavern Club
• Liverpool Cotton Exchange Building, Old Hall Street
• Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas, Liverpool
• Royal Liver Building
• Cunard Building
• Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool
• Sailors' Home Gateway, Canning Place, Liverpool
• Bluecoat Chambers
• St George's Hall, Liverpool
• Walker Art Gallery
• Lewis's Building, Ranelagh Street, Liverpool
• Philharmonic Dining Rooms
• Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral

Image: AudaTours

What is AudaTours?

AudaTours turns a walk through a city into a story. Our guides bring landmarks to life with the history, the scandals and the detail you would never get from a plaque.

• Immersive: real stories about the places in front of you, not a dry commentary
• Offline: download once and use it with no data, anywhere
• At your own pace: start, pause and resume whenever you want
• Accurate: every story is built from verified historical sources and checked before release

Good to know

• This is a self-guided audio tour on your own phone. There is no in-person guide.
• It does not include entry to any building or site along the route.
• The landmarks on the tour are not affiliated with AudaTours.
• You need a smartphone with Android 7.0 or later, or iOS 16 or later.
• Bring headphones and start with a charged phone.

Who it suits

Solo travellers, couples, families and small groups who would rather explore on their own schedule than follow a guide and a fixed departure time. It suits a first visit, and it suits anyone who has already seen the famous sights and wants to know what actually happened in them.

Image credits

Photos: megan ✌, Frank, Sreekumar Pillai (Unsplash).