In Liverpool, I beheld long China walls of masonry; vast piers of stone; and a succession of granite-rimmed docks, completely enclosed, and many of them communicating, which almost recalled to mind the great American chain of lakes: Ontario, Erie, St. Clair, Huron, Michigan, and Superior. The extent and solidity of these structures, seemed equal to what I had read of the old Pyramids of Egypt.

Karel Čapek – Letters from England, 1924

Back in February 2017 I took the train up to Liverpool to see Tracey Emin’s My Bed at the Tate. I wasn’t disappointed; close up the installation created a searingly honest self-portrait of the artist. It was shown in an exhibition space alongside a series of drawings by William Blake. The seeming dissonance of these two bodies of work was quickly overcome, for me, by the underlying qualities they shared and their contrasting ways of saying something very similar. Emin’s My Bed and Blake’s The Crucifixion: Behold Thy Mother and Pity are all, in their own way, protests against the sexual and social hypocricies of their day.

Another image caught my eye as I was about to leave: the view across the Mersey towards Birkenhead framed by one of the windows of the former Albert Dock warehouse which now forms the Tate. A restored waterfront, its former wealth built on trade with Africa and the Americas. Trade that drove the shipyards of Birkenhead, the sugar refineries of Liverpool and the cotton mills of Lancashire. Wealth that was based, let us not forget, on the slave trade. This (above) is in some ways a beautiful image, but beneath its surface there is an underlying darkness.

A window on the River Mersey ©Bobby Seal