liverpool immediately upon arriving?
 

lso plan to go to Paris for a night later in the week.
Any advice is welcome!

Sorry my post got cut up. We are flying into London from Boston on an overnight. We want to visit Liverpool to see the Beatles sights. Wondering if we should go directly from heathrow to Euston and get on a train that morning or stay in London for a night to get acclimated. Not sure how burnt out I'll be. Any advice welcome!

Visit nationalrail.co.uk and enter your specific times to get exact results; start not from Euston but from your Heathrow terminal; the code for Liverpool Lime Street is LIV.

Then you will have to decide if you can tolerate such a long trip. It's 2.5 hours minimum from Euston, and expect to add an hour from the airport. Then there's customs and immigration and baggage. You'll have been on a plane for six hours, and you'll have arrived at Logan two hours before that, so your total door-to-door trip time from home to your Liverpool hotel will be at least fourteen hours, possibly 16.

Possible, but that's a pretty hard day's night for a few shoddy Beatles sights. The best Beatles sites are in London (aside from the excellent National Trust tour of Paul and John's childhood homes). Liverpool is an interesting place, though.

It does sound like an ordeal when you add up the hours like that. What are the best Beatles sights in London?

Abbey Road, obviously. Take a black felt-tip pen so you can sign the wall. Consider taking one of Richard Porter's Beatles walking tours. He operates them through London Walks. A lot of fans wander by Paul's office at Soho Square, hoping they will see him arrive or depart.

I do hope you go to Liverpool. It's a unpretentious city, and the locals are used to receiving Beatles fans by now. The next time you travel there, you may want to fly into Manchester, and take the train down to Liverpool. I did that last time (flying home from London), and it worked well.

http://www.visitliverpool.com (in case you haven't researched the city yet)

Here's a good list of Beatles movie sites around London:

http://www.music.indiana.edu/som/cou...ck/movies.html

There are other pages on that server for their homes, studios, etc. Not all of these will be appropriately located for a short visit. Your best bet is probably Richard Porter's tours. I'd skip the graffiti part though; that's tacky.

In Liverpool, the best remaining central Beatles sites are in pubs. Visit the Cracke, a favorite (and tiny) haunt of John and Stu Sutcliffe, and the Grapes , across from the Cavern (the current Cavern is a reproduction of the original, which is demolished and filled in) in Mathews Street, has some actual wallpaper touched by the Fabs preserved under glass.

There's some really bad artwork in various places nearby as well. Your tastes may differ, but I found the Beatles Experience thingie to be fake-o and rather terrifying.

The National Trust tour of Paul and John's house is by far the most impressive and intimate Beatles experience you can have there. Make sure you go through the National Trust, which is the only tour that actually enters the houses; the other buses, like the Magical Mystery Tour one, just drive past and wave. Paul's house is done up "in the style of", not with the original furniture and so on, but is a representative of a very important English style of council housing; John's is mostly original, just as Aunt Mimi left it. A powerful experience for a Beatles nut, and a very interesting one even if you couldn't care less about pop stars.

The Museum of Liverpool Life is excellent, though some of it will go over your head. It would probably help if you knew who Bill Shankly was (football).

But even if you don't, realize that Liverpool was the main point of embarkation for English and Welsh people to the United States, and was also the center of the slave trade (though the slaves themselves did not pass through here). It was also for a very long time the most important trade port with the US, and virtually all of the convoyed materiel that won WWII came through here. It's a very significant historical port, with the first real commercial dock system, the remains of which are well worth seeing; Albert Dock is one of the most significant buildings in the world.

My understanding is half the central city is under construction or demolition right now, in the runup to City Of Culture 2008, so I would check that other site to see what's open. There is a great deal of interesting Victorian commercial architecture in the center, and a lot of fine old warehouses and other commercial and industrial buildings. And some really unbelievable pubs; a few of the more ornate ones, like the Philharmonic and the Vines, will have your eyes bulging out of your head.

If anyone asks you who you support, Reds or Blues, Liverpool or The People's Club (Everton), it's best to plead American ignorance!

If you do go to Liverpool, and find a pleasant, reasonably priced hotel, let us know. The only one I've stayed in was the single worst hotel I've ever stayed in. Sopping wet carpet, drunks pounding up and down the hallways all night, gunshots out the window....

fnarf999, where did you stay? I've been to several different hotels in Liverpool, some better than others. You are absolutely right about the National Trust tour of John and Paul's homes. There are more details about it on the National Trust website, and tickets are available from the tourist office.

You mentioned all the immigrants who came through Liverpool on their way to America. The Maritime Museum has an excellent exhibit on that. The museum is down at Albert Dock, a nice place to wander around, shop, and eat. Walk several yards down the waterfront, and take the ferry cross the mersey and back.

Once again, it depends on how much time you allot to Liverpool. If the OP wants to take the train up the day after they arrive in the U.K., I assume you'll do at least one night there. If it's your first time in the 'Pool, I think you'd quite enjoy the Magical Mystery Tour, as well as the Beatles Experience.

Let us know what you plan to do....

fnart999 and merseyheart, thanks for your info. I will be staying overnight, my question was whether you thought it was a good idea to go right to liverpool from the airport after flying in from the U.S or whether to stay in London a night to get acclimated.
I have loved the Beatles since I was 9 years old, they are integral to my sense of self shall we say. My husband insisted we spend the big bucks two years ago to see Paul McCartney in Boston and he did not disappoint. I saw George Harrison with Ravi Shankar in 1975 and slept through most of it. In 1982 I went to London with a friend and there was very little Beatles tourist stuff.

So now, even though it may be touristy, I must go to Liveropool and just be where they were, where I've read so much about. It's like a little fantasy for me.
It's interesting to hear about the other historical aspects of Liverpool. I grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts amd always found a parallel between Lowell and Liverpool, the working class people, the immigrants, the melting pot.
That is why I'm thinking that maybe I shouldn't go to Liverpool after a sleep deprived flight. I want to savor the experience.

Ohhh, I hear ya. The Beatles arrived when I was in third grade, and I'm happily hooked for life. I'm delighted to hear you saw Paul in concert.

I've taken the train from London to Liverpool many times. If you wait till after 11 AM, it's generally cheaper. Eat a sack lunch on the way, and with any luck, you'll be in your hotel room by 3 PM. That leaves you some time to wander through Mathew Street, or drop by the tourist office, or shop at Albert Dock. The last ferry, roundtrip, leaves Pier Head at 6:15, I believe. Then, you can have dinner.

The following day you can do Beatles Experience in the morning, and the coach tour in the afternoon (you might like the Magical Mystery Tour just for Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, and a brief look at their homes).

The National Trust tour, which takes maybe two hours, will get you inside Paul and John's homes. Some of the furnishings at John's home are original (including the bath!). Paul's home, yes, is redone in furnishings of the period, but it's an awesome feeling to stand at the fireplace and think, this is where they wrote and rehearsed "I Saw Her Standing There". Ahhhh.....

The train trip is about three hours. I guess you could head back to London after one night, but of course, I'd recommend two. :) Do what you can, and plan on returning. Be sure to mention your love of the Beatles when you talk with the locals (taxi drivers, shop clerks and such). Many of the folks there saw the Beatles way back when, and will be glad to tell you about it.

Don't worry about closures. The place is a mess (so what's new?), but practically everything's still open.

The easiest way to get to Paris is to fly straight from Liverpool: the easiest way to get to Liverpool from LHR is to fly to Manchester, then get a train from the airport into Liverpool.

If you want to get the train to LIverpool, it's usually quicker to get the bus from Heathrow to Watford Junction: Virgin (who operate both the bus and the train) sell through-tickets on their website (www.virgintrains.co.uk)

Should you take fnarf's advice to visit Ye Cracke (and there's simply no point in visiting Liverpool without widely sampling the city's pubs, which were even more central to the city's culture in the early 60s than they are now) you must visit the men's lavatories in the Philharmonic Hotel, just up the road from the Cracke.

fnarf999, we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Albert Dock recently & it was fine : here's a link to my Tripadvisor report - http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserR...l_England.html

If your flight isn't already booked, you could fly into Manchester from Boston.
If you don't have this option, I think I would get the train directly to Liverpool once you land. My reasoning for this is that you often have to wait a few hours for your hotel room anyway when you land in the morning. The train is fairly relaxing and you can sleep on the trip up if you are exhausted.

Carolena

We stayed at Feathers Hotel on Mount Pleasant. To be fair our first night was the Saturday of the Liverpool-Everton derby, and the place was packed to the gills with extremely drunk fans. I'm not sure our room would ordinarly have been rented. It was really a hell hole. Water poured from the ceiling light fixture at one point, and the carpet was sopping wet the whole time, and the entire wing of the hotel stank of mold. Yet no one at the desk, on those rare occasions when there was someone at the desk, could be bothered to put down the telephone for even a second. The room was peculiarly configured, the wiring was strange, there was no curtain separating the open shower from the shag-carpeted (!) bathroom.

Breakfast was served hours late, with a very rude bossy woman refusing access to the dining room, and then changing her mind and moving everyone. The food was inedible, and appeared to have been prepared hours (days? months?) before. And the breakfast room was completely packed with large men, either still drunk or violently hungover. The fellow sitting next to us was bright red and coughing all through breakfast like he was bringing up a piece of lung. It's still the most memorable meal of my life; I actually wanted to stay and see if the fellow died or not, but my wife hustled us out of there after one cup of "tea".

But the city is lovely in lots of secret ways, despite a determined effort involving billions of pounds over the past fifty years to destroy as much interesting stuff as possible and erect hideous garbage.

Merseyheart's reaction to Paul's fireplace is exactly my own. It's an experience you aren't going to get in a museum filled with stuff that just has their picture on it.

On my next trip I'm going to see the Empress, which is the pub in Toxteth featured on the front of Ringo's "Sentimental Journey" album, just around the corner from his childhood home.

fnarf999, you stayed in Liverpool during a football match? Oh, no wonder the hotel was noisy. Last time around, I stayed (again) at the Thistle, but it proved to be too noisy as well. Ditto with the Holiday Inn at Albert Dock. One of my neighbors came in at 4 AM, quite noisy. There's lots of "clubbers" in that area.

I've liked the Adelphi on past trips, as well as the Travel Inn, and the Campanile. There's a new hotel opening in the city centre that is Beatle-themed, and I may do that next time around.

Yes, isn't it fine, standing there in front of the fireplace and knowing that's where the Beatles wrote and rehearsed some of their early material? At John's home, you can stand in his bedroom, where he wrote "Please Please Me" (if memory serves). The last time I was in Liverpool, our National Trust tour included some passengers from Liverpool, one of whom had seen the boys play way back when, in the Cavern days.

saysull55, flanneruk has given some excellent advice on how to travel to Liverpool. Have you bought the airline ticket yet? If not, I'd consider flying into Manchester, spending a couple of days in Liverpool, then off to Paris, and return to London, and fly home from there.

So much Europe, so little time! :)

Thanks thanks thanks to everyone for the info and entertaining stories! What's the story with the Philharmonic men's lavatories??
I'm now leaning toward going right to Liverpool and then flying to Paris from there. That way we get to spend the rest of the week in London, in one place, packing and unpacking a minimum number of times.
Any suggestions for finding flights from Liverpool to Paris?

"Any suggestions for finding flights from Liverpool to Paris?"

On the basis of "teach a man to fish..." the universal answer to such a question in Europe (and I'd have thought the US too) is to google "airport" and the city concerned, follow the links on the airport website for lists of scheduled operators, then follow those links to check prices for the day you want to travel. Do not assume any individual airline on an intra-Europe route will inevitably be cheaper or dearer than any other. There is actually no such thing as a low-cost airline within Europe any more: only low (or high) cost
flights.

In this particular case, Beauvais is a reasonable (though imperfect) approximation to Paris.

The men's toilets in the Philharmonic are comically ornate marble. Definitely worth a look. Ladies will be escorted through if they ask at the bar during a quieter time.

Oh, if you haven't already booked your flight, then go straight to Manchester. (I don't think there's any flights from the U.S. to Liverpool.) The Manchester airport is linked to the rail system. You just walk through the concourses to the rail station, then take the train to Liverpool. It takes an hour or less.

Keep us updated on your plans....

America has finally got a direct scheduled flight service to Liverpool. It's only taken 165 years since Samuel Cunard virtually invented mass intercontinental travel by launching his transatlantic steamer service from Liverpool.

But then the rest of the world has always taken a long time to catch up with the city that Carl Jung called the Pool of Life. Now America's connected to the town its poet Allen Ginsberg described as "the centre of the consciousness of the human universe", will it sign the Kyoto Treaty? Abolish handguns? Create a proper National Health Service? The possibilities are boundless.

True saysull has to get to New York first. But prices look cheap. www.flyglobespan.com

I had booked Liverpool - New York but Globespan introduced a stop at Knock on the days of our trip. My wife hates flying so we cancelled & are now Manchester - New York. Globespan is by far the cheapest but there are drawbacks if you intend flying with them - luggage limit 20kg, 29inch seat pitch & pay for everything on board. Having said that I was still saving £500 on Manchester.
I live close to Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields & grew up on the Beatles. My wifes uncle has a plaque on Matthew Street wall of fame. I met Bananarama at the Feathers (office xmas party 1977 or 8) before the group became famous & before the Feathers became the dive it is now.
There is a lot to see in this city. The Beatles stuff is all over the place so I would restrict myself to Lennon's house & Penny Lane, Albert Dock as a touristy area & Matthew Street. Unless you are used to it I would be careful with the Cains bitter as it is an acquired taste & can sometimes be served watered down.