Tag Archives: Liverpool

A fast lane for walkers in a Liverpool shopping complex

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Fast movers get their own walking lane in a new experiment outside Liverpool stores:

Argos has painted new markings on the pavement outside its Liverpool store after research revealed almost half the nation found the slow pace of high streets to be their biggest shopping bugbear.

The new lane, being trialled this week in the Liverpool One shopping complex, hopes to help pick up the pace for those who are hurrying by bypassing the crowds.

New statistics show 31 per cent of people find pavement hoggers frustrating, while more than a quarter (27 per cent) get annoyed by dawdling pedestrians…

‘As the research demonstrates, a faster high street could vastly improve the overall shopping experience for British shoppers across the UK.

As a fast walker, I approve. However, I envision multiple problems arising:
  1. The speed of fast walkers could vary quite a bit from each other. Various people could be moving faster than the general population but still not be moving fast enough for others in the fast track.
  2. What happens when people inevitably wander into the fast track without knowing?
  3. Where is the proper entrance and exit ramp on this track? This isn’t exactly like a moving walkway that has a clear beginning and end. Come to think of it, why not install more moving walkways that can help everyone move faster through a main corridor like this? (It does look like this is an outside setting so that’s an issue.)

How long can this experiment last? While there are a lot of pedestrians on many city streets, I’ve never seen fast lanes like this before.

Explaining the tunnel system under Liverpool

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Excavations have brought to light tunnels under Liverpool but it is unclear why a tobacco merchant created them in the early 1800s:

He also had men build tunnels. One entrance to the system even has been found in the basement of his former house. But why tunnels? Did he ask them to build his tunnels arbitrarily, for no other purpose than to be paid for work? It seems extraordinary. And yet there are no known records from Williamson’s time which offer anything like an explanation for their construction.

Instead, succeeding generations and historians have had to guess – leading to all manner of speculation. Perhaps Williamson wanted secret passages to get to and from buildings in Edge Hill. Or was a smuggler and needed the tunnels to carry out covert operations.

Or maybe he and his wife belonged to a fanatical religious cult that anticipated the end of the world, and his tunnels were designed to provide shelter during the apocalypse. Apparently, someone once made the suggestion casually on television, and the idea since stuck.

Those who have worked on the tunnels have now developed a new, somewhat more satisfying theory. Bridson points out a series of markings in the sandstone that he says are indicative of quarrying. There are channels to drain rainwater away from the rock while men worked, blocks out of which sandstone could be hewn, and various niches in the walls where rigs were once likely installed to help with extracting the stone, commonly used as a building material.

Bridson believes that before Williamson came along, these pits in the ground already existed. But it was Williamson’s idea to construct arches over them and seal them in. Properties could then be built on top of the reclaimed land – which otherwise would have been practically worthless.

I imagine there are interesting things lurking under every major city as evidenced by findings under Paris, Chicago, Seattle, London, and New York.

The land development theory is an interesting one. Williamson could benefit in two ways: by selling the excavated rock from below the surface and then also selling the land above it. Now, there might be separate rights to the above ground and below ground space but no such issues likely hindered Williamson.