It’s time to admit it: the Liverpool docks are overrated

Liverpool is full of fun, affordable venues, restaurants, bars and clubs. It’s part of what makes living in this city so great, but let’s be honest – the Docks come pretty low down in the list of places you actually go regularly in Liverpool.

Sure, they are gorgeous. That’s why whenever your friends or your parents pay you a visit they’re first on the list of places you take them. “Oh yeah, we’re always having drinks down here,” you lie. “I just love soaking up the culture.” But once you’ve walked around them once and popped into the Tate to gander at Tracey Emin’s haphazard bed, you’ve just about exhausted everything that you can afford. Even the ice-cream trucks are out of budget.

Freezing but Fabulous

They’re a favourite starting destination for everybody’s birthday. You want to start the night classy, and Revs is about as classy as the student loan can stretch to, but after one £8 glass of wine you call it a day and hike up to Faculty for a quad-vod instead. You know you’d rather be shit-faced in somewhere dingy than sober and poor somewhere ‘sophisticated’. Why pretend otherwise?

Even if you decide to just go down there for a coffee, your options are limited to fancy cafes where you can never get a seat, or a Costa which makes you question why you made the trek all the way there in the first place. Getting food is out of the question as well, when the restaurants are just a little too far out of the student budget and you’d rather be buying tequila shots in Cava. It might be a good option for a date, but you might find yourself stranded when you try and make a quick get away after an awkward tinder meet up, having to negotiate through railings and archways before you can make your big escape.

Cough up £7 and maybe you could ride the wheel, but if you were expecting a London Eye-esque experience you’ll be sorely disappointed – and terrified. As the small pod rises into the air you pray for the moment you can return safely to solid ground.

Want to see the sights whilst fearing your impending death? The wheel is for you.

And, whilst it is next to some water, the Mersey is hardly the seaside, and the amount of wind you have to suffer through makes you wish that you’d have just stayed in the shelter of Liverpool ONE – It might lack culture, but the shopping centre does have the added bonus of sheltering your carefully coiffed hair from the brutal wind. People might have tried to add a bit of romance to the docks by attaching padlocks to the fences, but the post-industrial Wirral landscape isn’t exactly Parisian.

It’s hardly the Seine

The docks are the equivalent of your mum cracking out the fancy china when guests come for dinner. For most of the year they sit there in the side cabinet, and then when Aunt Helen comes they’re laid out for all to see. You can barely afford them, get very little use out of them, but you’re glad they’re there nonetheless. They might be the thing that sold you on Liverpool, but when you’re a student who’s weekly budget mostly goes on doubles at Juicy, the Docks are just not somewhere you visit often.