Crosby Beach
Crosby Beach
Main page
1967343

Crosby Beach

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Crosby Beach

Crosby Beach is part of the Merseyside coastline north of Liverpool in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, England, stretching about 2.5 miles (4.0 km) North-West from the Seaforth Dock in the Port of Liverpool, through Waterloo, where it separates the sea from the Marina. The beach was awarded Keep Britain Tidy's Quality Coast Award in 2011.

Since 2007, the beach has been the permanent home of the Another Place sculptures by Antony Gormley.

The beach was stabilised from the mid 19th century, as prior to this, high sea tides could come in as far as the first row of houses. In the older dunes north of the coastguard station, between the sea and the West Lancashire Golf Club, there are still some remains of the old wartime defenses. The navigable shipping channel in Liverpool Bay, connecting the River Mersey to the Irish Sea, runs parallel to the beach to around the coastguard station where it swings out to sea.

During the 1960s, the beach suffered with severe litter problems, described in 1962 as the "worst ever". Just the year before, there was a reported 3,000 'glass victims' requiring first aid treatment. Girl Guides helped clean the beach of litter in 1962 and 1963. To combat the litter issues, a £5,000 machine named the "beach sanitizer" was imported from America in the late 1960s, which worked by turning over the first four inches (100 mm) of sand and sifting out any litter. Issues with litter were also reported during the 1980s and 1990s, including reports of concern from local school pupils in 1995 about the amount of rubbish and oil on the sand.

The beach was awarded Keep Britain Tidy's Quality Coast Award in 2011. The beach was featured in the 2012 BBC drama Good Cop, filmed at and around the beach region. Sefton Council hoped the drama would promote the coastline as a location ideal for filming.

As of 2020, the annual cost by the council to fund lifeguards on the beach is £160,200, with an additional annual budget of £15,000 for maintenance works of assets the council is responsible for.

The Another Place sculptures by Antony Gormley are found here and, after a Sefton Council meeting on 7 March 2007, it has been allowed to stay permanently. Gormley's reason for choosing Crosby Beach as the location was that he thought of the beach as being "the opposite of pretty. It is terrific and brutal and is a working beach". The sculptures were painted in June 2017 in what was described as vandalism, although several residents reacted favourably to the graffiti.

Approval to construct a recreation area, including a Marina at Waterloo was approved during a Crosby electors' meeting in December 1967, with capital costs estimated at around £400,000. The proposals involved the reclamation of 161 acres (65 ha) of land between Crosby Baths and the outer wall of Seaforth Dock, with the size of the lake itself around 58 acres (23 ha). Construction started in May 1972, following the final contract for the excavation of 500,000 cubic yards (400,000 m3) of sand being agreed in April. Floodlights were to be added to the marina at a cost of around £10,000. The overall cost of the marina, estimated at over £1 million, was provided by auctioning council-owned land at Crosby. At the start of the construction period, it was announced that a one-mile-long (1.6 km) pathway would be constructed around the Marina's perimeter, referred to as a promenade. The marina scheme was award-winning according to a report in February 1972, winning second prize in the 1971 Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and Time Conservation award scheme. It was also reported that Crosby Council had bid for financial aid towards its construction.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.