Liverpool, drawn from its own streets.

Liverpool on paper

The Mersey arrives as a broad open block down the western side of the frame, and the waterfront is drawn against it as a chain of rectangles — the dock system, basin after basin, each with its own entrance and quay. Nothing else in the country prints quite like it: the docks are water inside a shoreline, so they read as a row of dark panels with the streets stopping neatly behind them.

Inland the pattern is a set of arguments between grids. The commercial centre is roughly rectilinear, the Georgian quarter up the hill is a proper grid of long straight streets, and between and around them the Victorian terraces run at their own angles, combed off the radial roads that leave the centre like spokes — Scotland Road to the north, Smithdown and Princes Road to the south and east. Princes Road prints as a double line with its central boulevard, the one obviously planned street outside the grid.

The two cathedrals sit at either end of the same street on the ridge above the centre, and on the print they show as the places where the street pattern opens out. Parks arrive as pale shapes at the edges of the frame, and at the seven-kilometre width this page opens on the sheet reaches from the river to the streets behind Anfield. Take the frame in to two kilometres and the dock basins and the warehouse blocks fill the paper; take it wider and the Wirral appears across the water with the river between the two.