Credit: Dangerous Minds

There must be something in the water running through the Mersey, because Liverpool proudly stands a little bit apart from the rest of the country it’s nominally a part of.

You can ask any dyed-in-the-wool resident of the city, and they’ll tell you that to them, they’re “Scouse, not English”. There’s a staunch civic pride to being from Liverpool that overrides any kind of nationality, which has lead to the city having a strange kind of mysticism to it that you just don’t get anywhere else. Amazing urban myths and legends permeate the place more than Beatlemaniac tourists do, and that’s saying a hell of a lot.

There’s Bella and Bertie, the Liver Birds that sit on top of the Royal Liver Building, cast in metal because if they ever saw each other, they’d fly away and the city would fall. There are ghost stories like that of the Green Lady who haunts Childwell Hall and the floating torso of Lime Street. There’s the legend of William McKenzie, a Scouse merchant who lost his soul to the devil in a game of cards and was buried in a tomb large enough for him to sit at a table in, ready to play Satan again to win his everlasting soul back.

Seriously, you could go for hours before running low on things that make Merseyside a little bit magic. My favourite of all of them, though, is one that concerns Bold Street, the centre of independent business right in the heart of L1. Many people who’ve walked down Bold Street, in the shadow of the Church of Saint Luke, have taken one wrong (or possibly very right) step and found the most shocking thing imaginable. The city around them disappears for a few moments.

At least, the way they knew it.

What is the Bold Street Time Slip of Liverpool?

The first time a story like this was told came from the 1990s, when an off-duty police officer claimed to have been walking down Bold Street when he looked up and realised the entire street had changed. Gone was the city he was used to, and in its place were cars, shops and architecture that hadn’t been there mere seconds earlier. The kind that he’d only seen not in photos from his childhood, but from his parents’.

After a moment spent getting his bearings, the man realised that he was still on Bold Street, but about 50 years earlier than he had been a moment ago. He immediately took a closer look at his surroundings, recognising the location of what he knew to be his favourite book shop, Dillon’s. Except it wasn’t a book shop anymore, it was a fashion boutique with dresses and umbrellas in the window called Cripp’s.

He went to the door of the shop, opened it up and the moment he stepped through it, the Dillon’s he knew came flooding back, and he found himself back in July 1996. Pretty much immediately afterwards, he went home and did some digging, talking to some friends of his whose knowledge of the city was more in-depth than his. He asked anyone he could what had been occupying the site of Dillon’s before it became Dillon’s, and finally, someone came back to him with proof.

Before it was Dillon’s, it was a clothes shop. Called Cripp’s. So who knows? Perhaps these are more than just urban myths, and that there really is something magical at the heart of Liverpool.

And, I got through this entire article without making a “if you’d gone back to the 1950s in Liverpool, how would you know!!!” joke. Boss, la!