The Crosby Beach Walk, and Why a Hundred Iron Men Are Watching the Ships

The beach is free and nobody has paid for a word of this. There is one affiliate link, in the kit section at the bottom, to a dog water bottle I bought with my own money and use on every walk. If you buy through it I earn a small commission at no cost to you.

There is a kind of standing still I only really do at three in the morning. Not asleep. Not doing anything useful. Just looking at a dark window and waiting for something out there to change.

On Saturday I found a hundred men who do it for a living.

They are Antony Gormley’s Another Place, a hundred cast iron figures spread along Crosby beach on the northern edge of Liverpool, every one of them staring out to sea. Some stand on dry sand. Some are up to their chests in the tide. They have been doing it since 2005 and not one of them has blinked.

This is the Crosby beach walk, an out and back along the sand from Burbo Bank car park, done with Cujo and Blaze on a drizzly Saturday morning in late October. I had an early start, dropping a family member at Melwood in West Derby, and Crosby was twenty five minutes away.

I came home with a phone full of photographs and a list of questions. These are the answers.

The walk in real numbers

My Garmin Fenix 8 says 4.95 kilometres, which is 3.07 miles, and Komoot agrees. I finished six metres from where I started, which is about as out and back as it gets.

We were out for an hour and twelve minutes. Working it out from the track itself, fifty nine minutes of that was moving and thirteen was standing still. Given how many photographs I came home with, thirteen minutes sounds about right.

Now the climb, because the numbers disagree. The watch reported 33 metres of ascent and Komoot says 100 feet. The height data in the track itself never drops below 7 metres or rises above 13. The difference is the barometer on my wrist reacting to a damp, changeable morning. This walk is flat. It is a beach.

The whole track is on Komoot if you would rather follow it on a phone than read directions: the Crosby beach walk as I actually walked it.

Melwood, before the beach

The day started in West Derby, at a training ground whose name means a great deal to Liverpool fans of a certain age.

Melwood was Liverpool Football Club’s training ground from the 1950s until November 2020. The name is not a place. The land had been the playing fields of St Francis Xavier’s school, and two priests who coached football there, Father Melling and Father Woodlock, gave it the first half of each of their surnames.

When Bill Shankly arrived as manager in December 1959 he went to look at it and did not like what he found. The pitches were overgrown and the buildings were falling down. He rebuilt it, and it became the place where Liverpool’s pass and move football was drilled into generation after generation of players.

In 2019 the club sold it to a housing association, and in November 2020 the men’s first team moved to a new training centre at Kirkby. The houses were never built. Robbie Fowler and Jamie Carragher opened an academy on the site in 2021, helping young people into education and work through sport, and in 2023 Liverpool bought Melwood back.

It is now the AXA Melwood Training Centre, home to Liverpool FC Women’s first team and their academy. Then the dogs and I pointed the van at the coast.

Burbo Bank car park: £1.90, 40p and room for the van

We parked at Burbo Bank, the car park at the very end of Hall Road West in Blundellsands, at the northern end of the beach. It is big, open and tarmac, with no height barrier, and Parkopedia lists about two hundred spaces. On a damp Saturday morning there was room to park the Giottivan facing the sea.

It cost me £1.90 for two hours. You can pay at the machine, or by RingGo using location code 17918, which adds a small convenience charge.

I have learnt to read parking boards properly, for reasons I have written about before, and this one rewards it. Two things on it are worth knowing.

The first is the hours. The board says charges apply from 10am to 5pm, seven days a week. A yellow sticker over the old prices says new charges are in operation and to see the machine, so check the machine too. But if those printed hours still stand, an early start buys you some free time, which matters if you are here for the nine o’clock parkrun.

The second is a line in red: no caravans, lorries, HGVs or overnight parking. It does not say whether that is meant to cover a van conversion parked in an ordinary bay for a couple of hours, and there were at least two other campervans in while we were there. The overnight part is not ambiguous at all. Sefton’s coastal rules, on a separate sign by the promenade, also ban camping or staying on the beach overnight, and the picture on that sign is a campervan. This is a day stop.

The toilets are in a blue block by the car park. They cost 40p. The slot takes 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p and £1 coins, and a sticker underneath says no change given, so if all you have is a pound you have just paid a pound. No cards. Carry change.

Another Place: who, what, why and how

From Burbo Bank the figures run south for about three kilometres along the foreshore towards Waterloo, and the furthest stand almost a kilometre out towards the sea.

Who. Sir Antony Gormley, the sculptor behind the Angel of the North. Every figure is a cast of his own body. There are a hundred of them, made from seventeen different moulds, each one six foot two and 650 kilos of cast iron.

What. They are not statues of anybody important, and that is the point. The board by the car park quotes Gormley describing each one as “no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships, moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.”

As a middle aged man who spends a fair amount of time trying to remain standing, I felt seen.

When. They arrived in July 2005. Before Crosby they had stood on beaches at Cuxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium, and the plan was for them to move on to New York in November 2006. Sefton’s planning committee initially ruled that they would have to go. There was a campaign, Gormley backed it, and in March 2007 they were given permission to stay for good. Sefton Council owns and looks after them now.

Why here. The idea came from a new regeneration trust in south Sefton, and the man who pushed hardest for it was its director, Rod Yeoman, who is remembered on that board. Gormley came to look at the beach in dreadful weather and said yes the moment he came over the top of the dunes. He has described the work as being about emigration: the sadness of leaving, and the hope of a new life in another place. Liverpool is the port millions of emigrants sailed from. That lands.

How. Contractors spent three weeks lifting the figures into place and fixing each one onto a metre high foundation pile driven into the sand.

Locals call them the Iron Men. They brought an estimated 650,000 extra visitors to Sefton in their first ten years, and they turned twenty in July 2025.

Why some are in the water and some are not

This was the bit I liked best. Some figures stood on dry sand, some were knee deep, and the furthest were out in open water with waves breaking round them. It was quite something to watch.

It is deliberate, in two ways. Gormley set them at different stages of rising out of the sand, so some are buried to the waist or the chest before the sea even arrives. And they are spread from the top of the beach to almost a kilometre out, so the tide is always somewhere along the line.

This is a big tide, too. At Gladstone Dock, just down the coast, a spring high tide stands around 9.2 metres above chart datum and a spring low around 0.8 metres. On a big tide the water rises and falls more than eight metres, twice a day.

The sea was choppy on Saturday, brown and lumpy and white topped. The figures furthest out are streaked green with weed, and one of them had a gull standing on his head, which I think is the best review a piece of public art can get.

Why so many ships, and why so close

I was not ready for the ships. They kept coming. Big ones, one after another, close enough to see the colours of the containers stacked on deck.

There is a reason they pass this way. Crosby beach sits right beside the main shipping lane into the Mersey. Ships come in from Liverpool Bay along the Queen’s Channel, turn into the Crosby Channel and run down this coast past the iron men into the river. The edges of the channel are held in place by underwater walls of tipped limestone, and marked by numbered buoys that one pilotage guide describes as more like little ships themselves.

The red one behind my half buried iron man is almost certainly one of them. In these waters, red buoys mark the port side of the channel for ships coming in, which here is the Crosby side.

So how many? Merseyside Fire and Rescue, who run a marine rescue unit on the river, put the Port of Liverpool and the Manchester Ship Canal together at about 15,000 ship movements a year. That is roughly forty a day, counting every arrival and every departure separately. Most of them pass this beach.

As for what they carry, Peel Ports, who run the port, call Liverpool the UK’s fourth largest by tonnage and one of its most diverse. Containers, obviously. Grain and animal feed. Wood pellets, around two million tonnes a year, much of it going on by rail to Drax power station in Yorkshire. Steel and scrap metal, oil and other liquids, and lorry trailers on roll on, roll off ferries to Ireland. The passenger ferries use the same lane: the Isle of Man boats from the Pier Head and Stena Line’s Belfast ships from Birkenhead.

The two I photographed from the promenade were container ships. Every one of the hundred iron men was watching them.

This is the other half of the story from the Moelfre walk, where we watched big ships sitting at anchor off the Anglesey coast. Here they are moving.

What you are looking at from the beach

The cranes at Seaforth

Look south and the skyline is cranes. The big red and white ones belong to Liverpool2, the deep water container terminal at Seaforth that opened in November 2016 and cost around £400 million. It was built out into the river so the port could take the largest transatlantic container ships, two of them at a time. The cranes were made by ZPMC in Shanghai and arrived the dramatic way, sailing up the Mersey already built, five of them on a single delivery ship.

The blue crane among them is older, part of the original Seaforth container terminal that opened in the early 1970s. The wind turbines along the dock wall are onshore ones, and behind it all, through the drizzle, you can just make out the towers of Liverpool city centre.

Talacre lighthouse, just about

Away to the south west, past the end of the Wirral, I could just make out the lighthouse at Talacre. It is about fourteen and a half miles from Burbo Bank as the gull flies, and it is in Flintshire, which is my own county.

Its proper name is the Point of Ayr lighthouse. It was built in 1776 by a trust of the Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen of Chester, after two Dublin packet ships were lost, to warn vessels making their way between the Dee and the Mersey. It went out of use in 1844, when a light on piles further out took over. It is Grade II listed, privately owned, and still stands on the beach with the tide coming in around it.

1776 was a busy year for keeping ships off this coast. The same year, Liverpool’s dock trustees paid for a lifeboat station at Formby Point, a few miles north of where I parked. Sefton’s own local history talks call it Britain’s first.

New Brighton, across the water

Straight across the mouth of the river is New Brighton on the Wirral. The green dome on the skyline belongs to the church of Saints Peter, Paul and Philomena, known locally as the Dome of Home. In the Second World War, sailors coming back across the Atlantic knew they were nearly home when they saw it.

The wind farm on the horizon

The turbines out to sea are the Burbo Bank offshore wind farm, named after a sandbank in Liverpool Bay, which is also the name on the car park. The first 25 turbines went up in 2007. A 32 turbine extension followed in 2017 and was the first commercial wind farm to use 8 megawatt turbines.

Crosby parkrun, and where to park for it

Near the Leisure Centre we passed Crosby parkrun, with volunteers in hi-vis out on the grass. It is a free, timed 5k at nine every Saturday morning, and I suspect it is the only parkrun in the country where you run past a hundred naked men.

The course starts on the beach near Crosby Leisure Centre on Mariners Road, L23 6SX. It goes out and back along the sand among the iron men, then north along the promenade as far as the coastguard station by Burbo Bank, and back along the grass to finish by the Leisure Centre car park. At high tide they drop the beach section and run an alternative on the grass. Sand, tarmac and grass in one 5k, which is part of the charm. By late October 2026 it had passed 490 events and more than 18,000 different finishers.

Where to park. parkrun’s own advice is limited free parking at the Leisure Centre, in the right hand, north car park only. The left hand car park is for Leisure Centre users. There is more on Mariners Road and nearby streets, and they ask you to be considerate to residents. There is no coach parking.

Or do what we did and park at Burbo Bank. It is about a mile and a tenth from the start, which is a warm up, and it sits right at the far turning point of the course. Read the board and the machine for the hours, as above.

By train, Blundellsands and Crosby station on Merseyrail’s Northern Line is about ten minutes’ walk. By bus, the 53 from Liverpool stops on Bridge Road, five minutes away.

Dogs. You can take part with one dog on a short, handheld, non extendable lead. Waist harnesses are not allowed. With two dogs I would need a volunteer.

Toilets, a café and a pool are at the Leisure Centre, which is also where the post run coffee happens. And Crosby is a C, for anyone working through the parkrun alphabet the way Suzy is.

The coastguard station, the lifeguards and the nearest lifeboats

I had the building at the end of the car park down as a lifeboat station. It is not one, and the real story is better.

It is the old Liverpool Coastguard station. It opened on Hall Road in 1982, had a £1 million extension in 2001, and coordinated search and rescue for a huge stretch of coast, from Queensferry on the Dee, a few miles from my house, up to the Mull of Galloway in Scotland, plus the Lake District. It helped coordinate the response to the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster in February 2004, when 21 people died. Despite a long campaign to keep it, it closed in January 2015 and its work moved to Holyhead. The tall mast beside it is a coastal radar mast, used to track shipping.

Volunteers still cover this coast from the land. The Crosby Coastguard Rescue Team has eleven rescue officers plus a station officer and a deputy, and covers everywhere from Formby to Warrington. Getting people out of the mud on this beach is a regular part of the job.

Then there are the RNLI lifeguards. Crosby is the only beach in the UK where the RNLI has lifeguards on duty every day of the year, Christmas Day included, precisely because it is not safe to swim here. The beach is permanently red flagged. The sign at Mariners Road gives their hours as 10am to 6pm from April to September and 10am to 4pm from October to March. Since 2010 they have helped more than 14,000 people on this beach.

What Crosby does not have is a lifeboat. When something goes wrong out there, the boats come from across the water.

New Brighton, on the Wirral, has had a lifeboat station since 1863. It runs a B class Atlantic 85, one of the fastest boats in the RNLI fleet, launched off the beach from a tractor and carriage, and its crews have won 48 awards for gallantry. They are busy. They started 2025 with three call outs in twenty four hours.

Hoylake, further along the Wirral, has been going since 1803, which makes it one of the oldest lifeboat stations in Britain. It has a Shannon class all weather lifeboat, the Edmund Hawthorn Micklewood, driven by water jets rather than propellers and good for 25 knots, and a hovercraft called Hurley Spirit for the mud and shallow water where a boat cannot go. In February 2023 that hovercraft searched this exact shoreline in the dark, from the Leisure Centre past the coastguard station to the River Alt, after a report of someone in difficulty.

And if it ever comes to it, there is a public defibrillator on the side of the painted building by the promenade. Call 999 for the code.

Cujo, Blaze and the drizzle

The dogs had the best morning of anyone. Cujo and Blaze loved it, and went completely daft in the drizzle.

Dogs are welcome on Crosby beach. Sefton’s dog free beach zones are further up the coast at Ainsdale and Southport, not here. The borough wide rules still apply: no more than six dogs per person, and pick up after them, with a £75 fixed penalty if you do not, reduced to £50 if you pay within ten days.

Two Crosby specific warnings, both about the beach rather than the rules. The first is the mud. The council’s advice is to stay within fifty metres of the promenade, because there are areas of deep, shifting mud further out, and that applies to small dogs as much as to people. The second is water. There is nothing out there a dog should drink, and a dog that has been racing about on a salty beach for an hour wants a drink.

Ours drank from the portable water bottle we carry on every walk, which is in the kit list below.

Small things I liked

There is a beach toy library on the railings: a blue box of buckets and spades put there by the Friends of Crosby Beach and built by Sefton Council, with three instructions painted on the front. Borrow, play, return. Somebody has thought about this place.

There is a cheerful mural on the building set into the dunes, with a giant octopus and a message aimed squarely at the litter: slam dunk your junk.

And there is a lot of signage, most of it sensible. Sefton’s coastal protection order covers the whole coast and carries a £75 fixed penalty. No fires or barbecues anywhere, including on the sand and in the dunes. No drones without written permission. No camping or staying on the beach overnight. No horses within two hours of high tide.

What I wore, and what the dogs drank from

Hoka Kaha 3 Low GTX

I wore my Hoka Kaha 3 Low GTX. It is Hoka’s waterproof hiking shoe: a Gore-Tex lining, a nubuck leather upper and a very deep cushioned midsole on a Vibram Megagrip sole. Around £175 in the UK.

I have had mine for about nine months and I love them. Almost every shoe I own now is a Hoka, from these to the Infini Hike TC sandals I reviewed in the summer, which tells you how that has gone. There is no affiliate link on these. Just the opinion.

The honest negative is weight. They are not light. RunRepeat weighed one at 465 grams, against an average of 375 grams across the hiking shoes they have tested.

The dog water bottle

The COTOP portable dog water bottle came out again. Squeeze water up into the trough on top, the dogs drink, close it and whatever they leave drains back into the bottle. No bowl, no puddle, one hand. On a beach with no fresh water, it is the one thing I would not leave in the van.

Practical bits

3.07 flat miles, out and back from Burbo Bank car park at the end of Hall Road West. £1.90 for two hours when I went, charges printed on the board as 10am to 5pm, RingGo location 17918. Toilets by the car park at 40p, coins only.

Not a bathing beach, permanently red flagged, soft mud further out. Stay within fifty metres of the promenade and do not try to walk out to the furthest figures, however tempting it looks at low tide.

Dogs welcome on the beach. Bring water for them. Day visits only, with no overnight parking and no camping.

Hall Road station on Merseyrail is a short walk away if you are not driving. Crosby parkrun is at nine on Saturdays from the Leisure Centre.

If you want another coastal walk with ships in it, Moelfre to Lligwy on Anglesey has a whole line of them at anchor. If you want something with no ships at all and a river instead, the Chester riverside walk is ten miles from our house.

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I’m Pete Harrison. I’m 55, I live in Buckley in North Wales, and I have a mild case of insomnia that means I spend a lot of time at 3am looking up the things I saw the day before. Things I Learnt at 3am is where I write honestly about what I’ve actually bought, walked, tested and lived with.