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This weekend is the 80th anniversary of Black May, a turning point in World War II's Battle of the Atlantic. Read what's on and the role the Left Bank played.

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**This weekend is the 80th anniversary of a crucial turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic – Black May, where fewer allied ships were sunk than the German U-Boot Waffe during World War II.**

It’s a pivotal period of history that we helped shape, right here on the Left Bank. It’s why the event is being commemorated along our riverfront, and it’s why we recommend you really don’t miss it. 

Events will be held from today to Sunday 28 May to mark the anniversary. The Mersey will be welcoming some pretty important visitors – HMS Defender has already navigated her way over to Liverpool’s pier head, and she’ll be joined by the French Destroyer FS Bretagne and Trinity House Vessel Patricia.

The USS Ramage will also be coming here over the weekend. They’ll all be joined by Her Royal Highness, Princess Royal who’s scheduled to open a new Battle of the Atlantic memorial and garden of reflection at The Church of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas.

History-defining moments like Black May couldn’t have been possible without the efforts of the mighty Cammell Laird shipyard. It was here where  a 12,000-strong workforce produced a ship every 21 days during the Second World War - 106 naval vessels in total with repairs carried out on 2,000 merchant vessels and 120 warships.

A series of Battle of the Atlantic-themed tours are being held at Cammell Laird, with visitors able to tour the yard and see the areas so crucial to the war effort. It’s also a chance to see how the shipyard has modernised over the years, and how shipbuilding itself has evolved over the best part of a century.

If you visit on Saturday 27 May you’ll also be able to board vintage buses that have been kindly donated by Wirral Transport Museum. Exclusive commentary has also been created for the bus rides, which will help paint a picture of the extreme round-the-clock pressures taking place at the time.

Keep your eyes on the skies too over the weekend to see a Lancaster bomber, Spitfire and Hurricane flying over the Mersey alongside Seafire and Swordfish displays. And, if you’re over the water this bank holiday weekend, there are a lot of creative events to commemorate the battle including theatre shows, music and dance performances and more.

(Incidentally, today’s the last chance to see ‘Blowing a Raspberry at Hitler’ at the John Foster Drama Studio on Hope Street, which we think is well worth your time.)

**Cammell Laird Shipyard**

**Campbeltown Road, Birkenhead, CH41 9BP**

Our Role in the Battle of the Atlantic

Andy Saunders' Apollo Remastered is landing at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum in April. Left Bank finds out why it's the perfect place to host his exhibit.

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**“What particularly impressed me about The Williamson is the huge amount of quality gallery space we can utilise - almost 4,000sq ft - so I knew we could put a huge exhibition on here.”**

Space is everything to Andy Saunders. Not just gallery space; the north-west native’s Sunday Times bestseller, Apollo Remastered, was an instant hit when launched, garnering global praise and smashing our own personal ‘top five coffee-table books’ list.

Apollo Remastered was propelled into the stratosphere in 2022 and also orbits the world as a celebrated exhibition. Andy’s restored images of the lunar voyages have recently been displayed in London, Scotland and the UAE.

Now, the exhibit’s landing at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum between April and September, and we’re over the moon. We think it’s one small step to creating a whole new generation of lunar-tics on the left bank; kids and adults alike.

“I was especially keen to host the exhibition at a north-west venue,” Andy tells us. 

“The curators also really got the project and are as keen as I am to adapt the space as much as possible to really create an atmosphere suitable for these images and the subject matter. 

“From the colour scheme, to the lighting and even audio - I really want people to feel like they've gone back in time and are making the journey to the moon themselves.”

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For the first time in 50 years the original lunar voyage flight films (rather than duplicates) have been digitally scanned. 

Writer and image-restoration specialist Andy applied the latest digital processing techniques to these scans to produce highly-detailed, upscaled versions of the footage taken by NASA’s astronauts all those years ago.

So, we’ll be that guy. Which pic is his favourite? 

“It’s so difficult to choose a favourite image. I like so many for many different reasons. They took 35,000, so even whittling those down to 400 for the book was a near-impossible task. 

“There are images of historical significance; images that reveal something entirely new; images that instantly convey the awe-inspiring nature of human-space exploration… There are so many that are simply stunning.”

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Andy is also giving talks at the gallery on 12 May and 20 August, where he’ll likely provide a fascinating insight into the no-doubt extremely careful and delicate process of restoring and digitising NASA’s historical images.

For Andy though, it isn’t so much the voyages and the images that capture his imagination, but how NASA’s missions broke the boundaries of human achievement, and opened up a whole new universe of possibility for mankind.

“What better subject matter than fellow humans doing extraordinary things with the backdrop of 1960s spacecraft and scenes that are literally other-worldy?” he says.

“There are panoramic shots that show the scale and grandeur of the lunar landscape, but I think it’s the moments that capture the human side to the missions… these intimate, candid moments that I’ve managed to reveal.

“The Armstrong image [that was released in 2019] will be difficult to beat because of historical significance, but the photograph of Jim McDivitt on the cover of the book has it all.

“It's such an atmospheric, cinematic portrait and it's an image that was in such a bad state before. It was so rarely seen, and it’s a very historic moment.”

**28 April – 2 September 2023**

**Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, CH43 4UE**

[**More information on the Apollo Remastered website**](https://www.apolloremastered.com/)

[**The Williamson Art Gallery & Museum website**](https://williamsonartgallery.org/portfolio_page/apollo-remastered/)

Apollo Remastered

With Open Door, Lee Pennington wanted to change the way we talked about mental health. In doing so, his team has brought us new Hamilton Square development Joy.

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**Open Door's Lee Pennington has big plans. "Bloom Building isn’t big enough," he says. "We need to be bolder."**

“It’s been transformational for where we’re at now, but we need to get a better, more bespoke, brighter, building and to diversify how we sustain what’s now a £1m turnover plus charity. 

“We need to adapt and grow and change. Joy allows us to realise the potential of what the charity is now. 

“It’s a coming together of public, private and third sector, in a way that they don’t come together and deliver services together and coexist and co-inhabit and enhance each other’s offers – anywhere in the country.”

[**Read our interview with Lee and more about the Open Door Charity's work here**](https://www.leftbank.life/arms-wide-open)

The former Treasury Annexe, on the corner of Hamilton Square, will see Open Door move in to a building that’s bursting with colour, sound… and movement. 

Slides will snake down each staircase; swings will float people around the building. It’s a place designed to shape change, raise aspirations and improve life and health outcomes; an inclusive setting to reach people otherwise disengaged from services, support vulnerable members of the community, with art and culture at its heart. 

Facilities like a café and a barber and an outdoor performance space will be joined by social organisations like Convenience Gallery, PositiviTree and Happy Times Activities. 

Conversations are ongoing, but services including midwifery, 0-19 Health and Wellbeing and suicide prevention support from CAMHS are poised to head for Joy, too. 

“For Wirral – and further afield,” he says, “if we take all the NHS Trusts – our strategic and delivery partners – well, depending who you talk to and what day of the week it is, that’s the most progressive NHS health centre in the country. It’s giving the NHS the ability to talk a different language to the public.”

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Pennington is unfazed by the jump. “This ‘let’s get the gang together thing’, is what we’re good at. It seems natural,” he says. 

“How complicated is it that, anywhere where there’s stairs in a building, there should be a kid’s slide next to it? Isn’t it obvious? You’ve got to make the place have good energy and form. It’s not expensive. 

“Some of the organisations in there are working with people of all ages with learning disabilities or an autism diagnosis. 

“And we know that all the evidence suggests to create places that people can swing off and climb on and hang off and stuff like that. It creates a bespoke space for people with those needs. 

“Why wouldn’t we do that?”

[**Learn more about Joy online**](https://www.wherejoylives.co.uk/)

A Place Called Joy

Miracles do happen. A group of dedicated volunteers campaigned to protect inspirational gallery space, Ron's Place, from extinction. This is their story.

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**It’s official. The tale with more twists and turns than a Netflix box set has reached its nerve-shredding conclusion.**

Well, maybe. Or maybe the singular story of a one-storey flat in Oxton, once home to Ron Gittins, is just getting started.

What we do know is that, at the 11th hour, the hammer fell on the auction and the flat was sold to the good people of Saving Ron’s Place: the tireless volunteers who’ve campaigned to save this gallery of audacious outsider art for all of us. 

“Over the last three years, a small group of volunteers and I have fought hard to try and find a way to save Ron’s Place,” filmmaker and arts activist Martin Wallace told us.

“We did it not just because it’s a unique and internationally significant place in itself, but because we could see how Ron’s could form the hub of an inspirational creative programme focused on improving mental health and wellbeing of anyone who comes through its doors,” he says. Well, we say ‘doors’…but they’re more like totemic portals to a hitherto-hidden underworld of fabulous beasts and Roman altarpieces.

For Martin the crusade was as much about promoting a wider sense of community through exhibits, workshops and connections made in this eye-popping apartment, rich with Egyptian hieroglyphs, papier-mâché sculpture of Cleopatra and strange and wondrous creatures. 

“Over these three years, we’d tried to find a suitable partner to help us buy the building. However, for various reasons, we could never quite achieve that, although we came close,” he says.

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Then, after the group had been given its notice, and they’d handed the keys back to the current owner, something as strange and wonderful as Ron’s artwork itself happened…

On the day of the auction Tamsin Wimhurst was on a train. Trustee of the Muller Wimhurst Trust, Tamsin and her partner Michael Muller are also responsible for saving the David Parr House, a small Arts and Crafts museum in Cambridge. Skimming through the day’s Guardian, Tamsin spotted the story about Ron’s Place.

“Tamsin had been in a similar situation when she’d discovered the amazing terraced house in Cambridge, now known as David Parr House,” Martin says. “She bought that house and it’s now a thriving centre which offers a unique time capsule into the late 1800s, when David Parr created the interior.”

“I just thought ‘How could it not be saved?’” Tamsin tells us. “It’s unique and quirky, with the passion of one man’s life laid bare on the walls of his home. It immediately gets your mind whirring – how, why, who, what, when?”

For Tamsin, and Martin, the answers to all these questions begin to form a narrative that will be the starting point for the many ways to use Ron’s home to inspire others.

For Ron’s niece, Jan Williams, founder of the Saving Ron’s Place campaign and half of artist duo The Caravan Gallery, the past three years has been nothing short of tumultuous: “We were on the verge of saying our final goodbyes to Ron’s in the run-up to the auction,” Jan admits. 

“You can imagine how utterly gobsmacked we were on the morning of the auction to receive a message from a complete stranger offering to lend us the money to bid at auction.”

After a frantic couple of hours putting everything in place, Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust now owns the building which will, once refurbished, include affordable housing. 

“Of course this is just the beginning of the next phase in our Ron’s Place adventure and there’s loads of hard work ahead,” Jan says.

“There’s huge potential to share the magic of Ron’s with people in the local community and beyond. Everyone who’s crossed the threshold into the amazing world Ron created in his rented flat is taken aback by the sheer scale and audacity of his vision. 

"It’s a proven fact that creativity is beneficial to our wellbeing and it certainly kept Ron going through some difficult times,” Jan adds.

“We know that Ron’s Place is going to make a fantastically positive impact in people’s lives and it’s so great that it's right here in Birkenhead.”

“This is when the really hard work starts,” says Martin. “This whole process will likely take up to two years before it’s entirely complete.

“They’ve come this far,” says Tamsin. “How can they not succeed?”

[**Find out more about Ron’s Place**](https://ronsplace.co.uk/)

Saving Ron's Place

Left Bank Issue Three: We Made This is out now! We explore the Left Bank to find the makers and creatives making a difference throughout the Wirral and beyond.

Issue Three: We Made This - Out Now

Wellington Road Art Studios is hosting their Christmas Open Studios this weekend (25 and 26 November), featuring full-coloured fabulousness and gifts aplenty.

Made For Christmas

Adam Fenley is on a mission to get us supporting local traders through Wirral Spend Independent, opening up exclusive offers and discounts via his snazzy cards.

Wirral Spend Independent

Dan Hoolahan’s Utology creates some of the most strikingly simple and beautiful furnishings you’ll find. We find out how he went from garage to hotel chain.

Table Manners

Wirral Unplugged has been nominated for a national Fantastic for Families award in the Best Family Arts Activity category. CEO Dr Diana Powell tells us more.

Wirral Unplugged Nominated For Fantastic For Families Award

You may know Marie Louise Williams, founder of Oxton's Wellington Road. What you may not know is her story, and how it all started with the weaving of a basket.

Our Role in the Battle of the Atlantic

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Our Role in the Battle of the Atlantic

Related Articles

Apollo Remastered

A Place Called Joy

Saving Ron's Place

Editor's Picks

Cookie Notice

Editor's
Picks