slate industry

Liverpool

This week: World Heritage Sites

It was not, perhaps, our finest hour. On 21 July, UNESCO announced that its World Heritage Committee had voted to remove Liverpool from its List of World Heritage Sites, making Britain only the third country ever to suffer such an indignity. To make matters worse, the UN-backed agency warned that Stonehenge would also find its status in doubt if the government pressed ahead with plans to build a £1.7bn road tunnel under the site.

Opposite This aerial view of the Gorseddau quarry shows how much infrastructure was needed to extract, work, and transport the stone. The stepped quarry at the centre is flanked on either side by a series of working platforms where slate blocks were turned into roofing slates. The four terraces to the left are connected by inclined planes, down which the worked slate was carried on rails on wedge shaped carriages. Waste stone was taken by tramway along each terrace to be tipped off the edge, creating the characteristic lobe shapes fanning out from the terraces.

Appreciating the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales

On 28 July, UNESCO added the Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales to its list of World Heritage sites, which currently number 1,154. Chris Catling reports on the reasons for this inscription and marvels at the human ingenuity that has left us with a remarkable landscape combining natural and man-made features – fully worthy of being included in the top tier of all heritage sites in the world.