Walker Art Gallery

The Walker owes its name to a beer fortune. Andrew Barclay Walker, a Liverpool brewer who was also the city's mayor, paid for the gallery that opened in 1877 to give the port a public home for art. Its holdings reach back further, to 1819, when a group of early Italian and Netherlandish pictures gathered by the abolitionist and collector William Roscoe came to the city after his bankruptcy.

The result is one of the strongest collections in England outside London. Visitors find medieval and Renaissance panels, Rubens and Rembrandt, and a celebrated group of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, among them Millais's Isabella. The gallery also runs the John Moores Painting Prize, a contemporary competition held since 1957 that keeps sending new British painting through these older rooms.

The building itself is a Neoclassical block with a columned portico on William Brown Street, part of the cluster of grand civic monuments Liverpool raised while it was one of the busiest ports on earth.