麻豆社

Radio 4 throws down a challenge to poet Kim Moore: to create a poem inspired by one of the UK's many abandoned buildings. She visits a vast Victorian edifice she has never seen before in Newsham Park, Liverpool which was the Seamen鈥檚 Orphanage, later became an NHS hospital for people suffering with mental illness and is now a site for ghost tours.

Kim explores the Grade II listed building with local historian Steve Corcoran, discovering that it was originally designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the Natural History Museum. A group of Liverpool ship owners got together to finance the construction, when Liverpool was the second biggest port in the British Empire and life at sea was a precarious occupation.

Kim explores the now empty dining room, old staircases covered in anti-suicide grills, dormitories and wards with peeling paint and hears from people who have lived and worked there. As well as seeking inspiration for her poem, she sounds her trumpet where the orphanage's brass band used to play and ponders what the future may hold for this uncanny, derelict site.