Liverpool

With the UK’s identity as an island nation more important today than for the last 50 years, Adrian Chiles, Mehreen Baig and a team of experts explore four spectacular coastlines linked by the Irish Sea and meet the people who call them home.

In the first episode, they visit the Merseyside coast, stretching from Sefton Sands in the north to the Wirral in the south, via the great port city of Liverpool.

Adrian goes onboard to explore the nooks and crannies of what is the largest ocean-crossing liner in the world, the Queen Mary 2. Mehreen meanwhile is off to board a slightly smaller craft, run by one of the oldest lifeboat stations anywhere in the country, the Hoylake Hovercraft.

Other highlights of the show include historian Emma Dabiri on the hunt for a Viking ship that might just be buried under a Wirral pub car park, environmental scientist Tara Shine finding out how the people of Formby are protecting one of the country’s last thriving colonies of red squirrels, and engineer Danielle George visiting the Birkenhead Hydraulic Tower, a local titan of Victorian industry which was bombed in the Blitz and is now about to become the centrepiece of an industrial renaissance.