Glass map sculpture for Museum of Liverpool

The Liverpool Map will be exhibited at the new Museum of Liverpool at the Pier Head

A large glass sculpture capturing Liverpool people's thoughts on their city at its 800th birthday will be shown in the new Museum of Liverpool.

The Liverpool Map, made up of six, two metre high glass panels, will be part of the People's Republic Gallery.

Created by international glasswork artists, the sculpture maps the city by culture and heritage rather than on geographical lines.

The Museum of Liverpool will open on 19 July, 2011.

Newspaper poll

The Liverpool Daily Post collected suggestions of people and places that should be featured in the map during 2007, Liverpool's 800th birthday year.

Contributions of handwriting were collected from a series of community workshops and extracts from the Liverpool Saga, created by BBC Radio Merseyside listeners, were also fed in to the process.

The result of the newspaper polls were then translated into the design of the map showing centuries of the city's history.

The Liverpool Map will be placed in front of a 28 metre wide window in the museum overlooking Liverpool's Pier Head.

'Relatively terrifying'

American glass sculptor Jeffrey Sarmiento worked with Belgian artist Inge Panneels on the map, each section of which weighs 100kg and took four people to lift.

"I had not initially planned on coming up to see it being put in place because I find installs relatively terrifying and one single section of the Liverpool Map is twice as big as any piece I have made before, but I am relieved it is up and it looks extremely close to how we envisaged it," he said.

Chair of National Museums Liverpool Professor Phil Redmond, who founded the Open Culture project The Liverpool Map is part of, said he thinks the sculpture will be one of the museum's main attractions.

"It is a brilliant representation of what we set out to do in Capital of Culture year, create something multi-layered, textured and involving so many people.

"It is interesting to see how its appearance changes with the light.

"People will have to keep coming back to pick out all the different details."

The £72m Museum of Liverpool will display more than 6,000 objects chronicling the city's history from the last Ice Age to the present day.