How a BBC engineer captured Liverpool in transition

Photos showing the changing Liverpool landscape have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter.

Matt Ballantine scanned the photographs taken in 1966 by his father Malcolm and tweeted them earlier this week, to be inundated with responses.

They were taken when Malcolm was a BBC outside broadcast engineer during the 1966 World Cup but were never printed.

Matt said: "It's probably worth pointing out that my dad had little or no interest in football."

Instead of focusing on the tournament, Malcolm captured a slice of social history, illustrating Liverpool's transition from wartime devastation to modernisation.

Malcolm, 81, said: "As a Londoner working for five weeks in Liverpool, I used to wander around on my day off just taking photographs.

"I developed the negatives but never printed the photos. I put them in a drawer and forgot all about them the until a few years ago."

Matt decided to post the images after speaking to a friend in the USA.

"He was talking about how so many British musicians had grown up in the post-war landscape and I remembered scanning dad's photos," he said.

Malcolm's shots depict the remnants of bombed-out buildings and the beginning of the slum clearances, as well as the Metropolitan Cathedral which officially opened the following year.

Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk