Yellow Submarine at Liverpool John Lennon Airport

The Yellow Submarine at Liverpool John Lennon Airport is a steel model about 15.6 m long and 18 tons, standing on a traffic island at the airport entrance in Speke. Around 80 apprentices at the Cammell Laird shipyard built it for the 1984 International Garden Festival, and it moved to the airport in 2005.

Built in a shipyard for a garden festival

The submarine is 17 years older than the airport's Lennon name. In 1984 roughly 80 apprentices at the Cammell Laird shipyard made it for the International Garden Festival in Liverpool, and a yard draughtsman, L. Pinch, is credited with part of the design. It copies the craft from the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, which took its title from the 1966 song on Revolver.

The festival had 60 themed gardens, and the Beatles one was laid out as an apple-shaped maze with the submarine at its centre. Visitors could go inside. Doorways in the side opened onto a mock control cabin fitted with genuine submarine equipment, and two spiral staircases climbed to the bridge, which looked out over the whole garden. The yellow hull was set at a tilt, as though the boat were about to dive.

Chavasse Park, storage and a refit

When the festival site closed, the submarine moved to Chavasse Park in the city centre and stood there for several years, in plain view of drivers coming in from the south. As its condition got worse it was taken out of public view. It was renovated and put on a traffic island at the entrance to Liverpool John Lennon Airport in 2005; the airport's chief at the time, Neil Pakey, said other airports had Concorde and Liverpool had the Yellow Submarine. A Geograph photograph from February 2023 shows it still on the island.

Two Beatles pieces at one airport

The submarine sits outside; inside the terminal is Tom Murphy's 2002 bronze of Lennon, the John Lennon statue, Liverpool Airport. Liverpool has no Lennon bridge, despite the name turning up in search, and the city-centre Lennon is David Webster's figure on Mathew Street, about 11.6 km from the airport.