Life is "like a Sunday afternoon" on a formerly "dilapidated and scruffy" street once visited by Princess Diana.
Despite being just a few hundred feet from Liverpool Women's Hospital and the traffic of Upper Parliament Street, Falkner Square is peaceful. The white rows of three storey Georgian houses surround a park where Rossie is walking his dog, Kim Beecroft sits journalling on a bench, and Mo Tahir has just stumbled across a rare, leafy green in central Liverpool.
Rossie will have lived in the area for 18 years this April. He said: "You've got a beautiful mix of people. People who are local, people who maybe come from outside of this particular area. They can sit here in the summer, people lay out, take in the rays, have a little picnic, and as you can see, I'm walking my dog Micky boy."
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One of the houses on the Toxteth square, No 1, was once the Venezuelan consulate. Now, it's the Embassie Hostel, run by veteran backpacker Kevin Murphy, his dad, also Kevin Murphy, and his dog T2, named after Terminal 2 at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Kevin Jr was born on Lodge Lane, "just a stone's throw from here", and his grandad's GP was on Sandon Street, one of four roads running off the square, so he considers himself a lifelong local. Kevin "always thought it was magnificent, Falkner Square", which he described as "like a Sunday afternoon, the square is quiet most days".
He said: "I used to come past the square as a baby, as a kid. I used to look at this house, the Embassie, the former Venezuelan consulate. I remember a dog being in the window. That was when I was about four years of age, so this house has always been in my life."
Now in his 50s, Kevin fell into hostel keeping at 21 when a landlady in Bolder, Colorado left him the keys to her hostel while he hitchhiked through 45 US states. He said: "It was a bit overwhelming because I didn't expect to be in that situation, but after the first week of hecticness, I started to get a bit of a vibe off it. felt like this might be for me."
When he came back to Liverpool, his mind turned to the big houses of what would soon become the highly desired 'Georgian Quarter'. Before its transformation, Kevin remembers "a real vibe that nobody knew about when it was a half derelict site".
Roofs of unoccupied houses were missing slates and lead, taken for other purposes. Kevin said: "The city was pretty run down and pretty raw. A lot of the houses were empty, what's known as 'bombers' - dilapidated houses. They were like squats. People down on their luck, musicians and hippies and that, squatting in the houses.
"It was a great time when I was around here. We had undergound parties in the square with fires burning underground. I don't think anybody knew we were there, it was really bohemian."
When 1 Falkner Square - Kevin's "dream house" - went up for sale in the mid-1990s, he leapt at the opportunity. Kevin said: "It's the first house in the square, built in 1820. It's a beautiful house, it's in the right position, the ceilings are high."
Behind the hostel's red door is a seemingly never-ending sprawl of rooms. There's a kitchen at the back where T2 is snoozing on a cushion, with a door leading to a yard where Kevin Sr, 80, is preparing a barbeque. The basement covers the width and breadth of the house, adding a fourth floor to the building.
Wooden banisters wind up the stairs to a landing lit by skylight. In a room with thick wooden beams holding up the roof, you can climb through a window onto a balcony atop bay windows to can glance across the slates and see the sun smolder behind the redbrick tower of Liverpool Cathedral.
Most of the houses around here have been split into flats. Numbers two to 10 Falkner Square are occupied by Friendship House, retirement housing opened by Princess Diana in 1989.
One of the few houses still a single unit is currently undergoing renovation, with work falling silent when camera crews are around and joiners drop tools to peek through the gate. One said: "You're not allowed to get in the shot, you've got to be dead quiet."
The Georgian Quarter is a magnet for film and television productions like Peaky Blinders, Outlander and Irregulars, often used as a location for London scenes. It "looks like Chelsea", according to Mo, but it's "got a village feel, close to the city centre, but not so close that it's noisy", according to a woman who moved here from London with her late husband.
One series, Netflix's The English Game, used nearby Percy Street as a stand-in for Mayfair due to its Grade II listed Edwardian homes. Kevin Jr thinks this likeness to certain parts of London is why the area has seen a rise in house prices and an influx of wealthier residents in recent years. He described it as "Mayfair but 20% of the price".
Despite these rising prices pushing some locals out, and a move more more modern, white, Ikea-style decor taking over some houses, Kevin believes the area still has the "multicultural spirit" Toxteth is known for, and which binds the community together.
There is gentrification, but Kevin also sees it as buildings returning to function and feeling more youthful in "an area that looks great when it's polished". He said: "The area has got better with Chinatown moving towards us, more eateries and cafés and things.
"Some people would argue it's getting a bit too commercial now, but I think with all the flats getting renovated and people moving back to the centre, you need shops and places to go."
Even with the city centre encroaching, Kim, a 21-year-old acting student at LIPA, comes here to the nearest patch of grass to find somewhere to write that's "calm, peaceful and feels quite safe".
Rossie said: "Falkner Square is literally on my doorstep, but I never take it for granted. It's a lovely little square, very well kept, very picturesque, particularly in autumn. When you drive through, it looks like an arch and it's golden, it's fantastic.
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