[1][2][3][4] The port has significant links to North America and the rest of Europe via the Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

The Lyver Pool, a tidal inlet in the narrows of the estuary, which is now largely under the Liverpool One shopping centre, was converted into the enclosed dock.

Further docks were added and eventually all were interconnected by lock gates, extending 7.5 miles (12.1 km) along the Liverpool bank of the River Mersey.

In 1972, Canadian Pacific unit CP Ships was the last transatlantic line to operate from Liverpool.

In 2020 Liverpool was the United Kingdom's fourth largest port by tonnage of freight, handling 31.1 million tonnes.

Until 2012, any cruises beginning in Liverpool still departed from Langton Dock but, since 2012, the terminal has been used as the start and end of voyages, and not merely a stop-off point.

[13] This led to a dispute with Southampton due to the large public subsidy provided for the new terminal,[14] which Liverpool City Council has agreed to repay.

The terminal was accessed via the 1.26 mi (2.03 km) Wapping Tunnel from Edge Hill rail junction in the east of the city.

Previous to this, having only seen the miserable wooden wharves, and slip-shod, shambling piers of New York, the sight of these mighty docks filled my young mind with wonder and delight...

In Liverpool, I beheld long China walls of masonry; vast piers of stone; and a succession of granite-rimmed docks, completely inclosed, and many of them communicating, which almost recalled to mind the great American chain of lakes: Ontario, Erie, St. Clair, Huron, Michigan, and Superior.

Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other—too immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense of human handicraft—this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed, to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that have long passed out of their control ... ...Liverpool is the biggest port ... there was something to see from Dingle up to Bootle, and as far again as Birkenhead on the other side.

Yellow water, bellowing steam ferries, white trans-atlantic liners, towers, cranes, stevedores, skiffs, shipyards, trains, smoke, chaos, hooting, ringing, hammering, puffing, the ruptured bellies of the ships, the stench of horses, the sweat, urine, and waste from all the continents of the world ... And if I heaped up words for another half an hour, I wouldn't achieve the full number, confusion and expanse which is called Liverpool....Old photographs and even the print of Liverpool Docks as seen from the overhead railway would fail to convey the powerful reality of the Port of Liverpool in the 1950s.