Eurovision 2023: what remains in Liverpool

A contest hosted for a country that couldn’t host it

Eurovision 2023 happened in Liverpool for a reason that made the whole event unusually charged: Ukraine won the 2022 contest with Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania,” which under Eurovision’s normal rules means the winning country hosts the following year. But Ukraine was, and remains, at war, and the European Broadcasting Union judged it unsafe to hold a mass international event there. Instead, the EBU selected the United Kingdom, as runner-up in 2022 (Sam Ryder’s “Space Man” finished second), to host on Ukraine’s behalf — with an explicit mandate to weave Ukrainian culture, symbolism and hosting input throughout the event rather than simply staging a normal UK-hosted contest.

Liverpool beat Glasgow in the UK’s internal host-city competition, partly on the strength of the M&S Bank Arena’s waterfront setting and partly because a city with the Beatles’ musical pedigree made obvious symbolic sense for hosting Europe’s biggest live music event. The contest ran across the week of 9-13 May 2023, with the grand final won by Sweden’s Loreen.

What was built for the event

Much of Eurovision 2023’s physical footprint in Liverpool was, by design, temporary. The “EuroVillage” fan zone on the waterfront, the “Eurovision Bridge” pedestrian crossing linking the arena to the city centre, and the elaborate street decorations along the main thoroughfares were all installed for the contest period and removed afterward, as is standard practice for events of this scale. That’s worth being upfront about for anyone visiting now expecting to find a Eurovision theme park still running — there isn’t one, and there was never meant to be.

What Liverpool did keep, deliberately, was a set of cultural and civic legacies rather than physical infrastructure. National Museums Liverpool ran a major Eurovision-and-Ukraine exhibition during and after the contest, and elements of that programming — Ukrainian cultural exchange projects, artist residencies, and civic partnership links between Liverpool and Ukrainian cities — have continued in reduced form in the years since, administered through the city’s cultural institutions rather than as a standalone tourist attraction.

The waterfront mural and public art

The most visible lasting physical trace is public art: several murals and installations created around the Eurovision period remain on view around the city centre and waterfront, part of Liverpool’s broader habit of using street art to mark major cultural moments (see our street art guide for the wider context). These aren’t heavily signposted as “Eurovision sites” in the way Beatles locations are marked — they’re more incidental, the kind of thing a visitor might walk past without necessarily connecting to the 2023 event unless they already know the context.

Did it actually help Liverpool?

The economic case is genuinely strong: Eurovision 2023 is estimated to have generated well over £50 million in economic impact for the Liverpool city region, with sold-out arena shows across the contest week and a substantial visitor bump in hotel occupancy and hospitality spend. Global broadcast reach put Liverpool’s waterfront in front of an enormous international television audience, at a moment when the pandemic-era collapse in international tourism was still being recovered from.

The less quantifiable but arguably more significant impact was reputational: hosting Eurovision “for” Ukraine, with genuine care taken over Ukrainian cultural representation throughout (Ukrainian words and symbols appeared throughout the venue and host segments, and the contest opened with cultural performances honouring Ukraine), gave Liverpool a moment of international goodwill that’s distinct from its usual Beatles-and-football tourism narrative. It reinforced, in a very public way, the city’s post-2008 pattern of using major events as accelerants for broader civic confidence — the same pattern our Capital of Culture 2008 piece traces from the earlier, larger-scale precedent.

What’s genuinely still there to see

If you’re visiting Liverpool now specifically curious about the Eurovision connection, temper your expectations: this is a legacy you have to look for rather than one that announces itself at every corner. The Eurovision legacy guide covers the specific remaining exhibition material, murals and civic programming in detail. The M&S Bank Arena itself, where the contest was staged, continues operating as Liverpool’s main large-scale concert venue, and it’s worth remembering, walking past it, that for one week in May 2023 it hosted one of the most emotionally loaded broadcasts in the contest’s history — a fact the building itself gives away nothing about from the outside.

As Eurovision-specific content continues to age out of active memory, Liverpool’s broader music tourism story — Beatles, Merseybeat, the ongoing live scene covered in our music scene guide — remains the more durable draw. Eurovision 2023 was a genuine, well-executed moment for the city, but it was always going to be a moment rather than a permanent fixture, and honest reporting on the city should say so plainly.