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A giant spider hangs from the side of the Concourse Tower in Liverpool. The mechanical spider, which will appear at different locations around the city over the next few days, weighs 37 tonnes and stands 50 feet high. Should Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture be judged by the ripples it causes beyond the Wirral? The odd burst of Merseyside gaiety has registered on the national radar. I remember Ringo doing his bit, though perhaps only because he said something unflattering on TV afterwards. McCartney came and went, and then there was Klimt at the Tate, and of course Simon Rattle. No doubt there have been hundreds of excellent under-reported smaller events, vibrant and eye-catching in their way, and, yes, visitors have been flocking in to enjoy the docks and museums and parks and dancing in the street, helping to celebrate the city's proud achievements and history and enduring distinctive character. But where, you wonder, is the one big unmissable thing - the thing to boggle the collective mind? Where is the 'blimey' factor of Liverpool 08? Perhaps this is it. It's Wednesday morning and commuters are staring up at something dangling from a derelict 15-storey office block next to Lime Street Station. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Not with those legs. No, having tried a couple of Beatles, the moment has come for Liverpool to - ahem - roll out its spider. But this is no wee, cowering, timorous beastie. It weighs 37 tonnes and stands 50ft tall. It will remain here for the rest of the day. At night they'll have the searchlights on it, and on Thursday 'scientists' will crane it off and haul it across town. On Friday the spider will awake, beginning what promises to be 'the biggest, most spectacular piece of street theatre ever seen in the UK'... The idea is that the spider has emerged from the cobwebby recesses of this partly demolished building, providing a notional thread, as it were, between the ongoing celebrations and Liverpool's renaissance. But if it could talk, it wouldn't be in a Scouse accent. Rewind several weeks, to Nantes in northern France. It's a warm day and I'm wandering the site of the city's former shipyards on a sliver of an island in the Loire, a place, like Britain's own post-industrial centres, assuming a new shape and purpose with its ambient rumble of earthmovers and gentle breeze of civic awakening. Things are afoot on this grid of dusty streets lined with abandoned factory units, planted with saplings. There's a Banksy-style bit of graffiti art depicting a woman holding a chainsaw; up ahead a modish slab of office space; further, a little of the brutalist block housing much loved by the French, greenery hanging from the balconies. It has the air of a neighbourhood waiting for cool people to move in, followed by galleries, studios, hip bars, cake shops, estate agents. Central to all this - the magnet that has set everything twitching, and home to Liverpool's spider - are the workshops of Les Machines de l'Ile. They are busy with visitors - in the sunny café, exploring the high reaches of a huge fabricated tree-branch that sprouts out of the primary-coloured warehouses, or below, on the riverside concourse, admiring the merry-go-round with its winged horses and chameleons. Les Machines is the company charged with constructing a public spectacle here among the ghosts of the city's port heritage, a monumental long-term project funded out of the municipal purse, beefed up with regional and EU money. The designer and creative force is François Delarozière, the man who also dreamed up the awesome mechanical elephant that came lumbering through the centre of London two summers ago. That project - The Sultan's Elephant - was produced by Royal de Luxe, a long-established Nantes-based theatrical company. Nantes itself seethes with impresarios of one sort or another (30-odd performing organisations in a place the size of Southampton), nurtured by an arts-loving administration that has put culture at the heart of the city's revival. If Liverpool wants something special, it has come to the right place. Inside the high workshops, the spider (dubbed La Princesse) is still being knocked into shape - a huge thing, its arrangement of hydraulics and cables and chrome levers exposed, a half-dozen mechanics clambering about up there with their spanners and chisels, others perched amid the wooden and metal armour of its great pod and folded legs, and not a hard hat in sight. Health and Safety? Pah! It seems unfeasibly complicated. You'd think they'd have robots to do this kind of thing, but no, it's like walking into a Stella ad - small-town 1950s Peugeot factory, sunlight raking the inner darkness, air scented with WD40 and glue and rubber and coffee and Gitanes, the hiss of pneumatic equipment, beautiful grubby women with welding torches and ill-cut hair, grease guns. It's all here bar the Tour de France whizzing by outside.