Sophie's a model citizen

Nov 16 2006 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Johnson discovers why our newest celebrity resident is loving Liverpool

SHE is one of the most recognisable faces in the UK beaming from billboards, pictured in countless magazines, and currently on our television screens performing daredevil acrobatics in Sky One's Cirque de Celebrite. 

But, when life in the fast lane gets too much for Sophie Anderton, she knows she can escape to her second city - Liverpool. 

For the 29-year-old model is one of our newest celebrity residents, after snapping up a penthouse apartment in the Albany development in Liverpool's Old Hall Street earlier this year. 

Since then, Sophie, who made her name as the Gossard girl in the late '90s, starring in a string of sexy ads, has been a regular fixture on the city circuit. 

Last month she stole the show at Cricket's autumn/winter fashion spectacular at the Town Hall. 

So what made the reality TV regular (as well as her current Circus stint, Sophie featured in Celebrity Love Island and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here two years ago) fall in love with Liverpool? 

"Liverpool had been recommended to me as a brilliant city in which to invest and after winning the Capital of Culture 2008, I couldn't see how it wouldn't work," Sophie explains. 

"I bought the apartment in The Albany as an investment, but I keep coming back. I was up here for the Cricket fashion show and the NSPCC ball and I have built up quite a little group of friends up here." 

Quite the adopted Scouser then? "Possibly, yeah," she laughs in her girlish tones. "I just love it up here and I can be a much more low-key person. It's great to come up and have a couple of days' break from London."
 
Since purchasing her city bolthole, Bristol-born Sophie, who is currenty the face of fake tan favourite Fake Bake, has wasted no time at all getting to know the city's shops, bars and restaurants.