“Giant spider stalks streets of Liverpool” sounds like the premise for an unlikely science-fiction horror flick or a Scouse arachnophobe's worst nightmare. But an eight-legged creature did visit the city this past weekend. Fifty feet high, made of steel and poplar and weighing 37 tonnes, this mechanical marvel was hatched in Nantes, where François Delarozière's company La Machine has its workshops.

Delarozière is the engineering wizard whose designs for the free, peripatetic street-theatre event The Sultan's Elephant lured huge and appreciative crowds into Central London in 2006. Commissioned as part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture celebrations, his harmless creepy-crawly exerted a similarly magnetic pull on the local populace over a three-day period.

Foul weather and patience-testing delays in the spider's slow progress through the city failed to dampen curiosity, or so it seemed during the 24 hours that I was there. The area round Salthouse Dock was packed on Friday night, despite steady rain, while the streets radiating from the Town Hall were chock-a- block the following (and only intermittently drier) afternoon. Obviously something about having an oversized arachnid inexplicably in their midst captured the public's imagination. The sense of excitement and pleasure as it approached was palpable and audible.

Hauled about on a forklift truck, or raised above the dock by a crane for an entirely redundant water-cannon shower, the spider was indeed impressive. A dozen stoic operators travelled with it, a few stationed atop its occasionally frothing head and the rest seated in a ring below manipulating its long, articulate legs. There was also a retinue of 20 British musicians playing from inside the plastic-covered buckets of cherry pickers.

Was it worth it? Yes, and no. Long, wet waits for fleeting glimpses of the benign beast were uncomfortable and boring. Yet there's little doubt that it spun a strand of strange magic through Liverpool.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010