Building block | 8 June 2017

Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on the Mersey. It’s a city of scale, drama, melodrama, tragedy and comedy. Not to mention rich and poor. And often all these effects are simultaneous.

No other British city has a similarly contrary architectural character: superb, shabby, romantic, melancholy, proud and mean. You cannot be in Liverpool and not be affected by its buildings. I grew up there and long before I knew what ‘design’ meant, Liverpool had taught me to see — as well as to feel the deadly weight of history. It’s an architectural education.

But Liverpool has not treated its architects well. In his early twenties, Harvey Lonsdale Elmes won the competition to design St George’s Hall — civic ambition writ very large with pediments and volutes — but the city fathers, thinking him too sickly and inexperienced, took the job away.