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. Elmes died of neglect and TB in Jamaica in 1847 aged just 33. Nikolaus Pevsner, and many others besides, came to consider Elmes’s St George’s Hall the greatest neoclassical building in Europe. Its designer never saw it finished.
In 1864, a local architect called Peter Ellis built Oriel Chambers on Water Street, a design preternaturally ahead of its time with a metal frame and glass-curtain walling. It predicted the Chicago school of skyscrapers by 20 years, but a savage review in the Builder meant no more work for Ellis, who soon died in obscurity. Eventually, his reputation was made when Pevsner included him in the influential Pioneers of Modern Design.
More recently, Will Alsop was monumentally jerked about with his proposal, hubristic to some, for a ‘Fourth Grace’ to accompany the magnificent Pier Head threesome of the Royal Liver Building, Cunard Building and Port of Liverpool Building.
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