Category Archives: Liverpool’s Heritage

Young architect in Liverpool

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St George's Hall, Liverpool (1979)

St George’s Hall, Liverpool (1979)

A couple of years ago I showed a group of gifted and talented Wirral school students nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century buildings in Liverpool city-centre as part of a NADFAS North-West Area Young Arts educational event.

I pointed out to these bright teenagers that some of Liverpool’s most remarkable buildings were designed by young architects no more than ten years older than them.

One such was Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1813-1847).  In 1839, aged twenty-five, he won anonymously a competition to design two concert halls, respectively seating 3,000 and 1,000, within one building at an estimated cost of £35,000.

The following year Liverpool Corporation set up a second competition for the design of assize courts on an adjacent site, which Elmes duly entered anonymously and – extraordinarily – won.

He then revised his two designs, combining concert-hall and courts into one building.  The result was St George’s Hall, 490 feet long, with two law-courts at opposite ends of a large rectangular hall, and a circular smaller hall above the public entrance at the apsidal north end.

The Great Hall, 169 feet long and 74 feet wide, is based on the ancient Roman baths at Caracalla, which Elmes could only have known from publications.  Its sides are punctuated by red granite Corinthian columns with bronze-effect plaster capitals, supporting the 600-ton tunnel-vault, constructed to the design of the engineer Robert (later Sir Robert) Rawlinson.

The heating and ventilation system was designed by the same Dr Boswell Reid who drove Sir Charles Barry to distraction in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster:  manually operated by squads of workmen, it represented the first approach to air-conditioning of a major public building in Britain.

Elmes’ design, described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “the best example of Neo-Classical architecture in Europe”, absorbed much of what remained of his short life.  His health, never strong, gave way when the Hall was partially completed.  He left to winter in Jamaica in 1847 and died there aged 34, leaving the completion of the design with Rawlinson, who finished the Great Hall vault in 1849.

In 1851 the Corporation appointed Charles Robert Cockerell to supervise the decoration of the Great Hall and its superb encaustic-tile floor – still to this day in mint condition – by Minton, Hollins & Co.  He also designed the circular Concert Room with its balcony supported by graceful caryatids of hollow plaster.  This magical early-Victorian interior uses the most modern materials of its time – cast iron for the balcony trelliswork, papier mâché for the frieze and pilasters that surround the detached grained deal panelling, plate glass mirrors behind the elaborate Corinthian columns at the back of the stage and a gas-lit cut-glass chandelier, recently restored, by F & C Osler of Birmingham.

Elmes specifically asked that “there will be no organ at the end of the Hall, so that you can stand on the Judge’s Platform in one court, your eye glancing along the ranges of ruddy columns at either side,…[until it] finally rests upon the further Judge’s Throne.”  Instead, in the fashion of the day, Cockerell designed a gigantic case for the vast ‘Father’ Willis organ, which was completed in 1855, the year after the Hall opened.

St George’s Hall is a gem of world architecture – by an architect who if he was alive today would be recently out of college.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

No expense spared 2: Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool

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Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Alongside the three Horsfall churches I mentioned in Liverpool 8 Churches (1), the Toxteth area is studded with fine Victorian places of worship.  Almost next door to St Margaret’s, Princes Road (1868) is the Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue (1871), and across the road the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas (1870).  Round the corner, as Princes Road widens into a leafy dual carriageway where the trams once ran on a reservation, stands the Adult Deaf and Dumb Institute (1886-7) which had an octagonal chapel so that the whole congregation could see the minister’s signing, and further down on the opposite side is the desperately sad wreck of the Welsh Presbyterian Church (1868), apparently the richest and finest of them all, now a largely roofless shell.

Of all the Christian places of worship in Liverpool 8, perhaps the most surprising is the Ullet Road Unitarian Church, designed by Thomas Worthington and his son Percy in two stages, 1896-9 and 1900-1.  Unitarianism is a very individualistic creed, centred on the belief in the single personality of God, which regards Jesus Christ as a prophet rather than a divine person of the Holy Trinity.  It comes as a surprise to the non-Unitarian visitor, then, that the Worthingtons’ church has virtually all the features of an Anglican parish church, pews, pulpit, lectern, choir-stalls and reredos, all in the finest Gothic Revival style using the very best materials.

The place is an opulent essay in Gothic and Art Nouveau, with reliefs and wall paintings by George Moira and Morris & Co stained glass mostly designed by Edward Burne-Jones.  The electroliers that light the nave are original, and tucked away behind the chancel arch are original 1890s electric lamps.

This was a congregation that wielded heavy political clout in nineteenth-century Liverpool:  the previous church in Renshaw Street included among its members the poet and anti-slavery campaigner William Roscoe, William Rathbone V, who was Mayor of Liverpool in 1837-8, his son William Rathbone VI, who was MP for Liverpool from 1868 to 1880 and helped found University College Liverpool and the University College of North Wales, and Robert Durning Holt, the last Mayor and first Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1892-3.

The generation that moved their church out of the city-centre to Sefton Park could command serious money.  Robert Durning Holt’s mother, Mrs George Holt, didn’t like the idea of an interior in bright red Ruabon brick, and paid for it to be faced in dignified Runcorn sandstone.  The cloister and meeting hall were funded by Sir John Brunner, whose chemical company later formed the basis for ICI, and Sir Henry Tate, whose name lives on in the sugar company and the gallery that he gave to the nation.  Sir John Brunner appears in one of Moira’s wall-paintings as the philosopher Aristotle.

To see all these places of worship around Sefton Park would take two days minimum.  Even to see a couple is a forcible reminder that this was a city of huge mercantile wealth a century ago, a place where adherents of every faith sought to assert their presence with the finest architecture of their day.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

No expense spared 1: Liverpool 8 churches

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St Agnes' Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

St Agnes’ Church, Ullet Road, Liverpool

A couple of years ago I spent a fascinating four days researching and photographing places of worship in suburban Liverpool, south of the city, to add to my ‘Liverpool’s Heritage’ lecture and study-day for NADFAS [the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies].

I found a whole collection of fabulous Victorian buildings, and met some particularly interesting people in the process.

One group of Anglican churches is the series founded by the Horsfall family over two generations.  Robert Horsfall commissioned the great Gothic Revival architect, George Edmund Street, to build St Margaret’s, Princes Road, in 1868, at least partly because the diocese was vehemently low church, and he wished to promote elaborate, Anglo-Catholic worship.  This magnificent building, sumptuously embellished with wall paintings and stained glass, much of it designed by Maddox & Pearce and Clayton & Bell, is much loved by the local community, but desperately short of funds.

Robert Horsfall may well have been provoked by the statement of his low-church younger brother George’s project to build Christ Church, Linnet Lane (1867-71), not far away.  This church, by William Culshaw and Henry Sumners, has an elaborately sculpted exterior and a much plainer, though costly interior.  Its peculiar gabled aisles are particularly difficult to keep watertight, and the parish apparently struggles financially.

Robert Horsfall’s son, Howard Douglas Horsfall (1856-1936), was responsible for St Agnes’, Ullet Road, opposite Sefton Park.  Designed by the architect of Truro Cathedral, John Loughborough Pearson, this large but outwardly modest brick church has a dramatic interior, like a miniature cathedral, rich in carvings, stained glass and alabaster.  Pearson’s aim, in his own words, was to design “what will bring people soonest to their knees”.

The controversies of the Victorian Church of England are difficult to grasp in an age when Anglicans fall out about female and gay priests and bishops.  The second vicar of St Margaret’s went to jail for contempt of court over a liturgical dispute with the first Bishop of Liverpool, J C Ryle.  There were serious fears that the consecration of St Agnes’ would be interrupted by “some disturbance” following “heated newspaper agitation”.  Within weeks of the opening, the first vicar of St Agnes was in disagreement with Bishop Ryle over “the illegal use of Eucharistic Lights, Wafer-Bread, the Mixed Chalice, the Agnus Dei and the hymn sung during Holy Communion” and waited twelve years before the bishop backed down.

All three of these superb buildings still house congregations, though the days of packed pews and arguments over ritual are long gone.  Rev Robert Gallagher, the former vicar of St Margaret’s, wryly observed, “the capital used for St Margaret’s beginnings came largely from Liverpool merchants’ involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade and down through grandparents’ bank accounts…an irony not lost on a parish that is now the heart of Liverpool’s black community.”

The Ship of Fools’ mystery worshipper describes the “pious gaiety” of St Agnes’ at http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2012/2330.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Adelphi adventures

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Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel rather missed the boat when it was built before and after the First World War.

It was conceived by the Midland Railway Company as a companion to the Midland Hotel in Manchester, (designed by Charles Trubshaw, 1898-1904).

The Adelphi, built on a site that had been a hotel since 1828, was designed by Frank Atkinson, on a scale made possible because its Portland stone façades conceal a steel framework.  The two major spaces within, the Central Court and the Hypostyle Hall, provide grand interiors which lead to ancillary restaurants and meeting rooms.  A planned ballroom block beyond the Fountain Court at the east of the building was never built.

Ironically the opening of this magnificent hotel, its design and operation strongly influenced by the manager Arthur Towle’s tours of European and American hotel-practice, coincided with the shift of the major transatlantic steamship lines to Southampton.  It was the very last city-centre railway hotel to be built in Britain.

When British Transport Hotels was privatised in 1984 the Adelphi was sold to Britannia Hotels, who rescued it from a state of decay in which the top two floors had been closed off and given over to the pigeons.  Britannia’s restoration included converting the upper floors to modern bedrooms and building a rear extension to increase further the capacity to a total of 402 rooms.

Staying at the Adelphi is often an adventure.  In times gone by I ran university extramural study tours from the Adelphi.  On one occasion the maitre d’ let my group into the restaurant on the first night before I’d had a chance to register them:  it proved remarkably difficult to single out my two dozen extramural students, most of them of a certain age, from the two hundred line-dancers who were also there for the weekend.

The last time I stayed at the Adelphi was for one of Ken Roe’s inimitable Cinema Theatre Society weekends.  I’d been attracted by the opportunity to see On Golden Pond on the big screen at the Philharmonic Hall, but the entertainment highlight of the weekend was having breakfast with a gent who turned out to be an admiral.  (He was curious to know what part of the ship I’d served on, and had to be disabused of the idea I was there for a naval reunion.  On the contrary, I said, I was there to visit the bingo halls of Bootle.)

The admiral told excellent stories, including one of greeting the Queen Mother in a cloudburst, drenching her as he bowed forward, tipping out the puddle that had accumulated in his cap.  He also explained how to solve the problem of spring-cleaning the bridge of a nuclear submarine when no-one below petty-officer status is allowed in. But that’s a state secret, such as you might, if you’re lucky, hear whispered over breakfast at the Adelphi Hotel.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Slaughterhouse Gothic 1

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Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

Victoria Building, University of Liverpool

The expression “red-brick university” stems from the great Victorian Liverpool-born Quaker architect, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), and his love for terra-cotta, glazed moulded brick, with which it is possible to contrive elaborate effects without the great expense of masons and masonry.

The term was actually coined by Liverpool University’s Professor of Hispanic Studies, Edgar Allison Peers (1891-1952) in his polemic, Red Brick University, published under the pseudonym Bruce Truscot in 1943.

Waterhouse is responsible for, among much else, Manchester Town Hall, the Refuge Assurance Building in Manchester that is now the Principal Hotel, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington and a series of unmistakable office-buildings for the Prudential Assurance Company.  His predilection for terra-cotta led his architectural contemporaries sarcastically to label his work “slaughterhouse Gothic”.

His influence on the competition for the Victoria Law Courts, Birmingham, which were eventually built by Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, undoubtedly encouraged Birmingham to become “terracotta city” in the Edwardian period.

In his native Liverpool, Waterhouse built (in stone) the former North Western Hotel in front of Lime Street Station, and the iconic Victoria Building of Liverpool University (1892).  This was conceived as part of an 1880s federation of University College, Liverpool, Owens College in Manchester and the Yorkshire College in Leeds, which split up when first Liverpool and then Leeds gained independent university status in 1903 and 1904.

Many of the architectural interesting parts of the Victoria Building are now open to the public as the Victoria Gallery & Museum, and the interior is an eye-opening.  Rather than the lavatorial reds that one might expect, Waterhouse used an interesting palette of buff and pale green faience.  Staircases weave through the building, supplemented by an ingeniously inserted modern lift.  The Tate Hall, formerly the library funded by the great sugar baron, has a spectacular timber roof.

It’s well worth a visit.  Admission is free.  The displays feature aspects of the University’s work since its foundation in 1887.  And it’s a welcome addition to Liverpool’s superb range of places to have morning coffee or afternoon tea. See http://www.liv.ac.uk/vgm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Watching the boats go by

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Museum of Liverpool & Mersey Ferry terminal, Pier Head, Liverpool

Museum of Liverpool & Mersey Ferry terminal, Pier Head, Liverpool

Pier Head is the starting-point for the “ferry across the Mersey” and was, in times gone by, the terminus for most Liverpool trams, which gyrated round a series of loops like a Hornby train-set, and latterly for the bus services that replaced them.

The area was, until the late nineteenth century, St George’s Dock, which was filled in to provide a transport interchange between the trams and the ferries, and to provide sites for three statement buildings that asserted Liverpool’s grandeur to river passengers.

It became an often bleak plaza, across which ferry passengers tramped to a functional ferry building, above which was a Chinese restaurant, the Shanghai Palace, with quite the best views of ships and ferries moving about the river, overshadowed on the landward side by the bulk of the “Three Graces”, from north to south the Royal Liver Building (1908-10), the Cunard Building (1913-20) and the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board Offices (1903-7).

In January 2006 the floating pier of the ferry terminal ignominiously sank:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/2006/03/03/landingstage_feature.shtml.

Now, in the wake of the Capital of Culture excitements, Pier Head has been transformed.

The ferry building has been replaced by a very grand, modern structure with a display-area, a shop of Beatles memorabilia and an oriental restaurant.  Designed by the Belfast-based Hamilton Architects, it has divided opinion [http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/beauty-or-beast-new-liverpool-pier-head-ferry-terminal/5204487.article, http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/gallery/landingstage] and received the unequivocal accolade of the Carbuncle Cup 2009 [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2009/08/28/10-5m-liverpool-ferry-terminal-named-the-uk-s-worst-new-building-by-architects-magazine-100252-24551575].

At the southern end, at Mann Island, once a notoriously rough area of taverns between two further now-vanished docks, Manchester Dock and Chester Basin, stands the new Museum of Liverpool, designed by the Danish practice 3XN and the Manchester architects AEW and due to open in early 2011.  [For descriptions and discussion see http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/museum-of-liverpool-by-3xn-and-aew-architects/1994293.article and http://www.building.co.uk/a-lens-on-3xn%E2%80%99s-new-museum-of-liverpool/3125091.article (both of which require registration).]

The most startling innovation of all is the Leeds & Liverpool Canal Link, which gives narrow boats access to the Albert Dock for the first time.  Originally, the canal terminated at Stanley Dock in the midst of the north docks:  this link, running in a cutting in front of the Three Graces and tunnelling under the new Museum, is illustrated at http://www.penninewaterways.co.uk/ll/ll85.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Lost Empire

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Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

The invaluable newsreel of the current Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin reports that the former Empire Theatre, Garston, in south Liverpool, is threatened with demolition – apparently to make way for a hospital car-park.

That would be a pity.

This modest suburban music hall, with a seating-capacity variously recorded as 876 or 1,040, was built, after several false starts, and opened in 1915.  It lasted as a theatre for barely three years, before becoming a full-time cinema, bravely advertised as “The Scala of the South”, with a local news Gazette and an augmented orchestra.

Ironically, for an enterprise with such shaky financial foundations, it prospered in the absence of any nearby super-cinema in the surrounding suburbs.

It eventually closed as a cinema, with a final double bill of Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock and Glenn Ford in The Fastest Guns Alive, on December 8th 1962.  After that it went over to bingo until 2009 – three years of theatre, forty-four years of cinema and forty-seven years of bingo.

When I photographed it in 2000 the auditorium was undivided;  by the following year a suspended ceiling had been inserted between the balcony and the proscenium, presumably to make the place easier to heat.  Nevertheless, the Theatres Trust website http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/1956-empire-garston
reports that the building is well-maintained and retains many original features.

The existing building, by an unrecorded architect, was designed as a full-scale theatre, with a thirty-foot proscenium, a stage fifteen feet deep and a tower of seven dressing rooms, and because neither cinema nor bingo required any substantial alteration, it survives as a virtually intact Edwardian music-hall/variety theatre.

It’s the classic setting for Mickey Rooney’s line, “Let’s do the show right here.”

It’s hard to estimate – because I’m not a Garston resident – whether there’s any community need for a compact auditorium with everything needed to return it to live performance.

It’s a shame if the car-park can’t go somewhere else.

The Cinema Theatre Association website is at http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘lectures’ Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry and Liverpool’s Heritage please click on the links.

Spirited enterprise

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Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool

Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool

The Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin (September/October 2010) alerted me to activity at the Gaumont Cinema, Dingle, Liverpool – a huge Art Deco pile on the corner of Park Road and Dingle Lane that I’ve been driving past for years without ever having a chance to look inside.

It was designed by the Gaumont house-architect, W E Trent, assisted by Daniel Mackay, as a replacement for an earlier, smaller cinema called the Picturedrome.  It opened on Easter Monday 1937, seating 1,503, with a second-hand Wurlitzer organ (now in the care of the Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust:  [http://www.voxlancastria.org.uk/heritage]) transferred from the Trocadero Cinema, Liverpool.

W E Trent excelled at simple, sweeping architectural effects, so the exterior has a vertically-banded centrepiece, originally neon-lit, and horizontal bands of stone and brick, curving round the street corner;  the interior is a calm essay in moderne stripped classical features intended to be highlighted by concealed lighting, probably with a range of colour-changes.  Small-scale live shows were provided for:  the proscenium is 45 feet wide, the stage 15 feet deep and there are four dressing rooms.

It operated as a cinema until 1966, and then became a Top Rank bingo-club until 1998.  Thereafter it stood empty until it was taken over for redevelopment as a cultural centre despite attacks from local vandals [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2009/02/28/owners-hope-to-restore-former-gaumot-art-deco-cinema-in-liverpool-s-dingle-100252-23030627].

The Dingle Gaumont attracts more than vandals:  it has a reputation as the most haunted cinema for miles around.  The CTA Bulletin led me to a TV series I wouldn’t otherwise have come across, Most Haunted, with an over-the-top production-style that will strike viewers as gripping or hilarious depending on their views about the supernatural:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N08jo7kNqo&feature=fvw.  (More relaxed views of the interior can be found at http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/6799-Former-Gaumont-Cinema-Dingle-Liverpool-June-09.)

Because of its status as “one of the most haunted locations in the North West” it has now become a venue for ghost-hunters:  http://www.britevents.com/whats-on/merseyside/dingle/gaumont-cinema/74823.  Tickets cost £49, and you need to bring your own sandwiches.

Bingo kept the place going for decades.  It’s good to see a new way of gaining income from an old cinema.  And it’s an excellent way of deterring the vandals.

The Cinema Theatre Association website is at http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk.

Images from a November 2011 urban explorer’s visit are at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/66021-Gaumont-Cinema-Dingle-Liverpool-November-2011.

Excellent undated images are at http://urbanliverpool.blogspot.co.uk/p/gaumont-cinema-dingle.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

 

Down by the Riverside

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Liverpool Riverside Station [left] and Princes Dock [right] from the Liver Building (1983)

Liverpool Riverside Station [left] and Princes Dock [right] from the Liver Building (1983)

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John was puzzled when he parked up at the ferry terminal in Liverpool to find himself standing on cobbled roadway with a complex set of railway lines embedded.

This turned out to be all that is left of Liverpool Riverside station, a legendary line by which passengers were transported directly to the quayside, so that they stepped out of their railway carriage and walked across a covered roadway directly to their ocean-going liner.

Boat trains left the main line at Edge Hill station, which still exists, and followed a steep descent through Victoria and Waterloo tunnels and then over a tight curve on to the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board tracks that led to the three platforms of Riverside station.  On the dock estate these trains proceeded literally at walking pace, following a man carrying a warning flag.

The appeal for trans-shipping passengers who would otherwise have to make their way across town from Lime Street station is obvious, but the operational practicalities made the service cumbersome even in the heyday of rail travel.

In any case, not long after this link was constructed in 1895 the major transatlantic passenger traffic began to migrate to Southampton, where the London & South Western Railway cannily built docks big enough to take the new generation of vessels which included Oceanic, Titanic and Britannic.  (The reason that Titanic had the lettering ‘TITANIC – LIVERPOOL’ on its stern was because the White Star Line registered its vessels from its Liverpool head office.  The ship never visited Liverpool.)

The real heyday of Liverpool Riverside appears to have been wartime, when it was heavily used for troop movements.  Indeed, according to the Disused Stations website [http://www.disused-stations.org.uk], the very last train brought troops embarking for Northern Ireland on February 25th 1971.

The place stood derelict until the 1990s, and is now transformed by the regeneration of Liverpool’s riverside.

PS:  Since John got back “across”, as they say in the Isle of Man, he’s passed me this very informative link about the rail links between Edge Hill and the Liverpool docks: https://localwiki.org/liverpool/Liverpool%27s_Historic_Rail_Tunnels.

PSS:  A 1950s image from the same viewpoint as the image above, the western tower of the Royal Liver Building, is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thanoz/2863774968.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Losing a Liverpool legend: Lewis’s department store

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Lewis's department store, Liverpool

Lewis’s department store, Liverpool

Liverpool has lost a significant city-centre icon now that the first and last Lewis’s store has closed.

The business was founded in 1856 as a men’s and boy’s outfitters by David Lewis (1823-1885), an entrepreneur and philanthropist of genius who was one of the UK pioneers of what became known as the department store.

The existing building, a post-war replacement of the bombed-out 1910-23 building, was designed in 1947 by Gerald de Courcy Fraser.  Its dominant feature is Sir Jacob Epstein’s bronze statue, Liverpool Resurgans [“Liverpool rises again”] (1954), the subject of much ribaldry, especially in wet weather.

Epstein also provided three relief panels of scenes of childhood in fast-setting ciment fondu.  The emblems that decorate this elegant classical building – a virile man striding forward and a celebration of the generation we now call the “baby boomers” – speak of a post-war optimism for a future that turned out rather differently.

The Lewis’s building reopened as Britain’s first Adagio Aparthotel in June 2013:  http://www.adagio-city.com/gb/united-kingdom/index.shtml.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.