The City and the Shadow: A love letter to Liverpool’s Gothic buildings

Victorian art critic John Ruskin once said that it is “much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at.”

Something like this effect can be achieved if one consents to be raised in New Brighton. Astonishment is the appropriate response to the grandeur of the Liverpool skyline that dominates the view down Magazine Promenade: namely, Cunard’s Greek-Revival temple, the Port of Liverpool’s cathedral to commerce, and the architecturally unclassifiable concrete roost for the Liver Birds. Scousers with but a few distant spires and disparate domes to stare back at, I understand your envy.

The Portland stone muscles of the Pier Head are celebrated for their size, order, splendour, and harmony. They’re a powerful reminder of Liverpool’s “Second City of Empire” status. But look carefully in the far left of the photo above, and you’ll spy a school of architecture that’s less honoured in this city, one barely visible from the Wirral’s north flank: the Gothic. Here’s a close-up:

“Liverpool is not a Gothic city in the way that Manchester is,” explains Peter de Figueiredo. A soft-spoken but intimidatingly well-informed guide, Peter is an architect and architectural historian, and the co-author of Religion and Place: Liverpool’s historic places of worship. “Of the two great Northwestern cities,” he says, “Manchester tended to go for Gothic buildings while Liverpool favoured the Classical” — imitations of Roman and Greek structures, such as the Cunard or the Port of Liverpool buildings.

Perhaps this is what has led Liverpool to disregard its Gothic heritage. Possessing as we do the fewer and smaller cousins to Manchester’s Town Hall or the John Rylands Library, there’s something a little too strange, insular, and perhaps Mancunian about the style. But I think this is an oversight. After all, fewer does not mean lesser, and “smaller” is not perfectly synonymous with “less grand”. Not to mention the fact that Alfred Waterhouse, the most prolific and important architect who devised Manchester’s and London’s Victorian Gothic vernacular, was in fact born in this very city. If Liverpool’s waterfront is its façade, proud and brash, the Gothic represents its knotty internal contradictions, the nooks and crannies of its stone-and-terracotta soul. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take you on a tour of some of my favourite examples.

But first, just what is Gothic? Originally, this was a pejorative term for a style that evolved in Medieval Europe, considered barbarous for its flagrant disregard of Classical order. Ruskin’s book The Stones of Venice was a major catalyst for its revival in the Victorian era, and lists the changeful, rigid, savage, nature-like, and grotesque as among the architectural style’s characteristics. One might be forgiven for wondering why such eccentricities ever became popular once, let alone twice. But if one scrutinises the stone forest of shadows cast by the tradition’s best representatives — be they Chartres Cathedral or Westminster Abbey — it’s possible to see the intricate beauty in this denigrated and misunderstood tendency.

As de Figueiredo notes, Manchester got the lion’s share of these treasures. “But that’s not to say there weren’t Gothic buildings in Liverpool, and many of them were very fine too.” A historian of ecclesiastical architecture, he selects as exemplars the two surviving Cast Iron Churches of Warrington-born ironmaster John Cragg: St Michael’s-in-the-Hamlet in Aigburth, and St George’s in Everton. Also in Aigburth, he says, is the Norman Revival St Anne’s by Scottish architect John Cunningham.

For today’s journey, though, we’re starting with the centre. If we approach the city by train instead of ferry, then step out at Lime Street railway station (another Cunningham design, incidentally), we’re faced with a pride of Neoclassical buildings that includes the World Museum, Walker Art Gallery, and another Scouse Parthenon in St George’s Hall. But turn to the right and we see an abnormality, staring down St George’s as if in spiky opposition: the Northwestern Hotel, a French château in the Second Empire style whose spires prick at the grey sky above.

This is the creation of Alfred Waterhouse, better known for his Gothic contributions to London (such as the Natural History Museum) and Manchester (like its Town Hall, or the much-lamented Assize Court, a masterpiece lost to the Blitz). But Waterhouse was, in fact, born in Liverpool to Quaker parents, and for the first few years of his life brought up in Aigburth. At an impressionable age, he fell under Ruskin’s spell after reading The Stones of Venice, as well as Contrasts, a pro-Gothic polemic by the designer Augustus Pugin. By the time he toured Europe as a young man, Waterhouse was, according to school friend Thomas Hodgkin, “entirely under the influence of Ruskin”.

Despite his celebrated works elsewhere, Waterhouse’s return to his Liverpool hometown was triumphant. For his contributions to Liverpool Gothic, we could take a left up Brownlow Hill to marvel at his Victoria Building, the intricate pale-carmine gallery and clock tower whose Ruabon masonry made Liverpool Uni the O.G. “redbrick”. Personally, though, I prefer to head towards Dale Street, the unacknowledged sunset strip for Gothic in the Northwest. Going via Sir John’s Lane, we find Waterhouse’s Pearl Life Assurance Building — another château, but with cusped arches and quatrefoil tracery, Ruskin’s Gothic influence seeping into the architect’s planer materials and form.

And on Dale Street itself is Waterhouse’s work for Pearl’s rivals, Prudential Assurance, another uneasy compromise between a style originally meant for contemplation of the numinous and the necessities of Late Victorian capitalism. They’re not Christian buildings, says de Figueiredo: “They’ve lost their connection with faith.”

But that’s not to say they aren’t interesting. Like his Holborn Bars in Camden and other commissions for the company in Newcastle and Nottingham, Waterhouse elected a dark red shade for the Dale Street Pru’, providing an important reminder for Scouse flâneurs to always look above the street level of barber shops and newsagents. Waterhouse “liked the use of terracotta and hard-faced bricks, which gives the buildings a tough character,” says de Figueiredo.

If we were to stick with Waterhouse, we could at this point taxi south to Toxteth and take in the Turner Memorial, formerly a home for “sick and disadvantaged men” in red ashlar sandstone, and then southeast to Allerton Priory, once a Magdalene Laundry, then a house for “mentally defective girls”. It would befit this article marvellously to be able to say that Waterhouse was some kind of dark-browed, devil-worshipping nutcase, but the truth is he was by all accounts the mild-mannered man one might expect of a Quaker’s son. Still, if The Batman director Matt Reeves decides to return to Liverpool for its sequel, either building could stand in for Arkham Asylum.

Before we leave Dale Street, we should acknowledge Musker’s Buildings, with their cinquefoil windows and bat-winged tracery — an odd, almost ecclesiastical façade above a locksmiths and newsagents, like if Count Dracula had packed in Carfax Abbey to open a corner shop. As a nod to Ruskin’s grotesque, the gargoyles of Thomas Rigby’s pub and the corner of Dale and Crosshall Street are also worthy of a mention.

But if it’s “rigid” and “savage” you’re wanting, look no further than 14 Dale Street — designed, incidentally, by Aubrey Thomas, the Wirral-born eccentric who also planned out the Royal Liver Building. The State Insurance is an upward geyser of Gothic flamboyance, with (and I apologise for the oncoming barrage of perplexing though eminently Googleable terms, but little else can convey the structure’s torrential effect) more trefoils, mullions, cusped arches, and curved mouchettes than you could shake a finial at, its turret hard and sharp as a bone-handled blade. But there’s also a wittiness to the structure: the folly of crafting such intricacies into simple white ashlar as if it were priceless marble.

“Part of it was destroyed during the war,” de Figueiredo tells me, explaining a lopsidedness that I took to be Thomas’ eccentricity. “It’s lost half of its frontage, being replaced by modern building, so it can be a bit difficult to understand.”

The State Insurance Building is now home to a JD Gym, and is — apart from the European Renaissance-cum-Eastern Orthodox wedding cake that is the Adelphi Bank Building (now a Caffe Nero) around the corner on Castle Street — perhaps my favourite commercial-architecture absurdity in all of Liverpool. Discordant among its wider and more sensible neighbours, and therefore perhaps objectively ugly, I love this building more than is probably healthy.

Remarkably, within walking distance of this leprous abomination with small-man syndrome, there are three examples of the Italian Gothic championed by Ruskin: the stripy, thrice-gabled chocolate layer cake of 81-89 Lord Street, another confectionary by Aubrey Thomas; the nearby Venice Chambers, which readers may know better as the misnamed coffee shop Rococo; and the cheerful brick Lombard Chambers of Bixteth Street. The latter, especially, is undervalued by enthusiasts, and I’d love more time to extoll its values. But as you may now have gathered, there’s simply too much of this faux-Medieval strangeness for us to linger too long. Whether they were building churches or textile halls, the Victorians indulged their fondness for melancholy a little too often, and even Ruskin ended up with more than he asked for from disciples like Waterhouse.

And so we must flee the city centre. Another of Ruskin’s acolytes, George Ashdown Audsley — perhaps best-known today for designing the Wannamaker pipe organ in Philadelphia — is, with his brother William James Audsley, responsible for the wonderful synagogue on Princes Road, an exercise in Neo-Moorish finery. But is it Gothic? “I wouldn’t call it a Gothic building,” says de Figueiredo, “but it’s got touches of Gothic, and that’s often the case actually — a lot of Victorian architects were very eclectic, and they mixed up different styles to make buildings more striking.”

The interior of this terracotta brick basilica is if anything more impressive, inspiring one author to write that “he who has not seen [it] has not beheld the glory of Israel.” In all its dignified variegation, the Torah arch really does seem to point towards an ideal Temple beyond base matter. Ruskin called the Venetian Duke’s palace “the central building of the world” for its harmony of European and Arabesque features, but in blending all three Abrahamic traditions, the Prince’s Road synagogue has a solid claim.

Not done with the L8 district, the Audsleys can also be thanked for Toxteth’s “Welsh Cathedral”, the Presbyterian church now sadly fallen into disuse and decay, daubed in Satanic graffiti and gradually being retaken by lichen and plant life into the earth’s bosom. “A problem is that many of these buildings are under-listed,” a spokesperson for the Victorian Society tells me. “People are aware that many beautiful buildings in Liverpool are in peril, but what they perhaps don’t realise is that it’s quite hard to get them listed — we have to pick our battles.”

For once, I don’t wish to dwell too long on endangered structures. And regardless of its dereliction, this memento mori in brick-faced rubble is as much an indelible feature of Toxteth’s Gothic landscape as the Turner asylum, the synagogue, and Streatlam Tower, another Audsley brothers contribution to Princes Road, or the already Grade-I listed St Agnes and St Pancras Church on nearby Ullet Road, described by Pevsner as “by far the most beautiful Victorian church of Liverpool.”

Anyway, there’s something about the Gothic — perhaps the changeful and nature-like elements Ruskin identified — that gives itself over to decomposition, its grotesquery somehow both more prettified by and fertile for vegetation than other architectural styles. A weed cluster bursting from a dull modern edifice is mere evidence of municipal ineptitude; the same invasive greenery sprouting among smashed lancet windows somehow inspires delight. The State Insurance Building is now much cleaner and whiter than when I took that picture above some years ago, but I prefer the grubbier, somehow degraded finery.

Not that I want these buildings to fall into disrepair, of course. Down the road from St George’s ferric chapel in Everton is the old Collegiate School. Its restoration is a success story this city can lay claim to, even if the 1985 fire destroyed much of the hallowed interior of this Tudor Gothic castle. Traditionalists may rather wish the building was returned to its original pedagogic purpose instead of a glorified apartment block, but at least its brooding majesty — designed by St George’s Hall’s architect Harvey Lonsdale Elmes and carved from pink sandstone sourced locally in Woolton — is not going to wrack, ruin, and waste. It’s a “sympathetic reappropriation”, to quote a phrase the Victorian Society spokesperson said to me.

There’s much more to Gothic Liverpool that I intended to write about, such as the works of E W Pugin — son of the Augustus, who so greatly influenced Waterhouse — and his stone dreamings in Childwall, Birkenhead, and Rock Ferry. I wanted to sell you on the Bombed-Out Church by Johns Foster Sr and Jr, the latter now better remembered for his pagan-inspired temples like the Oratory and Huskisson Memorial of St James Cemetery than anything he did in the Gothic style, and the Anglican Cathedral next door. If I had all day, then the dark serpentine font and red-rock rose window frame of St Paul’s Church in Hooton, south Wirral, would have also made a fine meditation.

Hopefully, these examples are well-known enough to survive until The Post next indulges my ekphrastic peregrinations. On the way back to Lime Street, I stop at Doctor Duncan’s pub, set like a gemstone of tiled comfort into Waterhouse’s aforementioned Pearl, and think about these buildings over a pint of Shipyard.

None of this is intended to denigrate Liverpool’s preference for Neoclassical buildings. But I can see why Ruskin held that the Gothic architecture was somehow edifying. When I worked a spiritually nauseating job on Old Hall Street, seeing St Nicholas’s features and Lombard Chambers’ exuberance were part of my daily walk and made the journey more tolerable. And unlike the classical splendour of St George’s Hall, the Gothic never feels impersonal. The cavities and crevices of these buildings, their smooth curves and sharp edges, are unpredictable — changeable, natural — even when they conform to conventional patterns.

Unlike York, Norwich, or Durham, none of Liverpool’s Medieval structures — the original Gothic — have survived. Among the Gothic Revivalists, there’s no real “Scouse Gothic” consistency, no features one can point to as being particularly “Liverpool”, even among the portfolios of individual architects like Waterhouse or Pugin. But perhaps the defining characteristic of Scouse Gothic is that each of these buildings, commercial or ecclesiastical, is eccentric in its own way. And that is both very Gothic, of which even the arch of St Nicholas’ represents a union of Roman and Arab forebears, and very Scouse. Whether we mean the Princes Road synagogue or the Pearl Insurance Building, these buildings mirror the diversity and eclecticism of the city itself.

Of course, these structures are nevertheless artefacts of a Victorian age recent in chronology but so impossibly distant in class, tenor, and ambition that we can scarcely understand their meaning, like books written in a dead language. Their strange and transient nature is part of the point. Writing about his beloved Venice, Ruskin described a “ghost upon the sands of the sea”, so fragile that beholding it in its lagoon “we might well doubt […] which was the City, and which the Shadow.” We are, in some sense, foreigners in our own city, seldom glancing up to behold the twisted monoliths of a previous era. Perversely, that is perhaps why I find the alien features of the Gothic so consoling. It is in these most disregarded buildings of Liverpool that the familiar and uncanny are somehow united.