Have Brief Will Travel
Feb. 1st, 2004 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanYou know, it's colder here than it was in Liverpool.
On re-reading the following I find it reads much like the kind of entry I write on visiting foreign cities. But then, why not, it's a new city to me. And Olympia puts up with me writing about Greece...
Well, Liverpool was fun. (we won, by the way, which probably helps). The taxi driver who decided he couldn't be bothered to charge me for running me from Lime Street to the hotel was certainly a good start, but the stereotype that people outside London and the South are, in general, more friendly than those here was proved to have some substance again and again. That isn't invariably a good thing in that I'm not someone who finds it easy to chat to complete strangers, particularly not when I'm on the way to court for the first day of the most significant solo trial of my career so far, but you can certainly see why they accuse us down here of being a bunch of miserable and antisocial gits.
I'd only been to Liverpool once before and hadn't had time to look around; this time I did, on the first day. The main thing that struck me was the civic architecture. I mean, just how many grand civic buildings does one city need? London is a special case, as the capital and former centre of an Empire, but equally as the city that suffered most from of Hermann Goering and co. Liverpool just has magnificent building after magnificent building.... I don't have any figures to hand, but it's blatantly obvious just how rich the city once was, and how much civic pride its inhabitants had.. how have the mighty fallen. But then everyone seems so cheerful...
The last century saw two more Great Buildings, the two cathedrals. Wildly different, probably sharing in architectural terms the distinction of being "an acquired taste" alone, but I love both of them. I was staying less than 200 yards from the Catholic Cathedral, fondly (or perhaps less than fondly: like Glasgow and Manchester Liverpool had emigrants from all communities in Ireland and they brought their differences with them; the Protestants of Liverpool fought bitterly to prevent the site being sold to the Catholic church) known as Paddy's Wigwam, and it isn't too far along Hope Street to Giles Scott's neo-Gothic pile for the Anglicans, so I managed to fit in a visit to both on Wednesday afternoon.
The Catholic cathedral is, notoriously, an enormous circular building with the altar in the centre. Outside the building rises to a crown (representing the crown of thorns) and inside over the altar hands a massive baldachino, representing the same. Various chapels open round the circumference. It's a genuinely impressive and original building, an uncompromising piece of modernist architecture which actually succeeds in aritistic terms though I did find myself wondering quite how well it works for those who attend mass there. More importantly, where it does fail is as a practical building.... notoriously, the modern and, at the time, experimental materials and methods have proved not quite sufficient for English weather. Until recently water used to pour in when it rained, thus kind of missing the basic point of a building. Work has been done to remedy this, and more repairs are on foot.
The Cathedral, designed by Frederic Gibberd, stands on the great platform designed for Lutyens' planned neo-baroque pile, never built due to the advent of war (that too would have been a magnificent building, judging by the plans). On a digression, I once saw, but failed to buy, a book entitled London that Never Was or something of the sort, all the great buildings of London that never actually happened, and the rejected plans for places like the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Courts of Justice. I really must track it down one day.
Anyway, inside the platform is the crypt, apparently itself worthy of a visit though I wasn't able to go down. Curiously, that was completed by Adrian Scott, brother of Giles Scott who at the time was working on the Anglican pile at the other end of Hope Street. Their father and grandfather, both named George Gilbert, were of course two of the most famous architects of Victorian Gothicism.
The Anglican building is utterly different and yet no less an important piece of 20th century architecture. Gothic in inspiration, but more austere and modern in its feel than the great buildings of Victorian gothicism, the Great Midland Hotel at St Pancras (George Gilbert Scott, 1876); Keble College (William Butterfield, 1883), the Royal Courts of Justice (G.E.Street, 1882) and the Houses of Parliament (Barry 1868), to name some of the obvious candidates. The foundation stone was laid in 1902, the tower was topped in 1942 and the building was sort of finished in the 1970s. Even more than in Paddy's Wigwam one has an incredible feeling of space, in every dimension (one major contributing factor is that the building, although extremely long, has less pillars than the original Gothic masterpieces, Winchester or Salisbury for instance). An odd point about it is that it is built on several levels: entry through the West Door brings you into a kind of narthex somewhat below that of the nave. Above the steps from the former to the latter is a rather beautiful bridge: I couldn't quite understand its practical function -that is, why a bridge is necessary- but I assume it has one. The perfect lady chapel is on a lower level again, to the right of the High Altar and hidden away down a little labrynthine staircase.
Halfway between the two cathedrals is an odd little piece of public sculpture.. piles of old fashioned trunks and suitcases, cast in concrete. Though I couldn't see any explanation, I assume it's a memorial to the hundreds of thousands who passed through Liverpool on their way to a new life, my own maternal grandparents among them (the paternal ones came over for a bit but decided they didn't like it and went back to Galway...). Apposite and thought provoking, as one looks down the hill to the Mersey.
On re-reading the following I find it reads much like the kind of entry I write on visiting foreign cities. But then, why not, it's a new city to me. And Olympia puts up with me writing about Greece...
Well, Liverpool was fun. (we won, by the way, which probably helps). The taxi driver who decided he couldn't be bothered to charge me for running me from Lime Street to the hotel was certainly a good start, but the stereotype that people outside London and the South are, in general, more friendly than those here was proved to have some substance again and again. That isn't invariably a good thing in that I'm not someone who finds it easy to chat to complete strangers, particularly not when I'm on the way to court for the first day of the most significant solo trial of my career so far, but you can certainly see why they accuse us down here of being a bunch of miserable and antisocial gits.
I'd only been to Liverpool once before and hadn't had time to look around; this time I did, on the first day. The main thing that struck me was the civic architecture. I mean, just how many grand civic buildings does one city need? London is a special case, as the capital and former centre of an Empire, but equally as the city that suffered most from of Hermann Goering and co. Liverpool just has magnificent building after magnificent building.... I don't have any figures to hand, but it's blatantly obvious just how rich the city once was, and how much civic pride its inhabitants had.. how have the mighty fallen. But then everyone seems so cheerful...
The last century saw two more Great Buildings, the two cathedrals. Wildly different, probably sharing in architectural terms the distinction of being "an acquired taste" alone, but I love both of them. I was staying less than 200 yards from the Catholic Cathedral, fondly (or perhaps less than fondly: like Glasgow and Manchester Liverpool had emigrants from all communities in Ireland and they brought their differences with them; the Protestants of Liverpool fought bitterly to prevent the site being sold to the Catholic church) known as Paddy's Wigwam, and it isn't too far along Hope Street to Giles Scott's neo-Gothic pile for the Anglicans, so I managed to fit in a visit to both on Wednesday afternoon.
The Catholic cathedral is, notoriously, an enormous circular building with the altar in the centre. Outside the building rises to a crown (representing the crown of thorns) and inside over the altar hands a massive baldachino, representing the same. Various chapels open round the circumference. It's a genuinely impressive and original building, an uncompromising piece of modernist architecture which actually succeeds in aritistic terms though I did find myself wondering quite how well it works for those who attend mass there. More importantly, where it does fail is as a practical building.... notoriously, the modern and, at the time, experimental materials and methods have proved not quite sufficient for English weather. Until recently water used to pour in when it rained, thus kind of missing the basic point of a building. Work has been done to remedy this, and more repairs are on foot.
The Cathedral, designed by Frederic Gibberd, stands on the great platform designed for Lutyens' planned neo-baroque pile, never built due to the advent of war (that too would have been a magnificent building, judging by the plans). On a digression, I once saw, but failed to buy, a book entitled London that Never Was or something of the sort, all the great buildings of London that never actually happened, and the rejected plans for places like the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Courts of Justice. I really must track it down one day.
Anyway, inside the platform is the crypt, apparently itself worthy of a visit though I wasn't able to go down. Curiously, that was completed by Adrian Scott, brother of Giles Scott who at the time was working on the Anglican pile at the other end of Hope Street. Their father and grandfather, both named George Gilbert, were of course two of the most famous architects of Victorian Gothicism.
The Anglican building is utterly different and yet no less an important piece of 20th century architecture. Gothic in inspiration, but more austere and modern in its feel than the great buildings of Victorian gothicism, the Great Midland Hotel at St Pancras (George Gilbert Scott, 1876); Keble College (William Butterfield, 1883), the Royal Courts of Justice (G.E.Street, 1882) and the Houses of Parliament (Barry 1868), to name some of the obvious candidates. The foundation stone was laid in 1902, the tower was topped in 1942 and the building was sort of finished in the 1970s. Even more than in Paddy's Wigwam one has an incredible feeling of space, in every dimension (one major contributing factor is that the building, although extremely long, has less pillars than the original Gothic masterpieces, Winchester or Salisbury for instance). An odd point about it is that it is built on several levels: entry through the West Door brings you into a kind of narthex somewhat below that of the nave. Above the steps from the former to the latter is a rather beautiful bridge: I couldn't quite understand its practical function -that is, why a bridge is necessary- but I assume it has one. The perfect lady chapel is on a lower level again, to the right of the High Altar and hidden away down a little labrynthine staircase.
Halfway between the two cathedrals is an odd little piece of public sculpture.. piles of old fashioned trunks and suitcases, cast in concrete. Though I couldn't see any explanation, I assume it's a memorial to the hundreds of thousands who passed through Liverpool on their way to a new life, my own maternal grandparents among them (the paternal ones came over for a bit but decided they didn't like it and went back to Galway...). Apposite and thought provoking, as one looks down the hill to the Mersey.
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-02 06:47 am (UTC)"London as it might have been" - Felix Barker, Ralph Hyde - ISBN 0719555574 (1995 edition)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/202-3565130-3466223
Re:
Date: 2004-02-02 07:19 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-02 07:24 am (UTC)My dad has the Liverpool equivalent of "London under London" too, which is equally fascinating - mostly due to Joseph Williamson's crazy unexplained tunnel network.