Streets of Liverpool

I was delighted to read the news this week that planning permission has been granted to turn the Royal Insurance Building on the corner of Dale Street and North John Street into a luxury hotel. Of course, planning permission does not guarantee action but it seems as if this is a genuine application.
The building is one of the city centre’s neglected gems. It has stood empty for well over a decade and has begun to look tired and neglected. The architect J Francis Doyle worked closely with his friend and colleague Norman Shaw (architect of the White Star Building). The building is a particularly early example of steel frame construction in this country, further proof, if any was needed, of the innovative architecture taking place in the city.
I have a couple of contemporary photographs from the building’s opening in 1903. The first is of the Board Room, which has all the grandeur that an international company required. The last photograph is of a rain butt, which shows again the attention to detail now so sadly lacking in most of today’s buildings.

Exchange Flags, May 1886

Exchange Flags, 1829

I must apologise to John Sergeant. He did visit Liverpool and included a mention of Frith being a founder member of Liverpool Photographic Society (although not the founder as was stated) in 1853. By way of illustration, a photograph of cotton traders and other merchants was shown – all gathered for the camera in Exchange Flags.
As John Sergeant mentioned, this was a clever commercial ploy. Photographing so many together would have guaranteed healthy sales – as any school photographer worth his/her salt knows.
My particular interest is not in the realities of commercial photography – a difficult business at the best of times – but in the setting. Exchange Flags has been through three major transformations. The photograph of Wyatt’s Exchange Buildings, built in a ‘Flemish Renaissance’ style in 1867 reveal an ornate and impressive building in sharp contrast to the building it frames, the Town Hall. It replaced a smaller building in the more complementary Classical style which is illustrated above. By the 1930s, Wyatt’s building itself was felt to be too small and the current buildings were erected, although not finally completed until after the War. I have ambivalent thoughts about the ‘modern’ buildings. I used to dislike them but my views have softened now that they have been cleaned up.
My biggest problem is with Exchange Flags itself. It should be a magnificent city square but it is a soulless place. The statue to Nelson is a superb centre-piece but there is nothing else to break up the view. Tree planting is out of the question, I suppose, because of the underground car park, but surely a more dynamic setting could be designed that will actual encourage people to sit down (seats would be a good starting point) rather than rush though. Liverpool is not good on squares – Williamson Square and Clayton Square are dreadful and Derby Square is little better in spite of its recent upgrade. The best continental squares are where people want to be, with cafés, fountains and interesting sculptures. Somehow, we cannot create such places. Exchange Flags would be a good place to start.

Park Lane Goods Station, 1980

Apartments on the same site, 2012

Kean’s Hotel (originally Mayfair Hotel) 1980

Park Lane/Tabley Street, 1980

Comparative view taken 2012

Park Lane/Liver Street, 1976

Comparative view 2012

Park Lane is a short street, probably no more the 500 metres. I walk along it most days and always enjoy my quick walk into the centre. It has no pretensions to grandeur unlike its London counterpart but it was once a busy thoroughfare connecting Canning Place with the Dingle.
I can remember some of the buildings that once lined the street. The offices of the Park Lane station (the top photograph) were demolished in the last five years to make way for the blocks of flats shown in the second photograph. Next to the station stood that glorious folly of a pub, the Mayfair Hotel. Folly in that the brewery had jumped the gun when plans were announced to extend the railway from Edge Hill to Park Lane. Anticipating a great trade from thirsty travellers, they built an impressive gin palace, only to discover that the station was meant for goods traffic only. It was a remarkable sight and survived until the early 1980s. The next blocks were typical nineteenth century Liverpool – a mix of pubs and businesses with considerable character. My 1966 Kelly’s Directory has armature winders, flooring contractors, leather goods manufacturers, turf accountants, dried fish dealers, tailors, hairdressers and publicans amongst the trades listed. All in all, a very vibrant street.
The colour comparative photographs tell a different story. Most of the street is now vacant land. There is a new housing development walled off alongside the Swedish Church but the rest of the street is now cleared land – a soulless stretch only enlivened by sight of the Albert Dock in the distance. Why does this kind of destruction have to take place? I could understand it if the land was built on (like the new apartments in the second photograph) but to remove interesting and historical buildings for waste ground is a depressingly routine act in Liverpool. Who is to blame? Developers of the City Council? Either way, the destruction of Park Lane is a clear lesson in how not to develop an area. Like the Sailors’ Home, there is an undue haste to pull down buildings in the hope that development will become that much easier. The holes in the ground and acres of waste ground are scars the community must look at, often for decades.

Victoria Street, 1965

Hackins Hey, 1965

One of the main reasons for starting my blog was to get more people involved in discussing Liverpool as seen through photography and to encourage greater sharing of collections. There is a wealth of material out there and the internet offers an ideal opportunity to involve a wide network of people. I have my own ideas of where I hope it will go and will be putting forward a plan for the future before long.

The response I have received is beyond my expectations. Sadly, I have not managed to meet everyone’s requests for images but I hope to rectify that in coming months. I know it might seem as if my collection is limitless but many of the photographs I have been asked about (of tenements/courts and backstreets in particular) are more likely to be found in the City Engineer’s Collection at Liverpool Record Office and they must be approached rather than me.

Today’s two images were, again, taken by Pat Weekes, who ran the memorable Merseyside Collectors’ Centre in Temple Court. The first image is of happy Liverpool supporters returning from the great FA Cup celebration held at the Town Hall. The soot-blackened buildings are very much in evidence. With the exception of Watson Prickard’s building on the corner of North John Street, all the buildings have survived and look much better for having been cleaned. The second photograph is of another street that remarkably has survived largely unchanged. Hackins Hey has no great architecture but it has the atmosphere of an older, lost Liverpool.

61 Lime Street, c1912

Church Street, 1928

In a much earlier post, I wrote that a history of shops in Liverpool was overdue. There is plenty to write about from the first purpose-built department store in Europe (in Compton House where M & S is now), the great Welsh retailers David Lewis, Owen Owens and TJ Hughes, the Vestey’s and their Dewhurst butchers chain, the once-exclusive Bold Street and so on.
Liverpool with its extremes of wealth and poverty supported a wide range of shops catering for those at either end and the ones in the middle. The first Woolworth’s store was in Church Street and Harrods were close to opening their only store outside of London on the site then occupied by St Peter’s church. They pulled out and Woolworth moved across the road and built the fine shop now occupied by Top Shop.
Marks and Spencer were another company attracted to the city and they opened a shop in Lime Street in 1903. The top photograph is of a slightly later date because The Picture House (later renamed The Futurist) built in 1912 is clearly visible next door. The facade above the shop front is showing signs of age – and it is no better today.
M & S had opened their first store in Manchester in 1894 and quickly built up a reputation for their high principles, buying only British produced goods and offering a no-quibbles returns policy that was unique at that time. In 1928, the company moved into a substantial part of Compton House and have remained there ever since. The store was extended in the 1970s and a further extension to front Williamson Square has been planned but not, as yet, carried out. Hopefully, the development will take place before too long and help revamp what is now a rather poor quality city square.

Norton Street 1971

London Road 1973

Moss Street 1973

Norton Street 1976

London Road 1979

Following on from my blog about the demise of TJ Hughes, I have posted several images of London Road at the end of its ‘glory days’. All the photographs were taken in the 1970s and show the road was still a busy retail centre with nearly all the shops trading.
Perhaps it wasn’t too surprising. Liverpool still had a population of 610,000 at the time of the 1971 Census, although this was substantially down on the 1961 figure of 745,000. The decline continued and the last Census in 2001 registered a population of 441,830. A decline of that magnitude has to impact on the whole city and London Road has been hit very hard by the loss of its immediate population. Looking at the photographs, it is sad to see the subsequent loss of a number of fine buildings. I particularly like the showroom on Norton Street in 1976 with its impressive Gothic windows. Fortunately many of the buildings have survived although many are run-down. The Prince of Wales pub on the corner with Moss Street has always intrigued me. I have never been inside it (it seems to have been closed since the early 1980s) but it is a real gin palace on the outside with statues in niches and a chateau-style roof.
What is the future of London Road? I feel it is too far away from the city centre to have any hope of a retail revival and can only see a continued neglect, particularly once the focus of TJ Hughes is taken away. Change is inevitable but it is sad to see such a marked decline in a once buoyant area.

Oriel Chambers, Water Street

16 Cook Street

Cook Street staircase

Peter Ellis is a great enigma. Little is known about him but he is regarded as one of the great architects of the modern movement, his Oriel Chambers accredited as being the blueprint for the skyscraper. Built in 1864, it outraged architectural critics at the time who compared it to a greenhouse. Ellis’s radical rejection of traditional styles and materials were an attempt to resolve the problem of lighting in offices. The prevailing Gothic style allowed for fairly meagre windows which resulted in dark and oppressive interiors. Even as late as 1931, Professor Charles Reilly was deriding the building as “a cellular habitation for the human insect”, although he hoped that it would survive as a humorous asset to Liverpool.
American architects took a different view. Quentin Hughes in Liverpool: City of Architecture describes it as the “most significant office building in Liverpool and one of the most important buildings in the world because, stylistically and structurally, it foreshadows by many years the work of the Modern Movement in architecture.”
16 Cook Street is a lesser building but no less interesting in its expansive use of glass and, particularly, the magnificent glazed cast-iron staircase in its courtyard, an idea successfully exported to Chicago and used in early skyscrapers.
I started to research Ellis because no other work by him is known to survive. It is said he was so hurt by the criticism of his two buildings that he never designed another and continued with his other job as a surveyor. I am not convinced the story ends there. I have discovered that a Peter Ellis of Liverpool had applied for patents for lift designs at about the same time. Perhaps he found a more elevated career with ever-upward prospects.

Castle Street

Victoria Street

First of all an apology. I have just realised that a few of my recent posts have had the right hand side of the image cropped off when viewed. This is due to me increasing the image width outside of the WordPress limits. In my browser, the images looked fine but I was shocked to see how they looked on another computer. So I have gone back and made the necessary adjustments – which will make sense of some of my references.

My last post about Victoria Street reminded me just how good Liverpool’s commercial buildings are. The 1930s photographs do not do justice to some of the finest Victorian streets in Britain. One of the great pleasures of walking through the city centre is to look above the ground floor, where too often the ubiquitous branding by national companies takes away all individuality. Look above their fascias and the detail is fascinating, from Classical to Gothic, from parapets to domes. Here above are two fine examples, of Castle Street and Victoria Street.

The Post Office c1900

Victoria Street is one of Liverpool’s more recent main streets. By more recent, I mean it was constructed as late as 1867/68 to connect North John Street to Manchester Street. The area had been basically an area of narrow streets with slum housing interspersed with industry (including a herring house, which must have been a pretty unpleasant neighbour). Of its earliest commercial buildings, Fowler’ Buildings is a good example of the intention to make the new street a prime commercial location.
Today, it is one of Liverpool’s best-preserved commercial streets, with many fine buildings from the 1880s and 90s. It suffered less severely from enemy bombing than other streets, although the Government Buildings (where the Municipal car park) and the Post Office were victims (the Post Office was rebuilt but without its French chateau style upper tiers which can be seen in the photograph above). The Produce Exchange (on the left in the top photograph) was at the centre of the fruit and provisions trade, with many of the surrounding warehouses in Mathew Street and Temple Court utilised to store and distribute produce.
The two photographs show a heavily congested street during the 1930s. The lorries in the top photograph are all servicing the fruit and vegetable trade, with a crowd of people assembled outside the Produce Exchange. When the Mersey tunnel opened in 1934, traffic increased substantially and I think that both photographs were taken to illustrate the problem.

Lord Street suffered badly during the war, losing many fine buildings, particularly on the left side of the street in today’s photograph.
The right-hand side fared better and the most prominent building, the Lord Street Arcade (the brown and white striped building) is one of the better buildings that has survived. A rather strange building for its time (1901) and built in the Gothic style that was already falling out of favour, it was originally built as a galleried arcade, as is shown in the second photograph, which was taken just before it opened. The arcade was not a great success, probably because the individual shop units were too small. In the late 1980s, I rented a small office on the second-floor gallery, but I never liked the place. The original glass roof had been replaced by a suspended ceiling and the whole place felt claustrophobic. Soon after I moved out, the building was taken over by a sports chain who remodelled the upper floors.
Probably the most interesting fact about the building is that Walter Aubrey Thomas was the architect (not to be confused with Walter Thomas, architect of the Philharmonic Hotel). WA Thomas’s more successful buildings included the State Assurance (1905) on Dale Street, Tower Buildings (1906) and, his masterpiece, the Royal Liver Building (1911). Three very individual buildings – all stylistically quite different. All substantially better buildings than the British Home Store building, which can be seen in construction further up the street – a building totally out of sympathy with its neighbours with its brutalist front that epitomises the worst of the post-War architecture afflicted on the city.