Streets of Liverpool

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.

I remember the final death throes of Queen Square back in the mid-1970s. I was about to move into the old Grapes Hotel, on the corner of Wood Street and Whitechapel, to set up the Open Eye arts project, and I attended an auction at the Stork Hotel (the white building at the far end of the photograph) at which all its effects were being auctioned off. I cannot recall anything of real interest at the auction – it was mainly stacking chairs, catering equipment and bedroom furniture – and I left empty-handed after a quick look around. It was only years later that I became more acquainted with its history as one of Liverpool’s early coaching inns, famous for its theatrical clientele (from the Theatre Royal in Williamson Square).
Queen Square was at the centre of the wholesale fruit and vegetable trade, a place full of character. Unfortunately, it was decided that the whole area should be designated for the ill-fated civic centre scheme, which was for a seven storey concrete monstrosity based on a swastika plan. The architect, Colin St John Wilson, is best-known for designing the current British Library building in London, which began in 1962 and was finally completed – after a 35-year history of political wrangles, budget overspending and design problems – in 1997. The original scheme would have created a piazza to the south of the British Museum, but would have required the demolition of a large part of Bloomsbury. After concerted protests, the scheme was relocated to save the area’s fine architectural heritage. Sadly for Liverpool, the Georgian/early Victorian buildings around Queen Square were compulsorily purchased, emptied and pulled down before the scheme was abandoned as being out-dated and an unnecessary solution to the problem of rehousing all the Council’s departments in one monolithic building.
What an appalling waste – for the cleared area became a car park for over 20 years before being redeveloped into … a square with a hotel, restaurants and offices.
Thank you to everyone who has followed my blog this year. I promise to get round to finding as many of those requested photographs I can find and to give you an even more interesting 2011. Have a great New Year!

South Castle Street

Two photographs of the Castle Street area. The first is largely unchanged – although the block of offices on the left had been replaced by the turn of the century. The main area of interest is the horse-drawn omnibus alongside the row of carriages. To the right, the old Exchange building can be seen, behind the Town Hall.
The view of South Castle Street is a Frith photograph of about the same time. The ghostly spire of St George’s Church can be seen above the buildings on the left. In the foreground are the shops of Thomas Ogden (presumably the Ogden’s tobacco magnate), who also had shops in St James Street, Mill Street, Green Lane, Park Lane and Cornwallis Street according to my 1874 Gore’s Directory. On the other corner, at 61 Castle Street, is J. Sewill, Watch and Chronometer maker (and still trading from their current shop in the Albert Dock).
Ogden’s building on the left (and much of its terrace) survived wartime bombing – but was swept away in the early 1970s to make way for the monstrous Canning Place development. It had survived for over 125 years – their concrete replacement managed 25 years. Enough said.
Francis Frith made his fortune in Liverpool before devoting his life to photography and becoming one of the great topographical photographers of the 19th century (particularly through his amazing photographs of Egypt and Sinai). His commercial enterprise covered the country but he was particularly strong on Liverpool – taking hundreds of photographs of buildings and ships. I am particularly interested in finding out more about Frith and would welcome any information on his time in Liverpool and of any photographs he took (especially earlier ones). He deserves a book – but I need to dig out a few more facts first!