Streets of Liverpool

I reckon that one way to double traffic to my blog is to mention Everton (well – increase numbers slightly!). I’m sorry to disappoint any football fans, though, for today’s photograph is a rather striking image of a policeman looking over his beat from the heights of Everton. Netherfield Road is below but I cannot decipher the street name on the side of the corner building.
The city he is observing is about to be dramatically changed.The closely-packed terraces are about to make way for that critically flawed high rise housing policy which destroyed well-established neighbourhoods for very little gain. The tower blocks have largely gone and now parkland rolls down the hill to Great Homer Street. Visually a huge improvement but I am sure there are many readers out there who will look at the disappeared landscape with more than a touch of regret for a lost community.

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Houghton Street, 1964

Daisy Day, 1965

In May last year, I included a photograph of Houghton Street looking towards Clayton Square. The photograph today shows the street from the opposite direction looking down towards Williamson Square. Within a year, the whole site was cleared to make way for the new St John’s Market.
One shop caught my eye – Madame Foner’s corsetry shop. The shop relocated to Bold Street and, last year again, rather incongruously to the front courtyard of the Bluecoat Art Centre. The last move seems to have been unsuccessful and it has been replaced by a gift shop. Small shops come and go but Madame Foner has had a long lifetime for a specialist shop.
The second photograph is of a fundraising campaign for Merseyside hospitals. I only arrived in the city in 1970 and I cannot recall Daisy Days. The small girl dressed as a nurse would appear to be helping her dad.
Two more photos (and the last for the time being) from Pat Weekes. Would anyone else like to submit their photographs of old Liverpool? Any date, any subject – this is a perfect forum for getting them seen!

Two photographs of Lime Street taken from the same elevated position on St George’s Plateau and quite probably on the same day. The day is easy to pinpoint – it is July 12th and the Dingle Orange Lodges are heading to Exchange station for their annual bash in Southport. Pat Weekes has taken his time. Having set his camera, he has also captured the fine sweep of what was once St George’s Place – a natural curve of buildings that flowed down towards Roe Street. Only for one further year because they were to make way for the angular, unsympathetic contours of the new St John’s Precinct – designed without any sympathy for the grand setting of St George’s Hall.

You know my grumbles well enough by now – so enjoy two fine photographs of the 1960s.

Liverpool’s churches come in all shapes and sizes and most of them found their way into David Lewis’s Churches of Liverpool.
Some missed the cut and the Sailors’ Church in Wellington Road was one of them. I spent a good hour trying to locate the tin church and fortunately found another photographic reference. There was another church in Wellington Road, a Free Methodist chapel at which Silas Hocking, the author of Her Benny was an early minister. The Sailors’ Church is of a different order to that once fine Italianate building and presumably drew its congregation from the ships docking in the South Docks.
Liverpool had a long tradition of sailors’ chapels and churches, using no longer seaworthy ships as well as buildings like the one above. It is not a pretty building but the photographer, Pat Weekes, has captured it for posterity (and for future inclusion in the revised Churches of Liverpool.

Following the last blog, which produced a fantastic response, I have posted another picture of boys at a gate being shooed away by an old man. This time the location can be easily identified as Liverpool Cathedral. The photograph was taken by Peter Leeson in the early 1970s. It is quite a grainy image and was not included in his book Goodbye Scottie Road – but I thought it was an interesting follow-on from the last blog, which has been fairly conclusively identified as Princes Avenue facing Parkway. The gates have gone but the row of houses on Parkway in the background still stand, unlike the row of Georgian houses which lined St James’s Road below the Cathedral. They all disappeared in the late 1970s.

The Rialto 1974

Lodge Lane 1976

Lodge Lane 1976

I was asked last week why I had not posted anything about the 30th anniversary of the Toxteth Riots. A fair point which I hope today’s blog will rectify. I thought I might have a photograph of the Racquets Club, which was unceremoniously burned down along with The Rialto, but so far nothing has turned up. I knew one of the Club’s committee members and he expressed his delight at the outcome. Members, all from the professional classes, had been reluctant to visit the Club for some time prior to the riots and a financial hole had been created. The generous compensation wiped out the financial problems and gave them fine new premises in Chapel Street (in the Hargreaves Building). The Establishment won out as always, as no doubt did Swainbank who lost his furniture repository in the Rialto. In the case of Lodge Lane, the looting of the shops dealt a devastating blow to the street, from which it still has not recovered.

Upper Duke Street 1977

Seel Street 1980

Duke Street 1971

After my last post about School Lane and Hanover Street, I received a mixed postbag. Whilst most agreed with me that Liverpool had lost a valuable chunk of its early history, others felt the Liverpool One development was a substantial improvement on the semi-dereliction that existed before. My point was that the gradual chipping away at these streets happened before the conception of the Grosvenor plan – by which time the few remaining fragments were indeed rather meaningless. Certainly I would not argue against the Liverpool One effect – it has transformed the city centre, created much-needed jobs and raised the image of Liverpool.
To labour my point again, I have posted three photographs of the Duke Street/Seel Street area. Virtually all the early Georgian terraces have been removed in the last 30 years. Of course, preservation is nearly always an expensive option but there was little will to save them. The houses on Duke Street collapsed through neglect in the 1990s, the terraces on Seel Street were even more recent victims. Upper Duke Street may look grim in the photograph but renovated and repainted, the houses would be a far more interesting streetscape than the JMU building which occupies the site. We never seem to learn any lessons. Once gone, an important part of the city’s history disappears and no matter how many museums are built heralding the achievements of the city, the real heritage has already been dispatched.

School Lane, 1970

Hanover Street, 1970

I worked in the Bluecoat Chambers for over 15 years and loved the small group of buildings at the Hanover Street end that had survived against all the odds. Too small to be commercially viable, they were, nevertheless, a very visible reminder of an earlier Liverpool. Hornby Lowe’s Cutlery Stores, with its superb frontage, was in business from at least 1879. The shop, with its macabre display of hunting, fishing and, I suppose, stabbing knives, was living on borrowed time but it had a character that greatly added to the streetscape. Looking at my 1867 Gore’s Directory, the buildings had previously been occupied by an oyster dealer, a chandelier maker and a gas fitter. In 1857, Charles O’Donnell, a policeman, lived in the Hornby Lowe shop.
Once land values began to soar in the 1990s, their days were numbered. Few property developers have any respect for history; what are a few eighteenth century buildings when there is money to be made. The row of very early houses and warehouses on Hanover Street were demolished one by one until the Liverpool One development swept away the last surviving building. Sadly, their demise followed the standard practice of removing buildings one by one on the grounds that they are beyond repair until there is no cohesion to the street, leaving the surviving building like a single tooth only too easy to extract. This sad pattern has removed whole layers of history – buildings not of great architectural merit but of importance because they were examples of Liverpool’s first great wave of prosperity. Had someone suggested in the 1980s that the Shambles in York should be pulled down because they occupied valuable development land, there would have been a national outcry. The shame is that Liverpool lost so much with hardly a whimper.

Ann Fowler Home c1968

Interior of Home, 1910

The announcement today that Southern Cross, the largest provider of care homes for the elderly in the UK, is cutting 3000 jobs and possibly closing over 100 homes, highlights a problem that has persisted for generations.
I studied social administration at university and was taught the maxim ‘a society is judged by the way it treats those in need’. I soon found out – on my first placement, I spent four weeks in a wing of an old workhouse in Sheffield looking after homeless men. With crowded dormitories, a small locker for their life’s possessions and little else but a roof over their heads, it would seem little had changed since the Workhouse had closed. The Ann Fowler Salvation Home for Women perhaps offered sanctuary of a sort but what a miserable place, as can be seen in the interior photograph taken a century ago. Housed in an old Welsh Congregational Church (built in 1868), I was surprised to read that it had survived until 1983 before closure and demolition. What sad lives had been lived by the women who passed through its doors.
Southern Cross’s problems, the cuts in public expenditure and the growing number of old people points rather ominously to a slow slide back into the Dark Ages of care. In a week when a 20 year footballer is bought for £20 million pounds, it makes me wonder how today’s society will be judged in 100 years time,

The view of the photograph is clear enough, looking to the Custom House and beyond, but I am puzzled as to where it was taken from. The dock in the foreground is empty, the remnant of George’s Dock, but I had assumed it had been filled in at the time Mersey Docks and Harbour Board building had been erected in 1907.
The rooftop shown would indicate it was taken further along the road – Goree Piazzas and Brunswick Street are to the immediate left – roughly from the position of the Cunard Building. Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to when the dock was finally filled in and where the camera is positioned.
That problem aside, I have often thought what was the ‘best’ year to have enjoyed Liverpool’s architecture. My own choice is slightly later than this photograph – probably the late 1930s. The Blitz and post-War destruction had yet to inflict devastation on the fabric of the city and the new buildings (Pier Head, India Buildings, Martins Bank, the Philharmonic Hall, the Mersey Tunnel and the Anglican Cathedral) were all positive additions. The photograph illustrates three key losses: the Goree and Custom House (to wartime bombing, although salvageable in both cases) and the Overhead Railway (through financial pressures). A real tragedy for Liverpool.