Streets of Liverpool

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.

I thought I knew most of Liverpool’s churches but this photograph has puzzled me for some time. It is a well-built church (it looks as if it is faced with stone) in a prosperous area (possibly Aigburth?) but there are few other clues. The photograph was one of a set owned by an organ repairer/cleaner. On the reverse he has written “organ cleaned – builder Foster & Andrews’. It was posted in Liverpool on 14th November 1904.
I am working on a new edition of David Lewis’s Churches of Liverpool, which I published in 2001. I thought it was due for an update after ten years (most of them out of print): and I have many new photographs (such as this one) I would like to include. Can anyone recognise the church and location?

Princes Dock 1976

Paradise Street 1978

Sea Brow/Strand Street 1975

Three more panoramas of central Liverpool in the 1970s. The photographs were taken by Stan Roberts, who, in each case, pieced together several images to extend the street view.
All three show how much Liverpool has changed in the past forty years. Virtually all the buildings in the photographs have been demolished – the last act being the removal of the Mersey Mission to Seamen (on the corner of James Street and Sea Brow/Strand Street: the white modern building on the far left) this February. The warehouse with the Golden Shred advert is on the corner of Redcross Street.
This is the Liverpool I remember well from my early years in the city with warehouse after warehouse dominating the streetscape.
Princes Dock retains its perimeter wall but all the sheds were lost in the 1990s. The dock had long since ceased as a working dock although the sheds were used to house Liverpool Museum’s Large Objects Collection for many years. The change of use to hotels and offices is logical but the architecture of the new buildings is mundane and not of a high enough standard to reflect the importance of its World Heritage setting. No doubt, within a relatively short time, they will be replaced, hopefully by better buildings.
The car park in Paradise Street is included as an example of the nadir of Liverpool’s fortunes. With virtually no inward investment and little incentive to spend on quality, this shocking bus station-cum-car park was hastily assembled just yards from the premier shopping area. How did they get away with it? A truly shocking example of disrespect for the fine architectural tradition of the city. Fortunately Grosvenor had better ideas for the site and I doubt any tears were shed as it was reduced to rubble.

Kent Gardens, 1975

St Oswald Street, 1979

Two more examples of how the face of Liverpool was so drastically altered in the 1970s. The bold housing projects of the 1930s led by Director of Housing, Sir Lancelot Keay, was one of the most concerted efforts to tackle slum housing. Whole areas of the city were transformed by Keay’s progressive approach. Much of his neo-Georgian styled housing (including very good examples on Queen’s Drive and Muirhead Avenue) remains but his tenement blocks, including the examples shown above, disappeared in the 1970s and 80s.
The high density blocks were considered a great advance at the time and were a vast improvement on the courts and run-down houses they replaced. With proper facilities – running water, toilet/bathroom and gas – they transformed the lives of thousands. St Andrew’s Gardens (the Bullring) and Myrtle Gardens have survived and, perhaps others could have served the community for longer. Sadly, the cost of building maintenance was considered a price not worth paying. Tastes had also changed and there was a desire from many tenants for a more private kind of housing. Most intensive housing schemes seem to have a limited life (perhaps 40 years) before they have outlived there usefulness – the high rise 50s/60s blocks being a prime example. Perhaps Keay’s smaller scale housing work which has successfully survived points to a less flawed model.

Brunswick Square 1973

Southern General, Caryl Street 1975

Which post-War decade was the most damaging for Liverpool’s heritage. The 1950s and 60s are strong contenders but what about the 1970s? Looking through my photographs, I am struck by how much was demolished and how much the city changed over the decade. Perhaps only a small handful of key buildings were lost, the Sailors’ Home without doubt the single most important, but the general clearance of Georgian terraces, warehouses, churches and other features of the landscape was quite staggering. Here are two such examples taken by Stan Roberts. He took the panoramas in sections which, thanks to Photoshop, I have tidied up a bit.
The first is of Brunswick Square, which I was unaware of. It was directly off Westminster Road, close to the junction with Barlow Lane, and was an unadopted street as the sign indicates. A look at the 1927 Kelly’s Directory shows it to be a ‘respectable’ square with a doctor, police constable, farrier, engineer and mariner amongst the occupants. The 1970s photograph shows a more distressed street in its last throes.
The bottom photograph is the Southern General on the corner of Caryl Street and Hill Street. With opening of the new Royal Hospital both the Southern and Northern became superfluous and two key features disappeared from the skyline.
In my next blog, I will post two more 1970s panoramas.

One of the greatest losses to Liverpool’s architectural heritage was to its city centre churches. In 1899, both St George’s Church (in Derby Square) and St John’s Church in Old Haymarket were demolished (the latter being fairly universally disliked for its rather crude Gothic design). The elegant church of St Thomas in Park Lane was pulled down in 1905 (with the tomb of Joseph Williamson, the “Mole of Edge Hill’ left in the cleared churchyard). St Peter’s was next in line, lasting until 1922. It’s demise was planned for some time. In 1880, Liverpool gained its first bishop, Rt Rev Ryle, and St Peter’s was made the Pro-Cathedral as an interim measure while decisions about a purpose-built cathedral could be made. In the photograph, the poster on the post states ‘Full Cathedral Service’.
Once the decision to build on St James’s Mount had been made, the diocese realised it could only fund the ambitious project by selling off its very valuable real estate in the city’s main retail street. St Peter’s had to go and there was no shortage of takers, including Harrods, who planned to build there only store outside of London on the site. In the end, it was the ambitious American chain, Woolworths, who won through and they maintained a high street presence for over half a century before Burtons/Topshop moved in.
I do find the removal of churches such as St Peter’s sad. Not from a religious standpoint but because city centres need spaces that are not dominated by commerce and retailing. We have too few and need to seriously think about what kind of city we want to live in. Is all our space up for the highest bidder, as always seems to be the case, or can we exert some control over its use for a greater communal benefit? After the disgraceful ‘Fourth Grace’ public involvement, I have my grave doubts although concerted action did help save the Lyceum.

I am guessing that the year is 1965. The John Moores Centre (top left) appears to have been finished, with a nearby crane working on Phase 2. The pub on the corner of Fontenoy Street and Great Crosshall Street (the road running up from Byrom Street the left), is the Australian Vaults with Holy Cross Church prominent just beyond.
The tenements, euphemistically named Fontenoy Gardens, without a blade of grass in sight, are split by the tunnels for Waterloo Goods station, across the road from Waterloo Dock. Further along the docks, the ‘Three Sisters’, the chimneys of Clarence Dock power station are another landmark. With the exception of the JM Centre, all these features have now disappeared in the reshaping of the city over the last thirty years – although the refuse lorry is little different from its modern counterpart (at least some things were designed to last).