Category Archives: Merseyside

The Liverpool Overhead Railway (aka the Dockers’ Umbrella) – 1893-1956

Carriage 3 of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, preserved in the Museum of Liverpool

On a recent visit to the Museum of Liverpool on the Mersey waterfront, Carriage No.3 of the Liverpool Overhead Railway made a real impression. It is the only significant surviving artefact of the Overhead Railway, fully restored and displayed on a replica of the railway’s raised infrastructure. It was one of the original 1893 carriages, and surrounding it on the first floor of the museum is a section dedicated to the Liverpool Overhead Railway (LOR). Carriage No.3 is a glossy delight, and because it is displayed on an infrastructure reflecting its actual height of 16ft (4.8m) above the ground, it conveys some idea of how the Overhead railway originally looked, and how it acted as a sheltered walkway for the dockers moving between different docks and both company and administrative buildings on or near the waterfront. Carriage No.3 is the last remaining carriage of the Overhead Railway’s trains, where it is the centre of a display about the Liverpool Overhead Railway.

Overhead Railway running past the Port of London Building, the Cunard Building and the Royal Liver Building, sometime after 1917, with horse-drawn carts still very much in evidence. Source: Gutted Arcades

Of all the heritage losses in Liverpool, one of the most painful has to be the Liverpool Overhead Railway (LOR), affectionately known as “The Dockers’ Umbrella” or “The Ovee.” The world’s very first overhead electric railway, it opened in 1893 with thirteen stations, and was extended over the following, serving both workers and tourists. The Overhead was damaged a number of times during the Second World War due to its proximity to the docks, but it was always swiftly repaired. The announcement of its closure was made in 1955 and in spite of considerable protest it was shut down in December 1956, and was dismantled from September 1957.

The railway ran the length of Liverpool’s docks, the earliest of which, built by Thomas Steers in 1715, is now known as “Old Dock” (the subterranean remains of Old Dock can now be visited – see my post here). It initiated the steady growth of Liverpool’s docks in a chain along its long, relatively straight waterfront This gently curving, linear chain was the key to the viability of a single passenger transport system that would help to integrate all the docks and, most importantly, relieve severe traffic congestion at street level.

A 1930s map of the Liverpool Overhead Railway

Electric train on the LOR, 1902. Source: Wikipedia

The port of Liverpool was expanding and increasing amounts of cargo and passenger traffic were putting a strain on the waterfront transport infrastructure, which was becoming increasingly congested with horse-drawn vehicles including carts, buses, omnibus- trams, cabs and carriages, as well as trucks and lorries and two horse-drawn goods railways. In 1850 alone 3.5 million tons of shipping entered Liverpool, entering docks that ran along a densely packed waterfront that by 1890 reach 7-miles, more than double the length from the 1840s. Most of the dock shipping consisted of sailing ships but an increasing number of steam-powered vessels were making their presence felt and were slowly replacing sail, becoming all-important with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. All vessels had to be offloaded and then reloaded with an onward cargo, nearly all moved by horse-drawn cart. Huge numbers of dockers, labourers and craftsmen as well as ship passengers (including emigrants) and transient sailors were putting enormous pressure on the city’s transport systems. As the docks continued to be built along the waterfront it was becoming more difficult to transport dock workers, administrators, labourers, local and foreign sailors and passengers (including significant numbers of emigrants until c.1920) to their respective docks, ships and warehouses, whilst office workers in buildings on the waterfront found it increasingly difficult to get to and from work, with the all-important Dock Road becoming the most congested road in Liverpool.

Elevated railway in New York 1876. Source: Wikipedia

An elevated steam railway in New York provided a suitable model for a transportation system that might help to solve Liverpool’s traffic problems, and was first proposed for Liverpool in 1853 by engineer John Grantham. However, it was not until after the docks had expanded even further and the traffic congestion reached crisis point that the idea was revived by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board and dock engineer George Lyster was sent to New York to inspect the elevated railways that had operated so successfully there since 1872. Shipping magnate Alfred Holt, a former member of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, put his name behind the project and in 1882 George Lyster presented a convincing report to the Board, which decided to proceed with an overhead railway. The initial Act of Parliament that enabled the work to proceed were the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Acts of 1879, 1882 and 1887, the latter enabling a double line to be built after the Board of Trade refused consent to the initial, more modest proposal for a single line with passing places. This was followed by the incorporation of the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company (LORC) in 1888. Sir William Forwood, who had been President of the Chamber of Commerce between 1872 and 1877 was placed in charge. In 1889 the new company issued a prospectus issuing £450,000 in £10.00 shares.

Approaching James Street Station. Source: National Museum of Liverpool

The approach to Seaforth Sands Station. Source: Wikipedia

The first task was to source land, and this was leased from the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (MDHB) for a period of 999 years, after which the engineers Douglas Fox and James Henry Greathead were appointed to oversee the development of the new overhead railway. Although New York had provided the initial idea for the LOR, its trains were steam-powered. This was rejected in favour of an electric railway , which would avoid a number of difficulties associated with steam, including the weight of steam engines, the danger of falling oil, coals and sparks on people, horses and vehicles below as well as the risk of fire to warehouses and sheds, particularly those that contained highly flammable sugar, rum and cotton. There was some precedent for electric services. In America there were nearly 2500 miles of electric tramways in service, in England the first electric railway was the City and South London line in 1890, an electric tramway was working in Blackpool, and in Liverpool the Electric Supply Company had built a small electricity generating station in the area where Liverpool’s commercial and administrative offices were based, and this was very successful.

The LOR under construction. Pall Mall Budget 1893. Source: British News Online

Work started in November 1889. Iron columns were erected and spans of the main infrastructure, based on iron girders, were pre-assembled in the yard. The standard span length was 50ft, but other sections had to be adapted to the needs of the railway line. The structures had to be stiff to withstand the impacts of the moving carriages, and this was supplied primarily by steel decking that was riveted into position. Each span was raised on to a trolley on the railway and lifted into place by an ingenious mobile gantry and its cranes, with the gantry moving along the route as the assembly took place. Steel rail tracks were then bolted on to sleepers. The rails were laid according to a standard gauge track, 4ft 8ins in width. As it was raised 16ft (4.8m) off the ground, it acted as an “umbrella” for pedestrians and vehicles, whilst roads and tramlines criss-crossed beneath it. Four movable bridges were built into the plan, to allow tall loads to pass through the railway.

The moving gantry with a horse-drawn train beneath it. Pall Mall Budget 1th January 1893. Source: British Newspapers Online

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury turning on the electricity to the LOR. From the Illustrated London News 11th February 1898. Source: British Newspapers Online

The build took four years, and when it was completed in January 1893 it had thirteen stations over an initial five mile route from Alexandra Dock in the north to Herculaneum Dock in the south and had its own electricity generating station at Bramley-Moore Dock. The first official trip was undertaken by dignitaries on the 7th January 1893. This was followed by a ceremony on 4th February to declare the Overhead Railway open, when no lesser personage that the the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury flicked the switch at the electricity generating station. The railway opened to the public on 6th March 1893.

Map of the Liverpool Overhead Railway in relation to the modern Metro rail line. Source: Wikimedia

Map of the Liverpool Overhead Railway in relation to the modern Metro rail line (click to enlarge). Source: Wikimedia

The LOR became an instant hit, an artery that connected all the docks along the waterfront. It also connected all the important dock-related buildings that related to the docks, such as shipping companies, bonded warehouses, H.M. Customs, forwarding houses, provisioning merchants (supplying food to ships), hotels, hostels, pubs and other food and drink outlets, ship repair yards, transport depots, and stabling for horses. It must have created a sense of integration and cohesion quite unlike that in any other British dock system. The line was extended first in 1894 to Seaforth Sands in the north, partly to generate more income from residential areas in the evenings when the railway was under-employed in the more central areas, and to encourage an untapped tourist trade to the beaches beyond the docks (see below). The LOR was extended again in 1896, this time to the south to Dingle at Park Road. The Dingle station required the excavation of a new tunnel, its blocked entrance one of the last surviving features of the LOR, and was the only station on the line to have been underground.

The route was short, totalling just over seven miles, including its extension; its connections with other railways were unimportant, and its traffic was based on a very large number of passengers paying, on average, low fares . . . Compared with most railways, its customer base, rooted in the business of the port, was not so much changeable as positively volatile (Adrian Jarvis, 1996, p.6)

All of the overhead platforms required stairs from ground level. Most of these were very basic, but the more popular stations, like Pier Head and Seaforth were more elaborate, with covered staircases and platforms. At Gladstone Dock Station there were two bridges over the track to enable people to change platforms.

Pierhead Station at the time of the station opening, showing one of the movable bridges and a range of ships’ masts beyond. A horse-drawn tram can be seen under the LOR at left. Illustrated London News, 11th February 1893. Source: British Newspapers Online

The earliest carriages were not pulled by a separate engine, because each carriage had its own engine installed. Initially each train was composed of two carriages, each of which had a 60hp engine enabling a speed of 13 miles per hour. The two powered carriages consisted of one 3rd class (for 40 passengers) and one 1st class (for 16 passengers).

An original illustration of the LOR carriage design. Source: Grace’s Guide

Later on, a third carriage was added between the two powered ones with two 3rd class carriages flanking an unpowered middle one that was 1st class. Combined, the three carriages could carry up to 140 people. A single small steam engine named “Lively Polly” was employed in the initial construction phases and was retained for maintenance work, including removal of ice from the tracks.

The curved seats made of wooden slats in 3rd Class were apparently very uncomfortable, but look great. Carriage 3 in the Museum of Liverpool

The carriages were manufactured in Birmingham by Brown, Marshall and Co. Carriages like Coach 3 at the Museum of Liverpool were made of Burmese teak. An initial order of 30 carriages was made for the LOR in 1892. After the initial build they were sent to the Carriage Shed at Seaforth Sands for fitting with the electrics, with the motors installed under the floors. Two classes were originally envisaged, a 1st and 2nd class but after 1905 only 1st and 3rd classes were employed to avoid confusion when the LOR joined forces with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.

An advert for sightseers in the Museum of Liverpool. It is sensibly displayed behind glass, and as a result of the low light and reflections my photograph is very fuzzy, but clockwise from top left it advertises Mossley Hill Zoo (open between 1932 and 1938), the beach at Seaforth Sands, the docks themselves (“a wonder of the world”), and the River Mersey with all its exciting shipping traffic

As well as creating a transport link between the docks, corporate and administrative buildings and the residential areas of the city, the LOR provided sightseeing tours at weekends for Liverpool families. Not only was the LOR initially a novelty, but it also provided superb views of the Mersey docks with all their cranes, masts and funnels, with ships of all shapes and sizes, from sailing ships to steamers, and from small tramp steamers to magnificent ocean liners. The Liverpool Overhead Railway Company, with a keen eye to making the most of the railway, made arrangements with shipping lines for visitors with special tickets to enter the docks to visit some of the luxurious ocean liners that came into dock, providing local people with a sense of the unreachable, glamorous lifestyles of their fashionable passengers and of the far-off sophisticated and exotic places that the ships visited.

Seaforth Sands. Source: Sefton Council Archives

The northernmost stop after 1894 was Seaforth Sands, and this gave access to the beaches to the north of the docks, providing a more conventional day out at the seaside with the day-trip staples of sand, sea and ice-cream. Special tickets allowed dogs to board the trains for family outings. Links from the LOR to tram routes allowed visits to tourist destinations both within Liverpool and further afield.

In 1901 Seaforth Sands was the first ever railway station in England to have an escalator (a “Reno inclined elevator”) installed in a roofed-in passageway from ground floor to platform level. It had wooden slats 3 inches wide that were faced with India rubber, with each tread running on wheels in continual motion, with a handrail that moved in tandem. Although escalators had been in use for some time in Manhattan, New York, it was only the second to be installed in the UK, after Crystal Palace in London, and the first used on a railway. A lovely piece in the Journal of Commerce in 1901 argues both the health and cost benefits:

An ingenious estimate is that the average passenger climbs in the ordinary way of travel on elevated roads some 24,000ft vertically per annum, thus spending 13 1/2 hours in climbing and expending 1.85 horse-power. With the inclined elevator this will be avoided, and will result in longer life to passengers, thereby retaining their customer longer to the railway,

Sadly, it had to be taken out of service when it became a real hazard due to women catching their long dresses in the moving parts.

Tickets from the LOR at the Museum of Liverpool

In 1902 the LOR was forced to respond when the previously horse-drawn trams were replaced by electrified trams, which also carried passengers into the shopping areas that were beyond the reach of the railway. In fear of the competition, the company increased the speed of their trains by upgrading their engines from 60hp to 100hp. After some time the running costs proved to be prohibitive, and the increased strain on rolling stock also raised concerns, so in 1903 the trains were slowed to a more cost-effective speed. Other costs were incurred from the wear and tear on wheels due to the curve line, but this was addressed by the LOR’s General Manager and engineer E.J. Neachell who innovated an automated lubrication system that significantly improved their longevity.

“New signal for Electric Railways” Railway Times, 2nd March 1907

Another important innovation on the LOR in 1902 included an automatic semaphore signalling system to replace manual signals. The company was the first railway to install an automatic signalling plant in Britain after it was approved by the Board of Trade in December 1891. It came into service in March 1893.

In 1905, in another attempt to maximize revenue, a direct connection was made to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway’s North Mersey Branch at the far north of the LOR a through-train was run to Southport, and in 1906 a link was made to Aintree. It was hoped that the direct through service might produce more passengers travelling first class. Although the through-train service to Southport was never sufficiently successful, and ceased in 1914, passengers could still change from the LOR to the Lancashire and Yorkshire to travel to Southport, and the link to Aintree continued to be popular for race meetings. By this time, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the LOR was carrying some 10 million passengers. The railway continued in its role as a passenger service during the war years, but it also saw some changes, servicing the passengers from the troop and supply ships coming into dock.

The Three Graces: The Royal Liver Building at left, the Cunard Building in the Middle and the Port of Liverpool Building at right.

Some of the most remarkable of Liverpool’s buildings had to adapt to the LOR. Sitting behind it, the striped White Star Line building was finished in 1898, five years after the opening of the LOR. Even more dramatic than that iconic building, the waterfront was changed forever between 1907 and 1917, the trio of buildings known as “The Three Graces” were built after the LOR had been running for nearly a decade on the site of the 1777 George’s Dock, which was still in situ in 1893, but was in-filled in 1900. The Port of Liverpool Building (the headquarters of the Mersey Dock and Harbour Board) was completed in 1907, the Royal Liver Building in 1911 and the Cunard Building in 1917. The LOR ran, uninterrupted, behind the new buildings. Other notable buildings that would have been in view of the Overhead Railway as Liverpool’s impressive waterfront continued to evolve are the Art Deco style George’s Dock Building (1934) and the India Buildings (1932).

Bomb damage at James Street Station. Source: National Museums Liverpool

In the early years of the railway, both manned signal boxes at key junctions and automated semaphore signals were used. An innovation was introduced in 1921 when Westinghouse coloured light signals were introduced.

During the Second World War the LOR continued to serve as a vital link between all the docks. Due to its proximity to the Liverpool docks, which were targetted by German bombers, the Overhead Railway was damaged during these raids several times. James Street Station was almost levelled in 1942, for example, and Canada Dock Station was hit twice, but most of these attacks were at night and no trains were lost. In all cases the bombed-out sections were brought back into service very quickly. During repairs a bus service was introduced to transport passengers between stations either side of damaged sections. As with many other services, for the first time women were employed in ticket offices and as conductors on trains to replace the men who went to war. Standard maintenance was severely reduced during the war, and it is probable that this neglect was partially responsible for the financial difficulties in which the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company found itself after the war.

Source: British Newspapers Online

In 1955 the decision to close the Overhead Railway was made. The announcement of the closure was made in the February of that year, and the authorities remained immovable, in the teeth of vocal public opposition. The main reason was the rust corrosion of the iron and steel that carried the railway. For a private company with limited resources, raising the estimate sum of over £2 million to renovate the railway was inconceivable for the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company in the post-war period, and the city authorities made the decision not to rescue it, whilst nationalization of the main railway companies in 1948 under the Transport Act 1947 excluded the LOR because it was not part of the main railway network.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway finally closed on December 30th in 1956 and the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company was forced into voluntary liquidation. Demolition began at the south end of the LOR in 1957. The iron bridges were all dismantled and purchased by scrap dealers for recycling. The Liverpool Corporation provided a bus service to replace the railway.

Source: British Newspapers Online

Disappearance of the Overhead Railway, with the supports in the foreground and the railway being dismantled in the background. Liverpool Echo, 27th September 1957. Source: British Newspapers Online

Cap badge from the Liverpool Overhead Railway. Source: Wikipedia

Final Comments

The Liverpool Overhead Railway was viable because of the arrangement of the docks along an almost straight waterfront. As a comparison, London’s docks were dotted along the Thames in separate, discrete systems that spread inland on both sides of the river due to the extreme u-shaped bends, rendering them unsuitable for anything like the Overhead Railway. Transport and communication between the different London dock systems was often laborious. See the London and Liverpool dock maps below for comparison, showing the dramatic difference between the two systems, demonstrating how Liverpool’s waterfront development made the LOR a very suitable solution, creating a fluid means of carrying passengers between different docks and related warehousing, commercial and government buildings.

1904 map of the London docks by Edward Standford

A map of the Liverpool Overhead Railway in the 1930s, showing the layout of the docks

The Docklands Light Railway. Source: Visit London

As well as being the world’s first electric elevated railway, the Liverpool Overhead Railway was the first to install an escalator, the first to introduce automatic semaphore signals and the first to introduce colour signalling lights. As well as being important to local history, the Liverpool Overhead Railway remains an important part of British dockland history, partly because of its innovative approach as a feat of electrical engineering, with its ongoing committent to innovation, but also because of its role in Liverpool’s social and economic history. It influenced many other elevated railways including London’s driverless Docklands Light Railway, which opened in 1987 to link parts of the newly developed financial centre in London Docklands with the City and the underground network. In some ways, London’s Docklands Light Railway serves a similar function today, although with a lot less personality, linking business and commercial centres that need to be connected to each other and to the City.

Even though the LOR was demolished in 1956, its loss is still deeply regretted in Liverpool, with many local people who were children at the time retaining memories of how it looked and sounded. The Museum of Liverpool has some recorded memories to listen to, and Peter Grant’s book (see Sources below) has compiled some excellent short accounts of people’s experiences. My great-grandfather, who was a French sailor from Toulouse, was on shore leave in Liverpool after his ship docked in Liverpool when he met my great grandmother. When his ship left, it left without him. Following marriage, he settled into life in Liverpool, not as a sailor or docker but as a driver on the Liverpool Overhead Railway, reinventing himself as one of the many moving parts of Liverpool’s dockland infrastructure. His was one of a great many lives shaped by the Liverpool Overhead Railway.

When the LOR was first built most of the road traffic was horse-drawn, but by the time it was demolished, only a few horses remained, and cars and trucks were the order of the day. It seems inevitable that as lorries became bigger and more numerous in the following decades, a dockland-wide 16ft height limit would eventually have made transporting goods to and from the docks impossible, but it is a great shame that a portion of it was not preserved as a matter of heritage preservation. One sympathizes with the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company, but the city council seems, with hindsight, to have been rather more accountable for failing to preserve a portion of the overhead railway for posterity.

Report about a personal archive about the Overhead Railway. Crosby Herald January 2002. Source: British Newspapers Online

Visiting

Museum of Liverpool

Given that the Liverpool Overhead Railway was demolished without leaving a single section in tact for heritage purposes, visiting might seem like a tall order. There is, however, a section at the Museum of Liverpool devoted to the Railway, which preserves the last of the original 1893 LOR carriages, Carriage 3, and has been placed on a piece of replica railway infrastructure, 16ft above the ground just as the original was, to give a good sense of how it must have looked. The museum is free to access.

The opening of the tunnel from Herculaneum Station to Dingle Station is still visible and there are also a number of truncated support uprights preserved where they were incorporated into sections of wall along the line of the old LOR.

Carriage 3, one of the original batch of carriages to be ordered, now on display in the Museum of Liverpool

Sources

Stanley Swing and Lift Bridge. Pall Mall Budget 12th September 1893. Source: British Newspapers Online

The above is a massive simplification of a very complicated story, in which political agendas and competition with road-based systems were perhaps just as important as engineering considerations. If you want the full story, I found Adrian Jarvis’s book the most useful, with a very insightful analysis of the Company’s financial challenges. For a short history with some splendid photographs see Peter Grant’s book, produced for the Liverpool Echo. The other titles listed also contributed very useful information, with C.E. Box’s being the most technical for those interested in engineering details.

Books and papers

Anon 1901. Inclined elevator at Seaforth. The Journal of Commerce, January 20th 1901, p.3

Box, Charles E. 1984 (Revised by Adrian Jarvis). The Liverpool Overhead Railway. Ian Allan Ltd

Gahan, John W. 1982. Seventeen Stations to Dingle. Countryvise / Avon-Anglia

Grant, Peter (compiler) 2011. The Liverpool Overhead Railway. Trinity Mirror Media

Jarvis, Adrian 1996. Portrait of The Liverpool Overhead Railway. Ian Allan Publishing

Neachell, E.J. 1916. The Liverpool Overhead Railway. The Railway News, 5th February 1916, p.231-232

Websites

The British Newspaper Archive
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.com/home

BFI
Liverpool Overhead Railway 1893-1956 (video)
https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/d6a0f2a3-fa48-5487-b722-d0e2a4997aa7

British History Online
Liverpool: The Docks
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol4/pp41-43

Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History
Liverpool Overhead Railway
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Liverpool_Overhead_Railway
1923 Visit to the Works
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Liverpool_Overhead_Railway:_1923_Visit_to_the_Works

National Museums Liverpool Collections
Liverpool Overhead Railway
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/collections/social-history/overhead-railway

Wikimedia Commons
Liverpool Overhead Railway map
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Liverpool_Overhead_Railway_map.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original

Videos:

1) Liverpool Overhead Railway (including rare footage). A documentary about the LOR (37 minutes long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xg0EAJ7OAk

2) “Liverpool Scenes 1896” begins in the city with a scene of milling horse-drawn trams, and then moves to the Overhead Railway where footage is taken from one of the carriages over the docks – wonderful to see all those masts.

3) Five-minute footage of the LOR in colour

A fantastic clip of the Liverpool Overhead Railway.
byu/vintagethrowaway19 inLiverpool

The Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Liverpool

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On an unplanned day-trip to Liverpool I walked up from Central Station to the Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, which is conveniently opposite the Catholic Cathedral, which I also visited on the same day (gorgeous). Visiting details for the Victoria are at the end of this post.

The museum is owned by the University of Liverpool, and was originally designed to be used for university activities, with lecture theatres, teaching rooms, staff offices, commons rooms and a library. It was the first building to be commissioned by the university, and is thought to be the origin of the term “red brick universities.” It was converted into a museum and art gallery in 2008. Like most university collections the Victoria has a diverse mixture of objects collected by university academics and contributed by donors. As well as art works including paintings and sculpture, there are examples of the decorative arts, including furniture and ceramics, as well as typical 19th century zoological, botanical and geological specimens, and scientific equipment. It is not every university collection that is able to boast possession of one of Turner’s most admired works, but it is the variety and range of items that really characterizes the collection.

The museum building is a treat in its own right, both outside and in, a marvellous Victorian extravaganza, reflecting all the prosperity, self-confidence and extravagant creativity of 19th century Liverpool. It belongs to a trend that saw investment in national public collections of fine and decorative arts, a philanthropic urge to invest in cultural resources and make them available to a wide range of people. The Grade -2 listed building was built in 1892, designed by no less a personage than Alfred Waterhouse, whose most famous building is probably the Natural History Museum in London. It is built in a mixture of red brick and darker conventional brick, creating attractive contrasts in both colour and and it features towers, turrets, Gothic-inspired windows and doorways, and some great chimneys. The interior is magnificently over-the-top, with extensive use of glazed tiles, terracotta and Burmantofts faience, many moulded into sculpted shapes, in a variety of bright, glossy colours. The cafe on the ground floor is located in the middle of this remarkable mixture of colours and textures, but it also extends up the staircases.

The first floor contains both permanent and temporary exhibitions. When I was there, one of the temporary exhibitions was Seeing Green: “The artists featured in this display each had their reasons for exploring greenery in their work. John Nash, for instance, turned to landscape painting as a form of therapy to heal from trauma. Caroline Emily Gray Hill found inspiration in the flowers near her home, continuing to paint well into later life. Meanwhile, Jim Russell, an environmentalist, expressed his values by creating art on recycled materials.” These paintings were arranged around a curving corridor, all very well illuminated and very effective against the red background.

Adrian Berg. “Gloucester Lodge, Regent’s Park, London” 1981

“Flowers and Foliage” by Lady Caroline Emily Gray Hill, c.1920. Oil on Board

Greenbank House. John Baum 1972.

Off this corridor there are a series of galleries displaying other items from the collection from a variety of time periods. The following are just a few examples, admittedly picking out the ones that most appealed to me.

Dame Elizabeth Frink’s 1967 “Gogglehead”

Halima Cassell’s 2013 “Noir Rhythm”

“Centurions” by Arthur Dooley, 1967. More examples of Dooley’s work can be seen in the Catholic Cathedral opposite the museum

Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe. Loosestrife, 1951

One of the original fireplaces in the Victoria Building

Seacombe slip plate c.1830, transfer-painted. Herculaneum Pottery. Based on a drawing by Samuel Austin and showing the River Mersey in the early 1800s. The spire at the rear was the tallest building in Liverpool at the time

A Hispano-Moresque tin-glazed earthenware dish with lustre. Spain, c.1600. The technique was introduced by Moorish Arabs from northwest Africa, but the IHS abbreviation in the centre is Christian

Retracing your steps past the stairwell, small galleries off another tiled corridor (looking rather as though it has been influenced by the Mezquita at Córdoba). These display more paintings, again a large variety of styles and types, with one gallery devoted to the original plans for the Victoria Building itself.

J.M.W. Turner 1815. The eruption of the Soufriere Mountains on the Island of St Vincent in 1912. Oils on canvas

Artist and Model 1974 by David Hockney, showing an imagined encounter between Pablo Picasso and Hockney. Picasso had died the year before, and the two actually never met. Etching.

Yinka Shonibare: “Unstructured Icons – King” 2018. Woodblock print with fabric collage. One of a series of six prints showing historical Western figures

Egyptian landscape by Dorothea Wright, c.1973. Lithograph

Stephen Conroy. “Head Studies (2)” 1992. Etching

The Rape of the Sabines 1. By Leon Kossoff 1998. Etching and drypoint

“End of Meeting” by John Heritage 1990. I loved this painting at first sight, because it perfectly reflects just how I feel at the end of a long, tedious and probably unnecessary meeting. Let me sleep or beam me up. It is a shame that the reflections in the glass, showing the glazed brickwork and floor, have made it impossible to photograph well, but this is a really great, humorous piece. You can see it on ArtUK here.

Head of an Irishman. By Lucian Freud 1999. Etching

One of Alfred Waterhouse’s plans of the Victoria Building in the 1830s

On the top floor, The Tate gallery space is named for sugar magnate Henry Tate and was the original library. It is an architectural spectacle in its own right, soaring upwards to an impressive roof space. This gallery is dedicated to scientific discovery and innovation. It includes specimens from the natural world, including fossils, geological samples, scientific equipment and objects that demonstrate the newly discovered Enlightenment and subsequent interest in how new ideas and technology was and should be employed.

Stenter ASSt 1-1 rocket engine for missile propulsion. Bristol Siddley Engines Ltd

Cast of Albert Einstein by Jacob Epstein, 1993

Gorgeous Predynastic Egyptian pottery. On the left a stone vessel made of porphyry. On the right, a pottery vessel made to look like a stone vessel (a skeuomorph). Professional archaeological investigations in Egypt followed on from treasure-hunting and helped to establish an academic understanding of Egypt, both Pharaonic and prehistoric.

“We asked members of the public to tell us about great ideas they’ve had. Not all them turned out to be that great.”

Cunard letterhead describing how collisions were avoided by restricting the Transatlatic fleet to specified routes.

Linda Stein’s “Knight Adagio” 2006. “Stein makes a visual world where men wear dresses and women where armour and where lines of gender become blurred into androgyny.”

The green quadrangle, viewed from one of the windows on a rainy day.

Visiting

The Tate Gallery

The museum is located on the corner of Brownlow Hill and Ashton Street, with its entrance on Ashton street at What3Words ///tribes.winks.cage. It is opposite the rear entrance to the Catholic Cathedral, which is very much worth a visit in its own right. The museum’s website, which contains details of opening times and special exhibitions, can be found at https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/victoria-gallery-and-museum/. Entry is free (although do check for special exhibitions) and there are lifts to all floors. The museum has a café on the ground floor. I had an excellent latte, and the food being delivered to surrounding tables looked very tempting. You do have to be careful with the café’s opening hours, which at the time of writing are limited.

From my home south of Chester I have driven into Liverpool a couple of times before, and have parked at Liverpool One, but on the whole I have found it more convenient to drive to Hooton Station on the Wirral, abandon the car in the huge car park, and take the train in. With a day ticket it is a much drier option on a wet day, using the circular train route to get closer to places to visit. Like London, Liverpool is awfully grey and rather dismal on a rainy day.

The excellent Hooton Park Hangars Aircraft Museum on the Wirral

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Comper Swift G-ACGL. The Comper Aircraft Company was based at Hooton Park in the inter-war years

With many thanks to the Heritage Open Days this year, I stumbled across this fabulous gem of an aircraft museum on the Wirral at Hooton. Hooton Park Hangars, owned and run by Hooton Park Trust, is sited on a former aerodrome, where the First World War Grade 2* aircraft hangars have been restored and two interlinked hangars now house a museum of aircraft and aircraft engines as well as other means of transport, including a military helicopter, a Chester Corporation tram, bicycles, and a number of cars, as well as model aircraft and memorabilia. There are steps leading up to the cockpits of some aircraft and in one case a ladder allows visitors to enter one of the cockpits, which gives a sense of the incredibly cramped conditions and the range of dials, levers and pedals that help to navigate the plane. Visiting information is at the end of this post. Much of the information on this post has been taken from information boards around the hangars, from volunteers who kindly chatted to me about the site, and the Hooton Park Hangars website’s history pages as well as from the sources listed at the end.

Example of some of the signage available (this for the Comper Swift shown above)

The 1788 Hooton Hall. Source: Lost Heritage

Hooton Hall was an estate owned by the Stanley family. It was built in 1788 to replace the existing house built at the end of the 15th century by the 5th Baronet Sir William Stanley, who employed architect Samuel Wyatt for the task. Seventy years later it had to be sold to pay off gambling debts and was bought by banker Richard Christopher Naylor who made various changes and added a racecourse. He moved away in 1875 when the Manchester Ship Canal was routed through the parkland, but retained ownership of the house and land. At the start of the First World War both the house and land were requisitioned by the Army, which converted the house to the hospital and built barracks on the racecourse. The house was probably in a fairly abysmal state when it was knocked down in 1932, initially remaining in the ownership of the military before it eventually came into the hands of Hooton Park Trust.

Propeller of VS390 Spitfire PR.XIX PM651, usually stationed at RAF Woodvale near Formby on Merseyside and restored by the RAF Museum at Cosford. It came to Hooton Park in April 2026.

As well as the hospital and barracks, several hangars were built on the Hooton Park site, now Grade 2* listed, originally as a plant for assembling American-built aircraft, but instead became a training centre for pilots destined for the Western Front. The hangar in which the museum is located is single storey, 16 bays in length, with iron casement windows separated by brick uprights and with corner pylons of brick (one of which was extended upwards to become a fire watch observation post). An interior arched brick arcade divides the hangar into two halves. The corrugated roofs of each half were supported by Belfast roof trusses of latticed wood which collapsed over a decade ago, but have since been replaced by new Belfast trusses. the hangars were built by Holland, Henna and Cubitt Ltd to a design by the Royal Engineers, whilst the roof trusses were built by D. Anderson and Co., Belfast. The training facility was closed in 1919 when the training facility was moved to RAF Shotwick.

In the inter-war years the aerodrome was bought by a Mr G.H. Dawson who rented space to the Liverpool and District Aero Club, which became one of the most successful in the country. At the same time, the aerodrome also became the home for two air manufacturing companies, the Comper Aircraft Co. and Popjay Air Motors. In 1927 the aerodrome was purchased to become Liverpool’s main airport, in spite of being on the Wirral before moving to Speke on the other side of the Mersey in 1930, where it remains.

Hooton Park aircraft Hangar on a chilly wet day, showing the brick elements and the 16-bay structure

At the outbreak of the Second World War Hooton Park became the base for 610 ‘County of Chester’ Squadron and in the 1940s it returned to its role assembling aircraft from the U.S. At the same time the Civilian Repair Organization was employed to inspect and overhaul existing aircraft. The aerodrome was also used during the war as an important role in aerial reconnaissance with the goal of locating submarines. In June 1946, No 610 Squadron reformed at Hooton and in 1949, 663 Squadron formed at the site. Hooton Park finally closed as an aerodrome in 1957. Subsequently Shell created a base at Hooton Park to carry out experimental work on car fuels. In 1962, Vauxhall Motors purchased the site and based their motor works at Hooton Park.

Hooton Park Hangars roof collapse HootPkTrust

Hooton Park Hangars after the roof collapse, showing the wooden lattice trusses made in Belfast. Source: Hooton Park Trust

The Hooton Park Trust was founded in 2000 to restore the hangars, originally built during the Second World War where they served the RAF Hooton airfield. This was not a lightweight project. The hangar roofs had collapsed in 2011 and just clearing the rubble cost £60,000, partly because of the asbestos used in the roofing material, which required special disposal measures. The new hangar roofs were built with modern, durable materials using the same methods as the originals. Do take the time to look upwards – the trusses are as attractive as they are impressive as you can see in the above photograph. The aircraft and other vehicles are a fine mix of different types, a mixture of civil and military, all with some connection to the aerodrome or the use of the hangars after the aerodrome had closed.

Many of the aircraft in the hangars were supplied by the Hooton Park Trust, to which aircraft have also been loaned. The Trust makes space in the museum available to the The Aeroplane Collection (TAC), first founded in 1962 so that they can both display and work on aircraft in the hangar. On a visit you are very like to see both Hooton Park Trust volunteers and TAC members working on the aircraft in the museum. In 2024 several aircraft and other items were transferred to the museum following the closure of a display hall in the Manchester Museum of Science.

G-AFIU Parker CA-4 Parasol

This is very much a living museum, with work constantly being carried out on the aircraft stored in the hangars. As well as the volunteers who were on hand to answer questions, there were plenty of engineers in overalls with their heads bent over engines, engaging in restoration work.

G-EBZM Avro 594 Avian 111A

Replica of BAPC.6 Avro Triplane

Full scale replica of a Spitfire MK IX

Gloster Meteor painted to represent aircraft WH127 of 610 Squadron based at Hooton

Another example of signage in the museum, this providing information about the Meteor shown above

Cockpit of a Fairey Gannet T.2. Steps on the other side allow you to climb up and get a good look into the cockpit.

Inside the Faery gannet T.2 cockpit

Sikorsky R-4B Hoverfly

G-ADAH DH.98A Dragon Rapide “Pioneer”

xxx

G-EBZM Avro 594 Avian 111A

G-AOUO DHC.1 Chipmunk 22

As well as aircraft and engines there are also road vehicles, including a tram, bicycles and Vauxhall cars, all of which were contemporary with some of the aircraft in the hangars or were produced after the aerodrome had gone out of use. The Shell Eco Car was a particularly surprising vehicle!

Chester No.4 tram

Visiting

The best source of visiting information is the Hooton Park Hangars website. Opening days are usually to Saturdays and the last Sunday of the month, and different activities are available on the Sundays, so do check the website to see what is going on. There are events throughout the summer, and these are worth keeping an eye out for. You can also find their social media presences on the website. There are toilets and a café on the site, although note that at the time of writing (September 2026) the café is only available on Sundays. It is very easy to find by car, although parking is limited, and on a Sunday there is a vintage bus to take you from Hooton Station. It is all on the flat, so very accessible for those with unwilling legs, and there is disabled parking. The museum closes for the season on 31st October, so you will need to get your skates on if you want to go this year.

Sources:

Much of the information on this post has been taken from information boards around the hangars, from the volunteers who kindly chatted to me about the site, and the Hooton Park Hangars website’s history pages as well as from the sources listed below.

Historic England
Northern General Service Hangar (Building 16) , Hooton Park Aerodrome
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1075377?section=official-list-entry

Lost Heritage
Hooton Hall
https://www.lostheritage.org.uk/houses/lh_cheshire_hootonhall.html

Vintage Aviation News
Discovering Hooton Park Hangars: Northwest England’s Living Aviation Heritage Museum. By Ian Doyle
https://vintageaviationnews.com/aviation-museum-news/discovering-hooton-park-hangars-northwest-englands-living-aviation-heritage-museum.html

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

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It has taken me some time to get to grips with everything that Liverpool has to offer, (not helped by various closures due to financial constraints or refits), but one of the must-see destinations in the city that is open to visitors six days a week, and of course for services on Sundays, is Liverpool’s Art Deco-influenced Post-Modern Catholic Cathedral, more properly The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King. It was the winning design in a competition that replaced the previous, less radical vision first presented by Sir Edwin Lutyens. The crypt for the Lutyens cathedral was already underway when the Second World War broke out, when work was abandoned and the crypt was employed as a bomb shelter. Lutyens died in January 1944, and never knew that following the war a reconsideration of the costs involved in building the cathedral meant that the project was no longer viable. A new approach was needed, and the winner of a competition to find a new design was Sir Frederick Gibberd. Unsurprisingly, the radical presence on a famous skyline was controversial, a bit cuckoo-like in its ousting of a more traditional architectural paradigm, but its longstanding presence since 1967 is now part of the city’s personality.

I was not at all sure about the building, which from a distance seems so alien to the best of Liverpool’s architectural heritage. Quite to my very great surprise, however, once I had arrived I loved all of it, inside and out. Counter-intuitively perhaps, it is much improved by being up close and personal. Standing at its foot, the interplay between the lines, planes and the variety of different sized and shaped window slits make for a fascinating interplay, rather reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky’s work and the ideas in his 1926 book Point and Line to Plane. Two of the Cathedral’s irreverent nick-names are “the rocket launcher” and the “launch pad,” both referring to the fact that the soaring central cylinder does have something space-age about it, but it is this central Lantern Tower, filled with stained glass, that gives the interior most of its sense of ravishing colour and light. The contrast between the pale concrete lines and planes of the exterior and the warmth and intimacy of the interior is one of the most remarkable aspects of the design.

One of the building’s several irreverent (and politically very incorrect) local names, “Paddy’s Wigwam,” is a clue to the main reason that a Catholic cathedral was deemed to be a requirement. The docks always attracted workers from other areas to Liverpool but the 1847 potato blight in Ireland saw a major influx of Irish workers and their families who left Ireland permanently to avoid starvation, some of whom migrated to America from the port of Liverpool, whilst many stayed to find work in the docks. This sudden and permanent increase in the presence of Catholic worshippers required a response. An initial attempt to provide a suitable building was started in 1853 in the Everton area in Gothic Revival style, but only the Lady Chapel was built, and although this served the community well for some decades, it was was condemned and demolished in the 1980s.

Information panel in the crypt showing the workhouse on the site of the present cathedral (click to enlarge)

In 1922 the idea of a cathedral was again discussed, and fund-raising began. In 1928 Robert Downey was appointed as Archbishop and pushed the project forward with considerable energy. Ironically, the location chosen was the former Poor Law workhouse on Brownlow Hill, where many unemployed Irish Catholics had found themselves living. Once the site was purchased, the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was appointed to the task of creating a suitably impressive building.

Lutyens model of his vision of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral

Lutyens’s model of his vision of Liverpool Catholic Cathedral in the Museum of Liverpool

The ambitious plan proposed by Lutyens distinguished itself from the design of the Anglican Cathedral in terms of the new cathedral’s broadly Romanesque design, its enormous dome and its overall epic scale. The dome, at 168ft (51m) in diameter, would have been bigger than that of St Peter’s in Rome. The above model in the Museum of Liverpool shows the scale of the proposed building. The exterior would have been built with multiple bands of alternating light red-brown and cream stonework and series of arches at the entrances, the latter looking rather eerily like the Thiepval Memorial designed by Lutyens to commemorate those lost in the First World War. The cathedral would have been a departure from the conventional Gothic Revival style generally favoured at the time, and would have dominated the Liverpool skyline, dwarfing Sir George Gilbert Scott’s nearby Anglican Cathedral.

Work started on 5th June 1933, when work on the crypt began, the vaults built below the level of the cathedral in different colours of brick. As with he rest of his cathedral, Lutyens had planned a special, remarkable space, and this now houses back-lit history panels that take the visitor through the entire history of the building in a former processional space, and is also home to a large chapel, a refectory and the cathedral’s treasury. It is stunning, and a marvel in its own right. You need to buy a ticket to see this, and it is worth every penny. Work on the crypt carried on until 1941, when the outbreak of the Second World War brought the building work to an abrupt halt. The crypt was used during the war years as a bomb shelter, but was fortunately never hit.

Following the end of the war, the new projected cost of some £27 million to built the Cathedral itself was now a pipe dream and the plans were scrapped. Lutyens had died in January 1944, so an new architect was approached in 1953 to re-envision what Lutyens had planned, retaining the dome but shrinking the superstructure to an affordable size. This brutalized version of the grand vision was very unpopular and although the crypt was finished, and used for special services and ceremonies, plans for a cathedral were again put on hold.

A small part of the big crypt chapel, with the statue “Our Lady of Liverpool” above the altar, by David John

The exterior of the crypt with the later cathedral above it.

In 1960 the new Archbishop, John Carmel Heenan, was appointed and he decided to approach the problem in a new way, setting a very tight budget (£1 million for the building without fittings), a very tight project construction period (5 years), and including the requirement that the crypt be incorporated into the design. He then offered the specification out to international competition. He also, fascinatingly, gave some guidelines that must have given pause to traditional churchgoers and architects alike. He wanted a it to have a capacity of 3000 people, to have an unobstructed view of the altar, and to focus on the conception of the building’s layout than liturgical niceties. Out of 300 entries, Sir Frederick Gibberd won the competition, but it is instructive to see other entries that were also seriously considered, all of them just as radical and in many ways quite similar in concept (the photographs show excerpts from displays in the crypt).

C.H.R. Bailiey’s competition design

Clive Entwistle's design was highly commended

Clive Entwistle’s design, in the centre, was highly commended. Click to enlarge for the image captions (a bit fuzzy but legible)

Gibberd delivered to spec, and on time. The official opening day on 14th May 1967 was celebrated in the Catholic areas of the city with bunting and parties, whilst an official ceremony was carried out at the Cathedral itself. A special dance, mixing modern and classical ballet styles was commissioned to celebrate the Mass, underlining the contemporary and alternative approach to worship.

Gibberd’s creation is an architectural landmark today. The use of concrete and Portland stone create a pale set of unadorned planes and lines, ascending diagonally towards the tower with its crown, give the impression of rising towards the heavens, and at night, illuminated from the inside, the colours are visible across the city. The full impact of the approach to the Cathedral only reached its full potential for creating an impact when another building in front of it was demolished in 2002. Over the front entrance is a frieze in Portland stone by William Mitchell, which has at its centre the cross of Christ, flanked by the two smaller crosses of the two thieves who were crucified at the same time. The bronze panels flanking the entrance depict the four evangelists, symbolized by man, lion, ox and eagle.

Inside, Gibberd’s vision of an imposing structure was supplemented by artists and crafts-men and -women, many of them local, created something completely new and rather more round-table in its handling of its congregation. All focus is still on the altar and the clergy, including a performance area, but the congregation are now in an amphitheatre-type arrangement in circular, concentric seating that surrounds the altar with paths between them radiating out from the altar like rays of the sun.

The whole building is built around the idea of the natural light of the sun and the symbolic light from the heavens, using light and stained glass to create an abstract language of worship. The glass in the Lantern Tower, for example, designed by artists John Piper and Patrick Reyniens, uses colours of the spectrum to express a divinely created natural world, whilst the three patches of white light represent Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The theme of coloured glass runs throughout the entire structure, with each of the twelve chapels provided with a different type of window and a different design of coloured glass.

The Lady Chapel with windows by Margaret Traherne

One of “The Way of the Cross” sculptures by Sean Rice

There are sculptural elements, paintings, carvings, textiles and other craftwork in each of the chapels, each communicating a different aspect of traditional Catholic messaging, just as churches have always done. The most prominent of these, in terms of their placement, are the fourteen bronze sculptures making up The Way of the Cross, showing Christ’s journey to Calvary. These were commissioned by Archbishop Worlock and composed by local artist Sean Rice, former lecturer and head of sculpture at Liverpool College of Art. They are fixed to the walls around the circumference of the outer walkway of the nave, overlooking the nave between vertical panels of stained glass. They are beautifully illuminated, and form a unified, coherent grouping that add to the overall architectural composition rather than detracting from it, and are consistent with the contemporary artistic themes that run throughout the building.

Each chapel each has its own role, theme and personality, all modern, but in a variety of very different styles.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel, dominated by the reredos and the two side windows. The tabernacle sits below the reredos. All were designed by Welsh artist Ceri Richards

The West Apse with a statue of Ahrabham by Sean Rice

The baptistry is light-filled in pale colours with bronze gates by David Atkins, with a white marble font.

The Babtistry

As someone who is not a church-goer I hesitate to comment on what it may be like as a spiritual experience when compared to a traditional gothic or gothic-inspired church, but I can imagine that the concentric circular seating, the central altar, the soaring stained glass tower, and the absence of medieval architectural conventions, statuary and emblems, provides a different quality of experience.

St Veronica. Sculpture by Liverpool-born Arthur Dooley

Final Comments

The Metropolitan Cathedral is a fusion of two different buildings – the Lutyens crypt and the Gibberd Cathedral superstructure, and they work together beautifully as a single functional entity. Astonishing, really. The rather hard, linear exterior gives way in an explosion of colour in the interior, showing two contrasting faces to its visitors. Unlike most churches and cathedrals in Britain there are thankfully no memorials affixed to the walls, and this helps to preserve the coherence and integrity of the original conceptualization of the Cathedral, which retains its identity as a unified work of art. To my absolute surprise, never having been terribly impressed by the distant view of the exterior, I loved the whole thing. Give it a chance if you are in any doubt – it is a somewhat mind-blowing visual experience.

Visiting

I travelled in by train, parking at Hooton on the Wirral where there is a huge car park. I bought a day ticket so that I could hop on and off at different stations, which was very helpful as I was visiting a number of sites at different locations. I would normally walk between the different sites I wanted to see, but it was raining and chilly, so hopping on and off the train was very handy. According to the helpful chap in the Hooton ticket office, the day ticket would have allowed me to travel to West Kirby as well, had I wanted to do so. There is also a car park at the cathedral, for which costs and other details are available on the Cathedral website’s Plan Your Visit page. There is also additional parking is available at the University of Liverpool’s Mount Pleasant car park opposite the Cathedral.

Full details of visiting hours are on the Cathedral’s website, as are details of accessibility (for example, step-free access is available in all the areas that visitors will want to reach). At the time of writing a visit to the cathedral itself is free, but there is a fee for accessing the crypt, where the excellent back-lit information displays are kept, and where you can see the magnificent brickwork architecture that was part of the Lutyens vision for his cathedral.

There is a free leaflet showing the names and roles of each of the chapels. A guide book is available, which includes a brief history of the cathedral, and describes the key features of the building, accompanied by attractive photographs, and is particularly helpful on the subject of the artists who contributed to the interior.

There are toilets and although there is no café in the cathedral itself the guide book mentions a neighbouring visitor centre and restaurant, which I either managed to miss or has been closed down (there is no mention of it on the Cathedral’s website). Alternatively, the cathedral is just across the road from the lovely Victoria Museum and Art Gallery that has a café in a superb ornamental surrounding, with a good menu. I can vouch for the coffee 🙂 The café’s opening hours are quite short so should be noted if you are planning to eat or have a coffee, and are available on the Victoria’s website here.

Painting of Liverpool by Ben Johnson in the Museum of Liverpool. Annotated with the location of Liverpool’s two cathedrals

Sources

The main source of information for this post was the extensive exhibition in the crypt showing the history of the cathedral.

Books and papers:

Trustees of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool 2025. The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. Authorised Cathedral Guide.

Websites:

Gibberd.com
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
https://www.gibberd.com/projects/liverpool-metropolitan-cathedral

Historic England
Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1070607

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
www.liverpoolmetrocathedral.org.uk

The lavish treasury seems rather out of step with the modern tone of the Cathedral, but you can find it in the crypt.

Excellent video about the Edwin Lutyens plans for a gigantic Catholic cathedral prior to the Second World War, with some great footage.

Brunel’s magnificent “Great Eastern” arriving this day in New York from Liverpool in 1860: The Illustrated London News

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On 17th June 1860 the fabulous S.S Great Eastern left Liverpool and set sail on her maiden voyage for New York. She arrived there this day, 28th June. Her designer and architect was Isambard Kingdom Brunel whose pet name for the ship during construction was “Great Babe.”

There is a nice nod to Great Eastern on the Chester City Walls, where the length of the ship (692ft) was carved quite deeply into one of the coping stones at Kaleyard, near the pigeon coop, preceded by an engraved anchor. It is also the measurement between that point and the King Charles Tower, also known as the Phoenix Tower. You can see a photograph of it at the end of this post.

I have written previously about the Great Eastern and her relationship with the Mersey, and above is a splendid engraving from the 21st July 1860 Supplement of the Illustrated London News showing her June arrival in New York.

Great Eastern shortly before launch 1858

Great Eastern shortly before launch in 1858 by Robert Howlett. Source: Wikimedia

With a capacity for 4000 passengers, she left Liverpool on her maiden voyage with only 35 passengers and 8 company overseers, both of which were far exceeded by a crew of 418. She was equipped to run under sail or steam, via paddles or propeller, had four decks, and could carry 15,000 tons of coal. Sadly she was never given the opportunity to meet the long-distance goals of India, China and Australia intended for her by Brunel and her builders and investors and was never competitive on the busy cross-Atlantic passenger service to which she was initially confined.

The fortunes of Brunel’s astonishing S.S. Great Eastern swung between greatness and near-disaster like an enormous, record-breaking pendulum. She was all too often something of a gigantic white elephant, but she became an invaluable resource for laying cables across the Atlantic, and was always a great public attraction.

Great Eastern at Hearts Content Cable Station

Painting by Charles James Lewis of the Atlantic Telegraph Expedition landing of the cable in Hearts Content Cable Station in Newfoundland, Canada, on July 27 1866, which he witnessed. Source: PK Porthcurno

After a traumatic roller-coaster of a career, the enormous ship was sold to be broken up in 1889, the work to take place on the Mersey.

Great Eastern, beached in advance of being broken up on the Mersey in late 1888, Wirral side. Source: Liverpool Echo

Throughout her history, Great Eastern was the subject of curiosity and fascination, and people lined up to buy souvenir pieces of the ship before the breaking work began on 1st January 1889. The photograph above shows her beached on the Mersey, ready to be broken up, and she continued to challenge even after the breaking work began. Not only was it a very sad episode for posterity but also, as it turned out, for the ship breaker. The company directors had estimated that it would take 200 men to break up the ship in a year, but she was so well built that it took nearly two years, requiring the costs of ongoing labour and additional machinery, including much more substantial wrecking balls, to finish the job. Substantial profits had been anticipated from her scrap value, but she was broken up at a considerable loss. Brunel had built her to last.

One of Robert Howlett’s famous photographs of Brunel with Great Eastern in 1857 prior to launch. Source: Wikimedia

Brunel had died in 1859 whilst the ship was still undergoing sea trials and had suffered an engineering accident during which five stokers died, and although the consensus is that the emotional stress of the ship’s construction and the difficulties of her launch undoubtedly contributed to his death, he was already suffering from a debilitating kidney disease.

It is perhaps thankful that he did not live to witness this drawn-out demise of his grandly imagined, fabulously realized and much-loved “Great Babe.”

Great Eastern was such a colossal, record-breaking chunk of maritime, industrial and national heritage that I find it more than slightly difficult to forgive the universe for allowing her to be broken up.

Infographic comparing ship sizes, in chronological order from left to right. Click to expand. Source: JF Ptak Science Books.

The length of Great Eastern carved into the City walls in the 19th century. Source: Geograph. By John Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0

The watercolour of Great Eastern, shows her beached on the Wirral side of the Mersey for repairs, although the painting is very sadly not on display. It was painted three years after the illustration at the top of the post, in 1863, by William Gawin Herdman (1805-1882).

Great Eastern watercolour showing the ship on the gridiron for repairs just off the Wirral on the Mersey in 1863. By W.G. Herdman (in the collection of the Williamson Art Gallery, not currently on display). Source: Williamson Art Gallery Collection at Birkenhead.

William Hesketh Lever’s Port Sunlight Village – industry, architectural diversity and social responsibility

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Port Sunlight. Source: Unilever Archives

It is quite a story. When William Hesketh Lever purchased land for a new factory and decided to build a village for the workers and their families in 1888, he wanted it to be a place where people would enjoy living, to be a thing of beauty, to offer educational and leisure facilities, and to celebrate the best of both vernacular and formal British architecture. Port Sunlight is often referred to as a model village, but this implies something rather effete, a bit of a vanity project, whereas the village was intended to offer all the benefits of a real, thriving, supportive community, as well as an educational and cultural hub. Port Sunlight was to be the very antithesis of the slum housing and overcrowding that had crushed so many workers in industrial areas and enterprises of the northwest.

View down a section of the Dell, once an inlet of the Mersey

To ensure that there was real architectural diversity, over 30 architects were employed. Central roads were based on boulevards. All streets were wide and the houses, all with a minimum of two bedrooms, were fronted with lawns. As it grew during the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were open green areas, a formal garden based around an old inlet of the Mersey now called the Dell, cricket lawns, a bowling green, tennis courts, a theatre, an open-air swimming pool (ingeniously heated with surplus heat from the soap factory), schools, a church, a cottage hospital, a private fire brigade, a village shop and various improving societies and clubs, including a girls’ institute. There were even plenty of allotments. To top it off, a library was built with a small display area to share a changing selection of Lever’s ever-expanding collection of antiques and antiquities, which were eventually moved into a custom-made art gallery within the village, which still attracts hundreds of visitors a year. Lever believed in prosperity sharing. Instead of profit sharing, in which additional cash is put into pay packets, he shared the prosperity of the company by using it to maintain the village and continue expansion and to add improvements to living conditions. The benefits to villagers came with risk, as anyone not caring for their home, or who fell short of Lever’s high moral standards could be ousted from their homes. His attitude to the village and his workers has been termed paternalistic. Today the village is managed and cared for by the Port Sunlight Village Trust, an independent charitable trust set up by Unilever in 1999.

William Hesketh Lever. Source: Wikipedia

William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) was born in Bolton, the son of a grocer. Although he and his younger brother James went into business together, providing the company with the name Lever Brothers, it was William who had the innovative flair that made the company a household name. His commercial successes earned him the title baronet in 1911, after which he was Lord Lever and baron in 1917, becoming Lord Leverhulme (combining his own surname with that of his late wife). In 1922, following the death of his wife in 1913, he was further honoured with the hereditary rank of Viscount. He named his village after his best-selling product, the subject of his genius for branding and marketing, Sunlight soap. The soap factory and related buildings sat behind the long low frontage of office buildings, which eventually became the Lever Brothers headquarters, on the very edge of the village. It was featured in the Illustrated London News in 1898, clearly the focus of considerable wonder. Today, with its beautiful homes, its art gallery, its community hall, its green spaces and formal flower beds, and even its more recent garden centre, it really merits the term oasis, sitting between a busy, industrial and commercial part of the Wirral built around the A41, and the Chester-Liverpool railway line.

Hulme Hall

I was incredibly lucky to live in Port Sunlight for six months in the early 1990s, but apart from an enjoyable foray into the Lady Lever Art Gallery last year, had not had a wander around the village since moving back up to the area a few years ago. It was huge fun to visit the Wirral History Festival on 21st March 2026. It was a bright and sunny day, and the turnout was enormous. There was a vintage double decker bus doing tours of the village, and the gorgeous 1901 Hulme Hall that hosted the event (originally built as a ladies / girls’ dining hall and named after Lever’s wife and designed by William and Segar Owen) was filled with a vast swathe of stalls. Entry to the Festival was free of charge but it inevitably ended up costing me a small fortune in purchases of books and journals 🙂 After its stint as a dining hall, and a temporary display area for Lever’s art collection, Hulme Hall housed Dutch and Belgian refugees in the First World War, later becoming a military hospital, and went on to be used by the American army in the Second World War. According to the Unilever Archives booklet the Beatles played there in 1962 and for the last few decades it has been it has been used for various community events.

Interior of Hulme Hall with the Wirral History Festival in full flow

The History Festival’s village tour bus doing the rounds near the Lady Lever art gallery

The subsequent walk around the beautifully maintained village, looking fabulous against blue skies and busy with visitors, was delightful. Today the village, within a 130 acre estate, is home to more than 900 Grade II listed buildings. It is impossible to do full justice to them here so I have picked out a few buildings to talk about, and have added snapshots of several others to give a sense of the village and its splendid character. Although the buildings looked great in the sunshine, many of the photographs simply didn’t work, even with the help of Photoshop either because I was shooting straight into the sun or because buildings were in deep shade, and there are some notable omissions. Hopefully I will take those on another visit. See the tourist map at the end of this post for some of the more prominent buildings.

As the image at the top of the post shows so clearly, Port Sunlight was a story of two distinct parts: the factory buildings that were focused on the production of soap, and the village that housed the workers and their families. The long low brick frontage of the office buildings along Wood Street served as something of a liminal area between the splendid village and the industrial buildings, including the soap factory, accessed via Central Road beyond the gates. The original main entrance to the offices of Lever House, with its 1895 ornamental stone façade by William and Segar Owen, and the Royal coat of arms above is still in situ, proudly welcoming visitors to Lever Brothers. Lever Brothers amalgamated with Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie in 1929, becoming Unilever, today one of the world’s biggest multinationals. Unilever Merseyside Ltd (UML) was based in the same Wood Street offices well into the 1990s.

Part of Central Road, Port Sunlight, leading past the office buildings and through the gates into the factory zone

Houses on Wood Street, opposite the entrance to the factory area

Houses on Wood Street, nearly opposite the entrance to the factory area. By Douglas and Fordham, 1894

Decorative detail on the above building

Community buildings were of fundamental importance to the development of the village. Next to the large 1902-04 Gothic Revival church designed by William and Segar Owen is the splendid Church Drive School designed by Grayson and Ould. Dating to 1902-03, it was built to supplement the Park Road Schools in the building now known as the Lyceum, eventually replacing it. The Lyceum, particularly enterprising and imaginative, was built 1894-96 and sits next to the Dell and its attractive bridge. Designed by Douglas and Fordham it was enlarged in 1898 and had the capacity for 350 boys and girls and 150 infants. It became a Lever Brothers training facility in 1917, eventually becoming the Unilever Archives between 1904 and 2006. Today it serves as a community space, and also hosts an interactive exhibition about the production of soap.

The Lyceum

Church Drive School

The Bridge Inn

The Bridge Inn intrigued me because Lever’s family were Congregational and were dedicated teetotallers. According to the guide to the village produced by Unilever, it was built in 1900, having been designed by Grayson and Ould who also designed the rather more adventurous Church Drive School. It was named for the 1897 Victoria Bridge, since demolished: “It was originally opened as a temperance hotel with dining and tea rooms and a few guest bedrooms but, in 1903, a deputation of villagers requested that a licence be applied for. Lever had to agree to a referendum and over 80% voted in favour of a licensed public house!”

The Classically-inspired Lady Lever Art Gallery was not part of Lord Lever’s original vision for the village but having filled his several homes to capacity, and finding the display areas of Port Sunlight’s library and other public buildings insufficient, he decided to build a gallery so that he could properly share his collections with the general public. He was one of the first British industrialist to create a gallery for his personal collections, although it was a practice very much in vogue in America, where he had visited with his wife and son.

Turner, Joseph Mallord William; The Falls of the Clyde; Lady Lever Art Gallery. Source: Art UK

The art gallery was named in the memory of his wife Elizabeth née Hulme who had died in 1913 before Lever became Lord Leverhulme. Work began on the museum in 1914, with George V in attendance, and was opened in 1922 by Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter Princess Beatrice. The items on display, from all periods of history and many different countries, were selected by Lever personally and included works purchased specially to cater for broader tastes than his own, as well as art that he commissioned. When he died in 1926, a substantial proportion of Lever’s private collections was sold at auction, but the items in the Lady Lever represent some of the the best of his years of collecting. The museum was handed to the nation in 1986. I visited last year, and posted about that visit here.

There is a huge mixture of housing styles and types in the village, some of them based on actual historical buildings, the others designed specially for Port Sunlight.

Cross Street, by Grayson and Ould 1896

On the corner of Lower Road and Central Road, by Lomax Simpson 1906

Central Road

Church Drive, by Grayson and Ould 1900-02

Park Road. The first set at far left were by William Owen, 1892-4

Detail of the above picture

Wood Street by Grayson and Ould, 1895

Greendale Road by William and Segar Owen, 1894

Park Street, by Douglas and Fordham 1895

Lower Road, by C.H. Reilly, 1906

Bath Street, by Talbot 1895-97

3-9 Bridge Street by Douglas and Fordham

Wood Street

Primrose Hill by Jonathan Simpson, 1899

Port Sunlight’s alternative sun dial

The war memorial is one of the unifying components of the village. Built between 1919 and 1921, and designed by Sir William Goscombe John, a friend of Lever’s, its theme was defence of the home. Inside the memorial is a copy of a book containing names of Port Sunlight residents and Lever Brothers employees worldwide who served in the forces during the First World War.

The War Memorial

The empty boating pond in front of the Lady Lever was not added until the 1930s. In spite of several attempts to restore it to its former glory, the original construction of the pond, which used to include a fountain with a statue, was not sufficiently robust to survive the best part of a century, and solutions are now being sought to implement a long term repair to enable the pond to be re-filled and the statue and its fountain to be restored to their original positions.

The successful garden centre is on the site of the open air swimming pool near Port Sunlight railway station and the Gladstone Theatre, and is a rather good use of the space. I daresay that Lord Leverhulme would have approved of something that combined commercial enterprise with a product that would bring pleasure in both the village and neighbouring areas.

The bowling green with Hulme hall in the background

One of the two bowling greens, with Hulme hall in the background, Cross Street on the right and the 1890 William Owen buildings on Bolton Road to the left

The Queen's visit to Port Sunlight in 1988 during a visit to celebrate the village's 100th birthday, with the then Managing Director of UML.

The Queen’s visit to Port Sunlight in 1988 during a visit to celebrate the village’s 100th birthday, with the then Managing Director of Unilever Merseyside Ltd (UML).

Sources:

Books

Hubbard, Edward and Michael Shippobottom 2019 (third edition). A Guide to Port Sunlight Village. Liverpool University Press

MacQueen, A. 2004. The King of Sunlight. How William Lever Cleaned Up the World. Corgi.

Websites

Based in Churton
Lord Leverhulme’s multifarious collections at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral
https://wp.me/pcZwQK-70x

An Institutional History of Internal Communications in the UK
Domestos and Domestics: The Family Metaphor at Lever Brothers. By Joe Chick, August 2023
https://historyofinternalcomms.org/internal-communication-unilever-family/

National Museums Liverpool
Lady Lever Art Gallery
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/lady-lever-art-gallery

Port Sunlight Village Trust
Home page
https://portsunlightvillage.com/
About Us
https://portsunlightvillage.com/about-us/
Renewing the Boating Pond
https://portsunlightvillage.com/renewing-the-boating-pond-project/
Racism, the Belgian Congo, and William Lever. Second edition, June 2022
https://portsunlightvillage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/PSVT-Racism-the-Belgian-Congo-and-William-Lever-Booklet-July-2022.pdf

Lever Brothers in the Congo. Source: Port Sunlight Village Trust

Unilever Archives
Port Sunlight Village booklet and guide (PDF)
https://archives-unilever.com/media/_file/website-documents/port%20sunlight%20village%20booklet.pdf

Wikipedia
Listed Buildings in Port Sunlight (list with photographs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listed_buildings_in_Port_Sunlight

Tourist map of some of the main non-residential buildings of Port Sunlight. Source and full-sized version: Port Sunlight Village Trust

Unilever Port Sunlight booklet

An enjoyable visit to the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead

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The Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1928, Birkenhead was still reaping the rewards of the economic industrial expansion created by the ship building industry. The gallery was funded by philanthropists John Williamson and his son Patrick Williamson. John Williamson was a shop owner and merchant who became a director of Cunard when it formed as a public company, serving until 1902. He was also on the board of Standard Marine Insurance and served on the Merseyside Docks and Harbours Board. His son does not appear to have had a career but co-operated with his father on philanthropic activities. The museum’s design is a simple brick-built square, with a prominent facade that references Classical features. The steps dominate in the above photo, but there is a ramp at the side for easy access. The gallery is all on one floor, so this too provides ease of access.

Nicholas Eames, The Dancer (1983) with two textile works by Anna Sutton behind it

I visited with my friend Julian in December 2025. We drove guided by the SatNav, which was needed as the Williamson is surrounded by something of a residential rabbit warren (with some very attractive Victorian terracing if you keep an eye open). There is a free car park on Mather Road that had plenty of spaces. Full visiting details, both for drivers and those using public transport, are at https://williamsonartgallery.org/visit/. Apologies for the quality of the photos inside the gallery, taken on my smartphone. As always in galleries there is reflection from protective glass in many of the photos, but hopefully they will give a good idea of the exhibits.

The gallery is all on a single storey, arranged in a square of linked galleries around what is now the café (with artworks on the walls) and a sculpture garden. A pre-visit inspection of the site plan indicated that around half of it is used for permanent collections, whilst the rest is home to temporary exhibitions. The twin focal points are, in the main, 19th and early 20th century and modern, including furnishings, ceramics, paintings, textiles, sculptures and, on this occasion, a modern video installation. The inclusion of temporary exhibitions is probably very attractive to local people who have reason to visit on repeat occasions.

The first of the galleries that we visited was a temporary exhibition showing the results of the 31st exhibition of the annual Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2025). The exhibition “celebrates the role and value of drawing with creative practice and provides a forum to test, evaluate and share current drawing practice.” There is a wide variety of styles and subjects along a continuum from representational to abstract. The skill on display was impressive, and some of the pieces were visually stunning. The mainly monochrome entries drew attention to different combinations of line and texture, with the analytical, humorous and occasionally alarming all demonstrating the versatility of the medium.

For me, the highlight of the permanent collection was the Maritime room, which is filled with models of ships built locally, as well as the actual fittings from some of the ships depicted by the models. A model of the Birkenhead Docks is really evocative of the size and scale of the operation (shown at the end of the post). The models of Mersey ferries are truly splendid, including a deliciously curvaceous Art Deco-flavoured example. It was a genuine delight to see a model of the S.S. Mauretania, as well as objects that furnished her, because my grandad was quartermaster and helmsman on the ship. It turns out that my friend Julian’s grandfather was a marine engineer, so there was a particular sense of connection for both of us with these beautifully crafted insights into Birkenhead and Mersey shipping. The whole room is redolent of local maritime history. Given that the Liverpool Maritime Museum is disappointingly closed indefinitely whilst funding is being sought, this gallery in the Williamson offers the best available local insight into Mersey shipbuilding and shipping.

Models of some of the Mersey ferries

The ship’s bell from the Mauretania

Side lever paddle steam engine, representing an engine of about 1840

Birkenhead Corporation Ferries poster

The C.S.S. Alabama, built Camell Laird’s shipyard, in theoretical violation of official Government neutrality in the American Civil War, is represented at the Williamson by both an oil painting and a model (the latter shown at the very end of this post).

Oil painting of the CSS Alabama by Samuel Walters (1811-1882), painted after 1862

Piece of furniture, a sideboard, from Arrowe park. None of the Arrowe Park furniture can be ascribed to a particular carver or workshop. Diana is at centre, possibly an earlier French panel. The cupid-like boys flanking her represent food and drink.

Entirely in step with this growth of maritime industry and the rise of commerce, was Arrowe Hall. The name is now associated with as a hospital, it was originally built in 1935 for John Ralph Nicholson Shaw, who inherited Arrowe Park from his uncle John Shaw, Liverpool Mayor and slave trader. A small gallery is devoted to reconstructing one of the Arrowe Hall rooms, with some truly astonishing, beautifully crafted, enormous and aesthetically rather appalling pieces of furniture and ornamentation, a mish-mash of medieval, Tudor and Jacobean styles executed with enthusiastic Victorian panache. The information board says that most of the pieces of furniture date to the 1880s, but were carved with earlier dates: “This deceit, and staining the oak very dark, was meant to give the owner a heritage and respectability that they didn’t really have.” The detail in the fireplace overmantel below shows considerable skill imitating earlier Renaissance style friezes. At the time of writing, the house is now a home for adults with learning difficulties.

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Pieces from the Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead

Similarly, the Della Robbia Pottery room is bound to split aesthetic opinion. Della Robbia Pottery, taking the name from Luca Della Robbia (1400-1481), and on whose style it is loosely based, was a remarkably successful Birkenhead enterprise for a short period of time between 1894 and 1906. It was established by Harold Rathbone (1858-1929), who worked with professional designers but also hired young people locally who he trained up. It is lavish, ornate, brightly coloured, glossy, often with multiple textures and sculptural components. Rathbone strained at the Slade School of Art and became a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites is clear in many of his pieces. Many of the themes of pieces produced by the pottery feature angels, cupids and mythological figures, as well as elaborate and complex patterns.

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Another small room focuses on ceramics that were either made and used in Merseyside or were imports, brought back to the Mersey docks from the far east to meet the demand of local consumers. Chinese ceramicists cottoned on very quickly to the types of decorative themes that were popular in the west, and produced specific types of design, including specific types of shape, for the European market. The mix is diverse, but there are one or two pieces that directly reference the maritime. The influence of Chinese ceramics is very clear, made either locally or imported, in some of the examples, but there are more localized themes as well. There were seven different sites in Liverpool that were making porcelain, all operating between the mid and late 1700s. Unfortunately, none of the factories used manufacturing marks so it is difficult to determine which factory produced which pieces.

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Maria Prymachenko – Autumn is Riding on Horeseback

Paintings by Ukrainian children, produced since the start of the war, from the Sunflower Dreams Project were on display during our visit, alongside paintings by Maria Prymachenko. The exhibitions produced by Sunflower Dreams are displayed in Britain, North America and Europe. Although the Sunflower Dreams Project exhibition at the Williamson ended in December 2025, at the time of writing you can still find full details about the project, with samples of the paintings produced by this admirable initiative on https://sunflowerdreamsproject.org/. Maria Prymachenko (1909-1977) specialized in Ukrainian folklore and was awarded a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937 for her wonderful, brightly imagined paintings. She was largely forgotten after the Second World War, but there was a resurgence of interest in her work in the 1960s and she is now featured in a number of international museums.

Philip Wilson Steer. A Girl at her Toilet, 1892-3

The painting collection on display during our visit strongly featured the landscape and seascape artist Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942), who was born in Birkenhead, although grew up elsewhere. He had spent time in Paris and was strongly influenced by the Impressionists and other contemporary artists. In his A Girl at Her Toilet of 1992-3, the theme of women engaging in personal behind-the-doors activities, so popular with Impressionist painters, is given a more dramatic overlay of contrasting colours, clearly inspired by Éduard Manet. the label says that the “intimate or even voyeuristic” tone of his painting was “ridiculed by English critics partly for the perceived indecency of his choices of subject matter.” By complete contrast, his Seascape off Walmer of 1930 was painted as he began to lose his eyesight, retaining only peripheral vision by 1935 when he moved almost completely over to watercolour. The entire composition is made up of thin washes of pale blue that create a delicate, almost abstract seascape with a single small boat in the distance, creating the only sense of depth.

Seascale off Walmer, 1930 by Philip Wilson Steer, 1860-1942

There were a set of paintings by Albert Richards (1919-1945), who has the sad distinction of being the youngest official War Artist to be killed in action in the Second World War, just two months before VE Day when the jeep in which he was travelling ran over a landmine. He was born in Liverpool but moved to Wallasey when young, training at the Wallasey School of Art.

Albert Richards – Della, c.1938. Painted when the artist was attending Wallasey School of Art. Gouache on paper.

Many of the other paintings on display by other artists from the period, both watercolours and oils, are obviously influenced by more accomplished Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, but are interesting as examples of how local artists were influenced by the latest trends.

Temporary installation – Di Mainstone’s “Subterranean Elevator,” which shows continually throughout the day. On until the end of January.

Because at least half of the Williamson is dedicated to temporary collections, a lot of the paintings are in storage. None of the better known examples from the permanent collection were on display when we visited, including the glorious watercolour of Brunel’s S.S. Great Eastern beached on the Mersey for repair work by William Gawin Herdman in 1863 and the Joseph Mallord William Turner’s dramatic watercolour Vesuvius Angry, both of which I was really hoping to see. I checked with the information desk after our visit, but the consensus was that they were both in storage. The comprehensive and very nicely presented online catalogue shows what the Williamson holds, but it does not indicate what is or is not on display.
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Charles Eyes 1767 Liverpool and Birkenhead

Liverpool and Birkenhead, attributed to Charles Eyes 1767, showing Birkenhead Manor and Priory. This photo is taken from the Williamson’s online catalogue at https://williamsonartgallery.org/item/1580053/

The spacious and comfortable café, with more paintings on the walls was producing some very good-looking meals and bakes, and the coffee was excellent. One of the paintings was a very evocative one of pre-industrial Birkenhead showing the manor and the ruined priory, the sister paining of one in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. I couldn’t get to it without trampling some diners underfoot, so the picture to the right is taken from the online catalogue. There is also a small shop area with books against one wall, and a few postcards. The sculpture garden, which can be reached from the café, looks interesting, but it was pouring with rain, so we abstained.

The Williamson represents Birkenhead and the Mersey, both past and present. The policy of the gallery is to mix its core collection of 19th and early 20th century art and decorative arts, with temporary exhibitions, often featuring contemporary works, and it is well worth keeping an eye on what their temporary exhibitions offer, either by checking the Williamson website or signing up to the email newsletter.

Frozen Fabric: Spectrum by Anna Sutton 1983

Frozen Fabric: Spectrum 1983 by Anna Sutton OBE (b.1935), British textile artist and designer. In this example she transforms a simple weave into a sculptural object, “merging textile traditions with minimalist abstraction.”

17th century Japanese temple bell, in the Arrowe Hall room. If it ever goes missing, you will know where to look!

CSS Alabama

A visit to Birkenhead Priory #2: St Mary’s Parish Church and HMS Thetis

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Introduction

The remains of the former church interior, with a tall arch that, now blocked with brick, once gave access to the tower

St Mary’s Parish Church in Birkenhead has a splendid claim to fame as one of the earliest churches to have cast iron tracery in its window openings, in place of the usual stone mullions and tracery. Although relentlessly Gothic Revival in style, it truly is a child of the Industrial Revolution.

St Mary’s sits over a part of the site occupied by the original medieval Birkenhead Priory. I have talked about the splendid remains of Birkenhead Priory, founded in the 12th century, and its ferry across the Mersey, the earliest one recorded, on an earlier post, Part 1, here. It is an absolute knock-out with a stunning vaulted chapter house, undercroft, remains of other parts of the monastic establishment and a small but very nice museum space.

A recent second visit to Birkenhead Priory, this time with the Chester Archaeological Society, was a good opportunity to re-familiarize myself with the much more recent stories of the 19th century St Mary’s Church, which is interesting in its own right. The tower, which is perfectly preserved with its clock mechanism visible from the stairwell, offers terrific views over the surrounding area whilst also serving as a memorial to those who died tragically during the sea trials of the submarine HMS Thetis.

St Mary’s Church

Plan of the Birkenhead Priory site, with the priory outlined in red, the now absent priory church outlined in orange and remains of the 1822 St Mary’s Church outlined in green. Source: Metropolitan Borough of Wirral leaflet (with my annotations in colour)

The site plan to the right shows the remains of the church framed in green. The medieval priory and its church are framed in red and orange respectively. The blue margin on the right is part of the Camell Laird’s shipyard, into which you can look from the tower of St Mary’s and watch the current shipbuilding activities. Church Street, right at the top of the image, post-dates the demolition of most of the church in 1970.

Although there are some stunning architectural survivals from the medieval priory, almost nothing remains of the priory church following the Dissolution. As you can see on the site plan to the right, the original priory church overlaps the site of St Mary’s. The Prior and his monks effectively handed over the keys to Henry VIII’s administrators and left peacefully. The need for a religious focus for the small community that remained, however, resulted in the consecration of the gorgeous monastic chapter house as a chapel (numbers 2, 3 on the plan, where the daily business of the priory had formerly taken place). It was only in the 19th century when Birkenhead began to grow into an industrial town, port and shipbuilding yards, with a rapidly expanding population, which was encouraged by the introduction of a steam ferry across the river Mersey, that the little chapel in the former chapter house became far too small for the needs of the Birkenhead community. As a result the decision was made to build a new church to meet the needs of this expanding population.

Thomas Rickman. Source: Wikipedia

The architect chosen for the task of building a new parish church for Birkenhead was Thomas Rickman, an interesting character whose 1817 book Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture helped to promote the development of the Gothic Revival, of which he was himself an enthusiastic proponent. Having secured some commissions in the Liverpool area from iron foundry owner John Cragg, Rickman had established an architectural practice in Liverpool in 1817. The foundation stone of the new Parish Church of St Mary’s was laid in July 1819, was consecrated on the 17th December 1821 and opened in 1822, with a vicarage established on the probable site of the priory kitchen. Built of red sandstone, which inevitably blackened with industrial pollution over the decades, the church had a rectangular plan apparently without aisles, with a tower at the west end. Although bricked up today for structural stability, the tall arch in the east wall of the tower would have opened into the nave of the church.

St Mary’s church in the early 20th century on a splendid postcard showing the church and the former churchyard. Source: St Mary’s Birkenhead blog

The church was large for the available population, but the landowner Francis Richard Price apparently decided to future-proof his new building, correctly judging that the early influx of people was going to continue to expand. By 1832 the church was too small for the congregation and was expanded with a north transept (wing), followed by a south transept in 1835. You can see some of the decorative touches from the roof in the remaining pieces of masonry at the feet of the west walls.

Victorian burials took place mainly in the churchyard but prestigious individuals were interred within the monastic garth. The former monastic garth, the square green that formed the focus around which the most important monastic buildings were arranged, became a cemetery for important residents in the 19th century. It is here, for example, that the Laird family crypt is to be found. In 2024, at his request, the cremated ashes of Birkenhead Labour MP Frank Field, who served for 40 years, were buried next to the entrance to the chapter house. He is almost certainly the last who will be given permission to be interred there.

The dock for which the churchyard was sacrificed in the 1950s

The churchyard with its cemetery no longer survives. It was originally established in the Middle Ages, for the monastic community, but after the 16th century probably only saw intermittent usage. It was only as Birkenhead began to expand that it came back into general use. After the opening of St Mary’s it once again became an important cemetery for the local area, remaining in use until 1901, after which only those with family plots or in exceptional circumstances were permitted. In 1948 the parishes of St Mary’s and St Paul’s in Birkenhead joined forces, and St Paul’s was demolished. In the 1950s, as the neighbouring shipyard expanded and was desperate for more space, a commercial deal was made between Camell Lairds and the town council, in the face of protests, to purchase the churchyard for a new dock. Whatever remained of the medieval church, all but part of one arch, was taken down. Around 1100 burials, including those that had been brought over, with headstones, from St Paul’s were transferred from the churchyard to the new Landican cemetery in 1957-8, leaving only those within the garth of the monastic complex, and a handful in the immediate vicinity of the church and the priory. A tall wall was built to divide the site from the docks below.

Another angle on St Mary’s showing the exterior walls and the base of the tower, as well as the clock

The Church tower has a number of notable features. The Victorian clock underwent restoration and was reinstalled in 1990, sponsored by local interests. From the top of the tower there are some stunning views, and you can peer into the fascinating Camell Laird’s shipyard and see the dry dock where the well-known and very controversial 1862 Alabama was built as a blockade runner for the Confederates in the American Civil War. However, the most notable aspect of the tower is its role as a memorial to the 99 men who died in 1939 on the submarine HMS Thetis.

The church was closed in 1974 and the majority of the church was taken down in 1977. Most of the fallen masonry remained after the demolition was presumably removed for recycling as building material, but some of the pieces of stonework that were less obviously adaptable for other building projects are laid along the remains of the inner west walls of the former nave.

One of the splendid cast iron windows

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HMS Thetis

HMS Thetis was salvaged, repaired and relaunched as HMS Thunderbolt, shown here. Source: Wikipedia

On 1st June 1939 a new submarine, the first of the new Titan class, left Cammell Laird’s shipyard in Birkenhead. This was her second set of sea trials, after her first went went very badly, and it was imperative that this time there should be no mistakes. There was great confidence when she put to sea, but only a few hours later sank 12 miles off the Great Orme in Liverpool Bay, with 103 men on board. This was twice the usual number of crew on board the HMS Thetis (N25), because as well as the standard Royal Navy crew of some 50 men that manned her, there were also engineers, members of the Admiralty and various others on board, including catering staff and other civilians, as she underwent sea trials. There were only four survivors, and it is partly due to their testimonies that the cause of the tragedy was pieced together.

The submarine sailed safely down the Mersey towards Liverpool Bay, heading towards the Great Orme and accompanied by a tug boat named the Grebe Cock. An essential part of her sea trials was to dive and make way underwater. When the attempt to dive was made, in 150ft (46m) of water, the submarine was found to be too lightweight to submerge. A submarine can make additional weight by taking on water. Her internal compensating tanks were full, and it was decided to check the status of the six torpedo tubes and allow the two lowest ones to flood if they were empty. The torpedo tubes could be checked by means of a stop-cock. If, when turned, water leaked out, then the torpedo tube was full. If it did not, it was empty and could opened and inspected. In the aftermath of the disaster, it was found that the stop-cock of the fifth torpedo tube had been accidentally covered with enamel paint during final preparation for trials, and had hardened, preventing any water seeping out of the stop-cock to indicate that the torpedo tube was, in fact, full of water. Because it was believed that the tube was empty, the rear door was opened. In fact, the torpedo door was open to the sea and immediately thousands of gallons flooded into the submarine, forcing her down at the bow as the water began to fill the first two sections. Thereafter the 270ft (82m) submarine could not be refloated and it was a matter of escape or rescue before air ran out.

The memorial stairways in St Mary’s tower

Thereafter it is a complicated story, certainly not one for someone uninformed to tell, and the best website account I have found to date is the unfortunately named Great Disasters website, which includes accounts by the four survivors and witnesses from the inquiry. Alternatively, and much-recommended is really excellent 15-minute summary provided by a video, with original photographs and diagrams, presenting the harrowing story very clearly: The Raven’s Eye YouTube channel.

The submarine was recovered on the 3rd of September 1939, towed to Traeth Bychan beach, where she was grounded and the remaining bodies either buried in a mass grave in Maeshyfryd Cemetery in Holyhead. After the submarine was salvaged, repaired and renamed HMS Thunderbolt she was returned to active service in 1940. She was a successful vessel until 1943 when she was sunk off the coast of Sicily by an Italian corvette, with the loss of all hands.

The catalogue of errors both on board and on shore is dismally reminiscent of the sinking of Titanic, when one is familiar with the details of both horror stories. Human error, in design, in execution, in procedures and in response to technological failure, always seems to be a major factor in shipping and air disasters.
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Final Comments

A visit to Birkenhead Priory is rewarding in its own right, but with the addition of the ruins of St Mary’s Church with its cast iron windows, and the tower, its memorial and its views. there is an awful lot to see, enjoy and learn.

There are some stunning views from the top of St Mary’s tower

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Visiting Details

Details for visitors are in Part 1. Although Part 1 was posted in May last year, I have checked the details and nothing has changed in the meantime. There are also opening hours and a map on the Birkenhead Priory website.
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Sources

Leaflets

St Mary’s Parish Church 1819-1977, compiled by Tony Hughes
https://thebirkenheadpriory.org/wp-content/uploads/St-Marys-booklet.pdf

HMS Thetis, compiled by Les Black, March 2016. Produced by Birkenhead Priory

Websites

AHRNet
Rickman, Thomas 1776 – 1841
https://architecture.arthistoryresearch.net/architects/rickman-thomas

Graveyard Survey, St Mary’s Birkenhead, volume 1, 1977, Gill Chitty 1977
https://www.merseysidearchsoc.com/uploads/2/7/2/9/2729758/jmas_1_paper_5.pdf

Marshall University, Marshall Digital Scholar
CSS Alabama. An Illustrated History. Part 1: Building Ship No. 290. By Jack L. Dickinson. Fall 10-9-2017
https://civilwartalk.com/attachments/part-1-building-ship-no-290-pdf.296944/

An Online Archive for the Church of St. Mary’s & the Priory, Birkenhead Cheshire, including a listing of the monumental inscriptions from the old graveyard & Priory
History of the Priory and St. Mary’s Church Birkenhead
http://stmarysbirkenhead.blogspot.com/

The Raven’s Eye
Everything Went Wrong – The Tragedy of HMS Thetis – Submarine Disaster (1939)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEcW7WjRxY8

Over the wall from the former churchyard

I believe that this was the dry dock where the “Alabama” was built, seen from the top of St Mary’s tower

The 1715 “Old Dock” – The earliest of Liverpool’s commercial docks, preserved beneath the Liverpool ONE shopping centre

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Introduction

The Eyes map of Liverpool showing Old Dock on a previous tidal inlet and enclosed within the streets of an expanding Liverpool in 1765, 50 years after it first opened. Later docks were laid out along the foreshore. Source: National Museums Liverpool

Earlier in summer 2024 I went on the Old Dock tour in Liverpool when it was offered one Sunday. Old Dock, of which only one corner remains to be visited, was perhaps Liverpool’s most important commercial and civil engineering initiative at a time when Chester’s port was going into decline and Liverpool had the opportunity to become the trading centre for the northwest.

Old Dock, Liverpool

Old Dock in Liverpool, the first of Liverpool’s impressive network of enclosed docks, opened in 1715, to the design of civil engineer Thomas Steers. It is Europe’s oldest enclosed cargo-handling dock. What remains of Old Dock is underground, beneath the “Liverpool ONE” shopping centre. Its lock gates can no longer be visited, but remain under The Strand (the modern dual carriageway that runs along the line of the old foreshore). Only the northeastern corner of the dock is accessible to visitors, and has been provided with a gantry and information panels, and its history is presented to pre-booked groups by an excellent guide. I’ve added details about booking and the tour itself at the end of the post under “Visiting.” The following looks at some of the history of Old Dock.

The 1699 Howland Great Wet Dock in London. British Library HMNTS 10349.ff.9.. Source: Wikipedia

Old Dock was modelled on the Howland Great Wet Dock, shown right, built in 1699, which was built to shelter ships, mainly of the East India Company, in the days when ships over-wintering on the Thames were regularly subjected to both storm damage and piracy. It was surrounded by a double planting of trees to help protect the ships within and had shipbuilding dry docks at its entrance. It was a convenient place to carry out repairs and to ready ships for the upcoming season, but was not used for handling cargo so was not a commercial trading dock. The Howland Great Wet Dock was built in a rural space on the south of the Thames in what is now the residential Surrey Quays area of southeast London, and was replaced in the 18th century by Greenland Dock, which itself became part of the Surrey Commercial Docks.

The commercial argument for Old Dock

Liverpool was established by a charter of King John in 1207 and was provided with a castle in 1235. At this time, however, Chester was the main northwestern port, and Liverpool did not become a commercial giant until the 18th and 19th centuries, and this required some pioneering Victorian thinking and civil engineering before it really took off as one of Britain’s leading ports. Old Dock is at the heart of this story.

Painting of Liverpool in 1680, from the Old Dock display area. Unknown artist. The original is held by the National Maritime Museum. See more (and a better image) on ArtUK

Before the docks, the Mersey was not the easiest of rivers to use in an age of sail partly due to strong winds but also because of the twice-daily tidal events that swept down the estuary. An additional problem was that due to the dumping of rubbish and ships’ ballast along the river edges, deep-sea shipping was unable to approach the river banks to offload and reload. It could also become very busy with river traffic of all shapes and sizes. The handling of cargo on the Mersey was achieved by mooring ships in the main channel and loading and offloading them with lighters – unpowered boats into which the cargo was loaded by hand, then rowed to shore, and offloaded by hand. This could only be carried out between tidal events, confining the activity to around 5 hours a day. To empty a single ship averaging 150 tons could take between two and three weeks.

The engineering success of the Howland dock enterprise inspired MP Thomas Johnson, who was both a successful merchant a slave trader, to approach one of the engineers probably responsible for the Howland dock, George Sorocold, to discuss the viability of a similar dock for Liverpool. Johnson, however, saw the greater potential of an enclosed inland dock, not for over-wintering ships but for creating a cargo-handling facility to radically improve speed and efficiency. Under The Dock Act of 1708 a Common Council of leading city figures was established to became trustees of the proposed dock, which they operated through council committees. The risk of doing it this way rather than as a private enterprise was that failure could have put the entire city finances in jeopardy. Thomas Steers from London was the civil engineer appointed in 1709 to make this a reality, only a decade after the opening of the Howland Great Wet Quay on which he had probably also worked. Initially costs had been estimated at £6000, but this was a serious underestimation and eventually the dock cost more than double this amount.

Building and opening the dock

The dock was lined with bricks in the upper sections with local red sandstone in the lower courses. I am accustomed to the later Surrey Commercial Docks in southeast London, where I used to live, which are lined with stone much like Liverpool’s Albert Dock, so the sight of a brick-lined dock seemed extraordinary to me. The bricks were made on site from local clays, with a dedicated kiln built for the task, and a special mortar was used to resist the incursion of water.

At the base of Old Dock, Liverpool

The result of all the investment, civil engineering and labour was Old Dock, which opened in 1715 at the mouth of a former tidal inlet or creek. Up to a hundred ships could be taken into the 3.5 acre dock via a 30ft wide entrance lock and could draw up against the quayside to offload without the use of lighters. Because of the tides, ships could only enter the dock at the top half of the tide, but a 1.5 acre tidal entrance basin was provided as a waiting area. By drawing ships up against the quayside, three weeks could be reduced to just one to two days. The proof of concept was soon confirmed.

The area around the dock was soon surrounded by residential, commercial, retail and service industry premises. Excerpt from a poster from the Old Dock exhibition area.

An entire new residential, commercial, retail and service industry quarter grew up around the dock, which became known as the Merchants’ Quarter. As well as homes, warehousing and other commercial facilities there were lodging houses for sailors, and less salubrious businesses that catered to their needs. This is a good illustration of the sort of process of urban sprawl that follows on from a specific industrial development.

Old Dock was such a notable success that new docks were soon opened, and the Liverpool foreshore began its transformation. During the 18th century South Dock, also built by Thomas Steers (later Salthouse Dock) opened 1753, George’s Dock opened 1771, King’s Dock opened and Queen’s Dock opened in 1796. It is a measure of the success of the dock concept, Old Dock having been established 53 years before Bristol’s first dock, that between 1772 and 1805 the total tonnage of shipping increased from 170,000 to 670,000, with foreign shipping increasing from 20,000 to 280,000. By the end of the 19th century 9% of all world trade passed through the Liverpool docks, and there were 120 acres of enclosed docks along 10km (7 miles) of Liverpool’s foreshore.

Closure of the dock

Old Dock, Liverpool

Old Dock itself closed in 1826 mainly because as ship sizes increased, in terms of width, length and depth, it became increasingly obsolete. It did not help either that the dock had become surrounded with other buildings and could not easily expand without considerable destruction. Instead, the development of docks beyond the existing foreshore seemed like a better option and this is what happened.

This new use of enclosed docks for cargo-handling was pioneered at Old Dock in Liverpool, creating the first revolution in cargo handling in the UK. To provide additional real estate for the rapidly growing city, most of the dock was infilled and built over, so this one remaining corner is a significant survivor from Liverpool’s early development as a major trading port.

Final Comments

Old Dock brickwork

Much of what is known about Liverpool’s earliest docks comes from the archaeological investigations that took place between 1976 and 2009. Old Dock was examined prior to the building of Liverpool One by Oxford Archaeology between 2001 and 2006. The remains of Old Dock are designated a site of Outstanding Universal Value.

It is difficult to over-emphasize how important London’s Howland Great Wet Dock and Liverpool’s Old Dock were to the development of maritime trade in Britain. With an enclosed dock designed by Thomas Steers, the Old Dock set Liverpool firmly on the path for trading success throughout the 18th century and the commercial and architectural triumphs of the Victorian period.

Visiting

Booking details, opening times, ticket prices and everything else you need to know are on the Old Dock Tour website.

At the time of writing the meeting point shown on one place on Google Maps is in a different location from the one that is shown on the Old Dock Tours website, and the latter is the correct one. I don’t know Liverpool at all and I was confused by the directions on the website, partly because I had no idea what a “Q-Park” might be when it escaped from its burrow, so I arrived early to make sure that I was in the right place, which was on the Thomas Steers Way entrance to the “Q-Park” (the Liverpool ONE car-park), on the left as you head up from the Mersey, near the base of the Sugar House Steps. Here’s the What3Words address for that location, which is traffic-free, but do check on the website or your ticket that this remains the same meeting place: https://what3words.com/found.farm.gent. Have your ticket handy to be checked, either printed out or on your device.

This is a guided tour. You receive an excellent lecture as you walk to the dock via a wall-sized map of old Liverpool, and then stand on the gantry looking down into the dock. Our guide was informative, humorous and engaging, parting with a staggering amount of information in an easily digestible way. It is always a mark of how well a guide does when there are questions afterwards, people wanting to explore specific aspects of the story, and there were lots of questions. I used to live overlooking Greenland Dock in London, and the remnants of the Surrey Commercial Docks were my home for twenty years. Opposite was Canary Wharf, where the former East India and West India quays are preserved and the Museum of London Docklands is located. It was a real dock heritage experience, so it was particularly nice to go to Liverpool and have someone bring this particular old dock to such vivid life.

If you are dealing with unwilling legs, there is a flight of steps with a banister to hold onto. I forgot to count, but I would guess perhaps ten steps, down from the car park entrance into the dock area. There is then a gantry (metal walkway) across the remaining part of the dock, with high sides to hang on to. There is nowhere to sit, so a portable perch of some sort might be useful whilst you are listening to the talks.

I had not realized that it was the schools’ half term break. Half-term was a poor day to visit Liverpool, and on the tour there were two completely uncontrolled young children running around and yelling their heads off. A less child-intensive day would be better if it can be arranged. There’s not a lot for young children to see on this walk anyway, although an older child seemed to be enjoying it very much.
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Sources

Most of the above details came from the guided tour. I did not want to detract from that so I have not gone into greater detail here, but I did use some additional sources to check facts that I had not noted down at the time, and have provided some suggestions for further reading.

Books and Papers

Farrer, William, and Brownbill, J. (eds.) 1911. Liverpool: The docks, in “A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 4,” p. 41-43. British History Online. Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 1911.
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol4/pp41-43

Gregory, Richard A., Caroline Raynor, Mark H. Adams, Robert Philpott, Christine Howard-Davis, Nick Johnson, Vix Hughes, David A. Higgins 2014. Archaeology at the Waterfront vol 1: Liverpool Docks. Lancaster Imprints / Oxford Archaeology North

Stammers, M.K. 2007. Ships and port management at Liverpool before the opening of the first dock in 1715. Journal of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol.56.
https://www.hslc.org.uk/journal/vol-156-2007/attachment/156-3-stammers/

Stephenson, Roderick A. 1955. The Liverpool Dock System. Transactions of the Liverpool Nautical Research Society, Volume 8 1953-55 (1955)
https://liverpoolnauticalresearchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Article-The-Liverpool-Dock-System.pdf

Websites

National Museums Liverpool
Ten fascinating facts about Liverpool’s Old Dock
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/ten-fascinating-facts-about-liverpools-old-dock

Historic Liverpool
1846: Plan of the Liverpool Docks, by Jesse Hartley, Dock Surveyor
https://historic-liverpool.co.uk/old-maps-of-liverpool/1846-plan-liverpool-docks-jesse-hartley-dock-surveyor/#4/65.79/-74.43

The Liverpolitan
Old Dock: a different view. Wednesday, 18 November 2015
https://theliverpolitan.com/blog_old_dock_a_different_view.php

That’s How The Light Gets In blog
Liverpool Old Dock: Down to the bedrock
https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/liverpool-old-dock-down-to-the-bedrock/

Liverpool World Heritage
LIVERPOOL MARITIME MERCANTILE CITY WORLD HERITAGE SITE MANAGEMENT PLAN 2017 – 2024. Prepared by LOCUS Consulting Ltd. Liverpool City Council
www.liverpoolworldheritage.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pmd-486-liverpool-whs-management-plan-final-version-as-at-27-sep-2017.pdf

A Rotherhithe Blog
The Howland Great Wet Dock 1699-1807
http://russiadock.blogspot.com/2008/06/rotherhithe-heritage-2-howland-great.html

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Dazzle-camouflage building on Knox Street in Birkenhead

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At Birkenhead Priory the other day I very much liked this small building on Knox Street, very close to both Birkenhead Priory and the Cammell Laird shipyard. It has been painted in the style of dazzle camouflage, used in the First World War, and to a lesser extent in the Second World War, primarily to confuse submarines. “The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. Dazzle was a method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked” (Norman Wilkinson, 1969, A Brush with Life, Seeley Service, p.79, quoted on Wikipedia).

The moment I saw it, it reminded me of a 1919 painting by Edward Wadsworth (1889 – 1949) that I have hanging in my spare bedroom, showing a ship in dry dock in Liverpool receiving its new paint job. Wadsworth painted in the style of the Vorticists, whose best known proponent was Wyndham Lewis, inspired by machinery and industry, and focused on clean lines, hard edges and planes of strong colour. The dazzle ship was a near perfect subject matter for this style of painting, and Wadsworth was in an ideal position to get up close and personal with his subject matter, as in the First World War he worked as an intelligence officer, and one of this responsibilities was implementing dazzle camouflage designs for the Royal Navy.

I would love to know who came up with painting the building on Knox Street in the same style. If you know anything about it, do let me know.

Below is a painting from the Merseyside Maritime Museum showing the Walmer Castle painted in her dazzle camouflage. “The Walmer Castle was launched in 1901 for the recently created Union Castle Mail Steamship Company. The ship sailed between Southampton and Cape Town and in 1917 was requisitioned by the British Government. It is seen here dazzle painted for use as a troop ship in the North Atlantic. Walmer Castle survived the war and was broken up in 1932″ (National Museums Liverpool).

Final Comments

Visiting

Sources

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Books

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Introduction

St Mary’s Church

HMS Thetis

Final Comments

Visiting Details

Sources

Leaflets

Websites

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Introduction

The commercial argument for Old Dock

Building and opening the dock

Closure of the dock

Final Comments

Visiting

Sources

Books and Papers

Websites

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