Looking after Liverpool: Liverpool is the New European capital of culture—a title it merits only because of the people who fought against its destructive redevelopment after the war

Apollo, March, 2008 by Gavin Stamp

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Behind the great 16-column Corinthian portico of St George's Hall in Liverpool, which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as 'the freest neo-Grecian building in England and one of the finest in the world', are four empty plinths (Figs 3 and 4). It has long been my fear that someone will propose that they should be occupied by statues of John, Paul, George and Ringo. It could happen: the Beatles now seem to be central to Liverpool's image of itself, and it is all too easy to imagine the dire vulgarity of the result: more of the bronze-waxwork type of sculpture (by Paul Day?) that now constitutes public art all over Britain. And it would accord with the famous desire to be forward looking, demotic, and not to be too reverential about the past, that is characteristic of those who govern Liverpool and many other cities.

Needless to say, Ringo Start was prominent in the noisy public ceremony in January that inaugurated Liverpool's long-heralded year as European Capital of Culture. Now it would be wrong to be too cynical about this, for the city deserves credit for having pulled itself up from being Britain's principal urban basketcase a quarter of a century ago, when it was known mostly for economic collapse, race riots and self-destructive militant socialism. But there is something so very exasperating about Liverpool's smug self-satisfaction, its impregnable belief in its own superiority and peculiar proletarian charm, for the simple fact is that most of what is genuinely cultured about the city--at least visually--dates from the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century. Without that legacy, the Capital of Culture would be vacuous hype.

It was the city's mercantile economy, primed by the slave trade (not for nothing did Liverpool support and supply ships to the Confederacy during the American Civil War) that paid for the stupendous and imaginative buildings that expressed its overweening civic pride: St George's Hall, the two huge cathedrals (alas, Lutyens's for the Roman Catholics was hardly begun, but the Anglicans finished theirs), the three grand Edwardian piles by Pierhead now known as the Three Graces. And it was the wealth and discrimination of the merchants and shipowners that filled Liverpool's museums and galleries with the art treasures the city now boasts. Compared with this, the recent record is not impressive. The European cultural accolade has been used as an excuse to encourage crass commercial developments at the expense of yet more of the city's historic buildings, and the one prestigious cultural project, the gratuitous new Museum of Liverpool that will disfigure Pierhead (Fig. 2), has been marred by delays and disputes--its Danish architects have been dismissed and there are rows about its stone cladding.

Liverpool has often been its own worst enemy and there would be rather less to boast about today if it were not for outside interference in recent decades. Of course, the moral effect of its inexorable economic decline as a great port--the end of the transatlantic liners in particular--should not be underestimated, but there is little excuse for the destructive policies pursued by its authorities. Things began badly immediately after World War II, when the gutted but substantial ruin of the magnificent neo-classical Custom House (Fig. 1), by a talented local architect, John Foster, was demolished in order to 'lessen unemployment'. Further relentless destruction of Liverpool's Georgian and Victorian fabric continued for the next few decades--not even the original Cavern Club, where the Beatles first performed, was spared, thus denying the city a major tourist attraction.

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Strange but true, it was the hated Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher that saved Liverpool from itself. After the 1981 Toxteth riots, Michael Heseltine, as Secretary of State for the Environment, set up a 'Task Force' to deal with urban deprivation and created the Merseyside Development Corporation. He also prevented the demolition of the former Lyceum Club, designed by Thomas Harrison, the architect of Chester Castle. Sited at the bottom of Bold Street, once the city's smartest commercial street, this most handsome neo-classical building was to have been demolished to make way for a new shopping centre. And it was the Conservatives who rescued Liverpool's museums and galleries from municipal control and mismanagement by establishing the independent National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (now National Museums Liverpool).

Heseltine was also involved with the saving and restoration of two monumental structures that are today two of Liverpool's principal cultural assets. One is St George's Hall, the vast classical building of the 1840s designed by the young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (who won the competition at the age of 25 and was dead at 34), which stands in the heart of the city and makes the area between the Walker Art Gallery and Lime Street Station seem like a Roman forum ('SPQL' those proud Liverpudlian oligarchs had cast on its great metal doors: The Senate and People of Liverpool). However magnificent, the building had long been neglected; after World War II the sculpture in the great south pediment was taken down and apparently ended up as hardcore for road building.