A Day Out with Elspeth in Liverpool

I was disappointed to arrive in a great city via a wormhole. If you arrive from Chester by Merseyrail, the first you see of Liverpool is after you get off the train. Despite calling near it, there is no glimpse of the lovely classical Hamilton Square of Birkenhead on the way, and no famous vista across the Mersey of the postcards.

That is only possible from the ferry.

The worm hole is the underground rail tunnel that sees you under the mile of river and into Lime Street Station. You have to go up a level to see the impressive arched glass and iron roof of the mainline station, and then you are greeted by one of the best leaving- the-train-station views I know.

It says a lot about Liverpool, that view. Turn round and you can see the Alfred Waterhouse designed former station hotel, and the biggest theatre in the city - the Empire. Face forwards, and a classical group of Victorian buildings awaits you, gathered round a cobbled area complete with a column monument and small gardens. St George's Hall is a court and concert hall whilst behind are the museum, library and art gallery, all with triangular pediments, balustrades on sweeping stairs, and classical columns.

Liverpool likes to boast (it does of many things) - but one of its self exultations that it is the second most filmed city in Britain. It has stood in for major cities round the world, it likes to tell us. There's a hint of Glasgow in that boast. It says - we are not just a major British city - we are a World City. Our buildings can be mistaken for anywhere because we're up there with the finest cultural architecture. We've got the style that all great Western cities have - that ancient style from the mother of all architecture.

However, this boast can be reversed. Classical Greek is too generic. Its buildings are often hard to tell apart. Perhaps it is not flattering that the city with the innovative Everyman Theatre can be filmed as Everycity.

That's where Glasgow and Liverpool differ. Glasgow too says - we're a city on a global league. Glasgow pinches bits of architecture from the world - not in the American sense of importing it - but in emulating it. A carpet factory, as well as the city Chambers, is Venetian. A non conformist church has Babylonian and Indian elements; a warehouse is Egyptian; while the university is Scots Baronial crossed with Gothic. But in that list I have already touched on the distinctness of Glasgow. Glasgow University takes a European Style - Gothic - but gives it the twist of its own country. The Egyptian and Greek, Indian and Babylonian is from an architect whose work, confined purely to Glasgow, is instantly recognisable. The Glasgow Style of Art Deco, which again gives a look that is peculiar to Weegie World.

For me, this is what makes Glasgow special. The other British industrial cities don't have that unique architectural signature. Liverpool has few buildings that are original in style and to my knowledge there are only two 19th architects and one more modern one who have left us with only half a dozen really different buildings.
The Lime Street/William Brown group are not any of them.

Looking towards the docks, one sees the distant graces and perhaps Albert Docks, but these are semi detached from the city, surrounded by hinterland. The building site has given way to a rather dull shopping complex. Liverpool may not be as original as Glasgow but it does have its own style, and I regret that this is being infringed on by generic modern developments.

Before the unimaginatively named Liverpool One was built, the area between St George's Hall and the Pier head was full of scruffy shops and fast traffic. Walking towards the water, I became aware of how carefully framed Liverpool photos are, missing out the unlovely, which is quite striking when you are actually there.

The Three Graces are really two with an undistinguished office block (the Cunard Building) in the middle. The dome of the Port of Liverpool Building makes it have a Londonesque feel - a city that Liverpool likes to compare itself to. There are many similarities, though Liverpool's wish to draw out London connections is about being seen as Britain's next most important city rather than looking for affinity.

The First Grace really is a Liverpool Original: the Liver Building. An early concrete building (the first if you ask a Scouse but not if you ask a Geordie), it has its own style. The only other building by Water Aubrey Thomas is behind it - Tower House - over one of Liverpool's now vanished earlier mercantile mansions. It gives Liverpool its American flavour. Liverpool likes to proclaim that it inspired its trading partner with the idea that became Skyscrapers, because the man that built the Reliant Building and Rookery in Chicago was known to have lived in Liverpool. So John Root must have copied that other original Liverpudlian builder, Peter Ellis.

To admire Ellis' work, one has to leave the docks, their cobbles, propellers, anchors and groups of homogenous hefty warehouses, where style bars, Beatles centres, and floating weather maps jostle for attention. You probably are already very familiar with Liverpool's top tourist attraction and the county's earliest waterfront redevelopment, Albert Docks. We'll leave the 1930s deco ventilator tower of the tunnel and the innovative Police booths, designed by Jesse Hartley in the 1840s along with much of the docks. And we'll go into the commercial area of grand banks and municipal buildings, some with their original uses and some now turned into restaurants. It's a short walk - not quite as far as the bizarre but intriguing Superlambbanana sculpture. And turn off, up little Cook Street, toward where we descended from the classical grandeur we began at. There are two quite small office blocks, but still shocking today in their originality. Oriel Chambers is the larger, with pod like honeycomb windows. The little curved roofed structure at No 16 has a glass covered curved stairway at the back. Allegedly, they were ridiculed at the time and Peter Ellis stopped building. What a shame he was not encouraged and had gone on to be Liverpool's Rennie Mackintosh. Like Hardwick Hall Mark Two - three hundred years earlier - they are 'more glass than wall'. And they are thrilling. And my favourite Liverpool buildings.

Central Liverpool has five distinct areas. We've seen three and the next comes as a pair. The Cavern Quarter is where Beatles pilgrimage is centred on a narrow network of streets that are neither quaint or arty, though they could be both. The Rope Walks area is also skinny and cobbled, slightly raffish and is full of warehouses. But it too is not developed to be what it might. Loud bars sit next to stylish restaurants and artists' studios. I pity anyone trying to create with an Australian themed late bight bar under you. This latter area is the home of Liverpool's arts cinema and media centre, FACT. Instead of taking the interesting 19thc warehouses, it built anew - not startling enough to be really modern, and not sympathetic to the existing warehouses either. The coffee machine goes off at 7pm and then it's alcohol only in a small bar where some disappointingly mainstream fare is shown - yet the multiplex is just a few minutes' walk away.

The last area of the centre was the one that nearly changed my mind about living here. I'd come on a day that fulfilled the title of the Crowded House Song, where every season manifested itself on one late August Sunday afternoon. I explored in this order. By the time I'd got to Albert Dock, I was unsure; and in seeing the two cobbled quarters, I was disappointed and had resolved a no. But then, I went to see the Cathedrals.

Passing the Chinese arch, one sees that the road that literally and spiritually connects the two cathedrals - another of Liverpool's boasts. It says it has more Georgian than Bath, which I find hard to believe as the whole of Bath's suburbs are Georgian as far as the eye can see. But the late 18th to mid 19th C in Liverpool has brought an area rich in impressive classical terraces, some red brick, and some plastered and whitish. This area gave me quite a different feel of the city I had been to hasty to write off.

A firm mediaevalist, I had refused to see the Catholic 'Wigwam', which family have called The Sputnik, the inside of a speaker, and which I think looks like the 1980s electronic game, Simon. But there's thought as well as originality here - and it remains the city's best modern building. Frederick Gibberd shows that concrete can be beautiful, or at least, appealing, and sacred. It is to date Liverpool's only modern treasure: the attempts at a fourth Grace are desiccations of the World Heritage Waterfront, and the stuff contemporary to this Metropolitan place of worship are inglorious concrete lumps.

The other cathedral was also one that took time to like. I considered Gilbert Scott's 20th C Gothic edifice a Babel, all about another Americanism that came with in with the cargo - trying to be the biggest, by overkill. I have heard Liverpool Anglican Cathedral as anything between 3-5th largest Christian church in the world (the original Catholic one was to be the largest). At 660ft+ long with a 331ft tower, this Anglican Cathedral is by far the largest church in Britain, and Liverpool is the only of the industrial cities to build anew when given a new diocese. Inside the red sandstone building of superlatives, the sense of awe made me wish to weep and fall on my knees - but in a good way. It isn't austere or fearful. The awe is not demanded - it is gentle.

When leaving the cathedral area - one of the few green patches in central Liverpool - you can turn to see the city below, right down to the water. That's where I felt my greatest draw and when I asked myself the hardest if I was happy to choose another city as home. I may have sounded like I'm jibing Liverpool, but I am really very fond of it and look forward to my next visit. I wanted to go so much this weekend but couldn't that I had a virtual tour, planning what I'd be doing if I was there, and getting out my vast array of guidebooks. Next time, I shall explore some suburbs and take a Beatles Tour (watching Nowhere Boy was what brought on this bout of Liverpool Mania), and then I shall report back...