THIS week on My Favourite Building, Gurdip Chamba, below, head of building consultancy at property consultants Bruton Knowles in Birmingham, discusses how his time at university started a love affair with the Anglican Cathedral, in Liverpool.
As you walk along Upper Parliament Street and turn the corner in the centre of Liverpool, the sight of the Anglican Cathedral hits you with the full force of its beauty and immensity.
Looking like the head and shoulders of a giant robot, this is a building that makes your spine tingle. It is here that I graduated from the city’s John Moores University, and I was as awestruck then as I am today by the scale of the place.
And it is truly a building of superlatives. With a bell tower that stretches up for 100 metres, it is the largest cathedral in Britain and the fifth largest in the world. It took 74 years to build and is a celebration of expert craftsmanship, from the stained glass windows to the stonemasons’ mastery of the red sandstone.
The cathedral’s interior is no less impressive and you cannot fail to be amazed by how it was all achieved by simple manpower, in comparison with today’s large modern buildings where modern plant, technology and machinery allow easier construction.
The concept design for the cathedral was drawn by Giles Gilbert Scott, who was just 21 years old at the time and, incredibly, had no previous experience of building design. Over 100 drawings were submitted to the design competition, including entries from the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and other established architects.
But the selectors must have liked Scott’s soaring ambitions for the building – although they did order him to work alongside the more experienced architect George F. Bodley.
Scott’s original design was based on Durham Cathedral and had two towers at the west end, and was packed with the Gothic detailing that was all the rage at the time. As the design was tweaked and revised, the two towers were reinvented as the single, central and exceptionally tall tower topped with a lantern that we see today.
The Gothic frills were cut back and even some elements of Mackintosh’s design entry were incorporated. Building work started in 1904 with the Lady Chapel being the first element of the structure to be completed.
But the Second World War and money problems hindered the work and the completion of the building – and consecration – only came in 1978: too late for Scott, who had died in 1960.
If you do get a chance to visit, and it is worth seeing at night when the building’s huge silhouette is almost scary, don’t miss the wonderful and rather creepy Victorian graveyard St James Cemetery.
Located at the back of the cathedral, you will find the gravestones of some of the merchant families who lived in Liverpool when it was one of the biggest cities in the world.
The cathedral’s interior is no less impressive and you cannot fail to be amazed by how it was all achieved by simple manpower, in comparison with today’s large modern buildings where modern plant, technology and machinery allow easier construction.
Scott’s original design was based on Durham Cathedral and had two towers at the west end, and was packed with the Gothic detailing that was all the rage at the time. As the design was tweaked and revised, the two towers were reinvented as the single, central and exceptionally tall tower topped with a lantern that we see today.
