Liverpool in the Pouring Rain A Pilgrimage with my Pevsner

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar The little children laugh at him behind his back And the banker never wears a mac In the pouring rain... - Very strange - Paul McCartney

Something of a trite tripper I had hoped for brilliant photogenic sunshine when I booked my cheap rail return. What I got when the 25 th September 2012 dawned was torrential rain, with a taunting tease of peeping sunshine when I boarded the train at Bloxwich. As the train from Stafford passed the Sow and the other Staffordshire rivulets on its way North I noticed that those streams were bankfull. By the time we reached Crewe the rain was teeming down and as we passed over the Weaver and the other rivers of the Cheshire Plain I could see that they were within a foot of spillage. At Lime Street the rain was so heavy that I had reluctantly to pull on my rain trousers, though with my boots and my Goretex jacket they afforded a cosy armor that gave me an impunity that few other city walkers knew. With my fortifications completed by my newly Fabsiled backpack I felt the careless confidence of some vole who might, if flood obliged, retire to snug security, immune to all elements until the storm had passed. The central streets were nearly vacant and almost ghostly, their eerie calm if anything accentuated by the little coteries of smokers who cowered sheepishly in the doorways of the mighty office buildings, or the few or two buses and taxis that emphasised the urban desert rather than civic amenity. is a city of splendor and suggestion in which each new turn discovers an imposing prospect of aesthetic arrangement. In this and some other regards it may be England’s only truly metropolitan settlement, if we except London. Both cities have been dreadfully damaged by war and by recessions of trade, but much remains to please the antiquarian and the unprejudiced stroller. The current population of the contiguous built-up area ( not all of which is politically Liverpool ) is about two million. Some areas of waste remain in a city whose population has halved since 1931, though the most shocking examples of dereliction have now happily revived. Liverpool is currently, in an economic sense, the fastest growing settlement in the British Isles, though of course this is against a background of a major European recession, and starting from a very depressed base. In the worst of the Thatcher years, 52% of Liverpool’s working-age males were unemployed. The port complex is mostly abandoned, though in a strictly areal sense it probably remains the largest dock complex in the World, and ironically The Seaforth Dock in its far North handled more tonnage last year than Liverpool ever handled in its heyday. Notwithstanding that, Liverpool dock employment is now 800 rather than 20,000 and manufacturing has evaporated. Liverpool is like no other British city. Those familiar with Ireland, and in particular Dublin, will recognise with pleasant recollection the many demotic street bronzes, the Georgian terraces, the over-stated neo-classicism, the ubiquitous churches ( once more numerous ), and of course the soft culture of music, of drink, of courtesy and the maritime.

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By the time I reached the aptly named Water Street, center of Liverpool’s commercial pomp and power, the was lost in a fog of rain beyond the sodden sandstone of The Old Town Hall. The Old Town Hall dates from 1749 and is by John Wood of Bath. Opened in 1754 it initially functioned as a commercial exchange, as did the open-air immediately North of the edifice at some point in history. The building has a sumptuous eighteenth-century interior including elements by Wyatt. Wyatt’s dome was added in 1802. The Exchange Flags now accommodate the Nelson Monument. The Old Town Hall stands at the crossing of four of medieval Liverpool’s seven streets: Dale, Jugglers’ ( now Castle ), Water and Moor. In contrast, The Royal Liver Building, insurance offices, is a steel- framed reinforced concrete structure of 1908-11 by Walter Aubrey Thomas, and is clad in granite. The towers are three hundred feet high and for many decades this made the Royal Liver Building the tallest habitable structure in the British Isles. The clock faces are the largest in the World. The towers are surmounted by bronze Liver Birds, the heraldic symbols of The City of Liverpool, fantastic creatures with seaweed in their beaks, who are said to represent the cormorants who inhabited the liver ( i.e. muddy ) pool or tidal inlet, friends and tutelary competitors to the poor fishermen who first settled this bleak and chill place.

Liverpool Old Town Hall looking down Water Street to a distant Royal Liver Building

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The Damp Dejection of Defeat at Sea

The Nelson Monument is a bronze group set on white ashlar. It is by Wyatt and Westmacot and dates from 1813. Four vanquished foes: St Vincent, Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar, sit enchained atop the granite plinth, their nudity spared according to the Rites of War by drapes upon their laps. The surmounting tableau reifies the apotheosis of the Hero of Trafalgar as a naked demigod stepping upon a de- carriaged cannon to grasp the hand of Νίκη , as Death discards his cloak, an enemy flag, to grasp the hero’s heart. The iconography of the Monument is extremely complex and I am not the man to unravel it, but the sword upraised in Nelson’s left and remaining arm may be impaling Napoleon I’s personal monarchies of The French Empire, The Kingdom of Italy ( basically Veneto and Romagna ), The Protectorship of the Confederacy of the Rhine, and The Grand Duchy of Frankfurt: Other interpretations are obviously possible.

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The Victorious Group of The Nelson Monument

The ensemble’s bronze bas-reliefs upon martial themes are not shown here. The monument was funded by public subscription to which the powerful Liverpool merchant and anti-slavery campaigner William Roscoe was a major contributor. Whilst the slave trade had been abolished by the time subscriptions were canvassed in 1807, slavery continued in the Empire, and there is speculation that the four chained men may have been added to remind the public of the evils of bondage. The group was laser cleaned for the Trafalgar Bicentenary in 2005. There are several other important sculptures on Exchange Flags. A conspicuous feature of Liverpool, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth century layouts, is the number of streets and monuments that honor naval heroes and their victories, to which local merchant princes play a secondary and supporting role. For example, the most elegant street in the town was Rodney Street,

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but Roscoe Street was only its mews, whilst on sunlit uplands Gambier Terrace overlooked the sea. Gambier Terrace is now eclipsed by the Anglican Cathedral, the largest Protestant church in the World, and itself paid for by the Vestey family. William Hope, an otherwise forgotten maritime merchant, had his house on the site of the Philharmonic Hall, in the street that now bears his name. The fact that the Protestant and Catholic Cathedrals were subsequently built at opposite ends of Hope Street is an irony not lost on the cheeky Liverpudlians, whose own sectarianism thankfully withered when Ireland became independent between The Wars. Both the English and the Roman churches had hoped to out-do each other by building the largest fanes on Earth at their respective ends, but cash constraints made them have to be content with smaller, though nevertheless megalomaniacal, structures. The merchants were not ignorant of to whom their wealth was due: In fact they were not ignorant at all, as their generous bequests to galleries and institutes of learning attest. A little further down Water Street, at Number 14, is the remarkable Building of 1864. It has a cast-iron frame and expanses of plate glass. The architect was Peter Ellis. The floors are supported by shallow brick arches, that enhance the fireproofing qualities of the construction and echo the design of Bage’s revolutionary flax mill at Ditherington ( 1797 ). The oriels accommodated desks that received light from the top and side as well as the front. The Oriel Chambers Building is some years younger than a number of Glaswegian cast-iron framed commercial buildings, the most comparable of which may be Gardner’s Warehouse, a furniture showroom ( now a bar ) in Jamaica Street. ( 1856 by John Baird ).

The Oriel Chambers Building

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All of these ferrous-framed structures are direct ancestors of the mild- steel framed .

Beyond Water Street, and even more Appropriate

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Tower Buildings and Our Lady and St Nicholas beyond the modern boulevard New Quay

The Tower Buildings are at the bottom of Water Street. Also by Walter Aubrey Thomas they were completed in 1910. Behind stands the parish church of Liverpool, Our Lady and St Nicholas. The present edifice, extensively repaired after Luftwaffe damage, is early nineteenth-century Gothic by Thomas Harrison of Chester, but it surmounts the site of a 1360 chapel of ease ( when Liverpool was in the parish of Walton ) that in turn was preceded by the Church of St Mary del Key, first mentioned in 1257. The latter reminds us that the natural shoreline ran somewhere along the boulevard in the foreground to the West of which there is dockland that was reclaimed from the sea in the eighteenth-century. St Nicholas is of course a patron of sailors and merchants. Turning my back on Tower Buildings I revisited The Pier Head, where so many millions paced the Old World for the last time. Many others took a shorter journey across the Mersey from the Ferry Terminal, a modern building in which inevitably I sought an even briefer trip to the lavatory. As I adjusted my dress, the attendant stepped in and said “Do you know whether they have lifted the hose-pipe ban yet?” I replied “I don’t know: I am not local, but given this weather I should think they would do so soon”. He assured me that he was only joking. Another case of Scouser irony confounding Brummie obtuseness.

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The Liverpool Working Horse Monument by Judy Boyt MA FRBS

Having never actually walked the riverside path beside the Mersey I made my way South and encountered several excellent bronzes commemorating various individuals and creatures important to the memory and genius of The People of Liverpool. Amongst the first of these was “Waiting”, The Liverpool Working Horse Monument by Judy Boyt MA FRBS. Commissioned by The Retired Carters’ Association for an estimated £130,000, of which the Carters themselves subscribed at least £72,000, the monument was unveiled on May 1 st 2010. More than 20,000 horses worked the port until after the Second World War, more than in any other British city except London. Nevertheless, it was the First World War that was the nemesis of these brave and uncomplaining helpmates, when those of Britain were virtually exterminated at the conflict in France, and were superseded by motor transport that had in fact been more economical for some preceding years. The youngest surviving Liverpool Carter is in his seventies, and worked in boyhood as a “pony lad” at the end of the Second World War.

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Hartley’s Gatemen’s Shelters at the Entrance to The Canning Dock system

A few paces further brought me over a bridge at the entrance to the Canning Dock system. Beside this are two octagonal Gatemen’s Shelters of granite ashlar, somewhat smaller than the massive cyclopean work of which Jesse Hartley built this complex of docks in 1842-43. Just landward of this place, the Old Dock had been the original Liverpool dock and the World’s first wet dock, gated and thus immune to the great fall of tide that afflicts these reaches. That Old Dock had been built in 1710-16 and regularised The Liver Pool, the ancient harbor. When the Old Dock was infilled in the eighteen-twenties, the Custom House was built on the site. The Custom House was a superb and highly original neo-classical structure built in 1828-39 by John Foster. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1941, but remarkable old photographs are currently accessible at http://liverpoolremembrance.weebly.com/the- custom-house.html . The site environs are now occupied by the shopping center and a large police station. Not far further South is the Albert Dock, a vast masterpiece of ashlar wharfage and warehouses, also by Hartley and surrounded by brick bonded storage ( originally isolated ), surmounting massive cast-iron columns. The design is fireproof, to render the storage of rum and other flammables insurable.

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The Emigrants Sculpture

Tucked away somewhere behind The Piermaster’s Office is The Emigrants Sculpture of 2001 by Mark de Graffenried. As aforenoted, many millions left this shore having converged to this point from all over Europe, and indeed beyond. Most would never see their homeland again: A fact that would also, of course, befall many poor sailors. Some emigrants, the very poorest, fleeing famine or massacre, would run out of money or will by the time they reached Liverpool, the Continentals having arrived by rail via the Channel Ports. Therefore, Liverpool benefited by assimilating Irish, Welsh, Jews and Chinese by the myriad and who

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indeed came to outnumber the native Lancashire people. They have combined to build upon the highbrow legacies of the patrician traders and shippers to make Liverpool one of the great cultural centres of The Occident. It is often said that Liverpool is the greatest Irish city after Dublin, the biggest Welsh city after Cardiff and the largest Scottish city after Glasgow. What may be better attested is that Liverpool’s Chinatown is the largest in Europe, and the oldest Chinese community beyond East Asia. Liverpool’s civic twin-town is Shanghai, and Liverpool has plans to erect The Shanghai Tower, projected to be one of the tallest structures in Europe. Behind De Graffenried’s ready father a hidden child plays with a crab said to symbolise the forlorn strand to be forsaken: Or perhaps the tenacious but ultimately feeble creature would arrest the youngster, but can only leave him a piquant memory? Meanwhile his mother, gravely confident, releases his brother to a better future far away.

Billy Fury with the Maritime Museum beyond

Just round the corner I experienced another pleasant surprise. Never a big pop fan, I was nevertheless delighted by an effigy of a son of Liverpool, the late Ronald Wycherley in his persona as Billy Fury. This man started working life as a docker at age fourteen before embarking upon a musical and musical film career that spanned twenty-five years. Wycherley, one of the pioneers of the British interpretation of Rock and Roll and a herald of Merseybeat first found fame with the 1959 Decca hit “Maybe Tomorrow”. Behind the Fury statue can be seen one of Hartley’s Albert Dock warehouses, now The Merseyside Maritime Museum whilst at ( 0.15, 0.4 ) is the local hydraulic power station with its attendant chimney and accumulator tower. The power station is now a tourist tavern called “The Pumphouse”.

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The Bluecoat School

I had resolved to see The Bluecoat School that I had in ignorance missed upon my previous excursions so I turned inland through the maze of postwar precincts, malls and shopping walkways that could have been anywhere. With a little difficulty and frequent recourse to my inkjet maps, which by now looked more like used chromatography papers, I located what looked like the back of a large seventeenth-century building. Forgetful in old age, I had not neglected to pack my usual insolence, and used the axial passage through this art gallery to reach the noble front and take this picture. By now it was much nearer to noon than the school’s old and doubtless tired clock would have you believe. Begun in 1716 and finished in 1718, the school bears the date 1717 as if further to confuse its clock or instruct pupils in the virtues of the moiety. Pevsner says that the architect may have been Thomas Ripley who built a Custom House that preceded the Foster example; or maybe Thomas Steers, the designer of The Old Dock. Whatever the case, it is a very excellent Queen Anne accomplishment, eminently worthy of its Grade One Listing, and is the oldest surviving building in the center of Liverpool. The edifice, now sometimes called , was commissioned by the wealthy sea-captain Brian Blundell as a boarding charity school for poor children. Several charming Victorian prints depict the parade of pupils being beadled to prayers behind their own fifes and drums. We hope that the bereft young people, whatever they made of Virgil and Euclid, found solace in their Prayer, in God and in the society of one another, and that their masters and matrons supplied the defect with the love of their spirits. Certainly Blundell has the satisfaction of their guileless company in a Better Place.

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At School Lane I was beginning to trespass too close to the city’s Worthy Quarter east of Hanover Street. Here the eighteenth-century merchants and master mariners of Liverpool, spurning their ancient quays, transformed a fanning fray of ropewalks into a range of Augustan terraces. Duty demanded that I photograph the colonnaded splendor of the Lyceum ( 1800 by Thomas Harrison ); the Royal Institution of Liverpool ( 1799 ); and the Union News Rooms ( 1800 by John Foster senior ). I shall desist from boring you with the pictures, poor even by my standards, for much better may be found in your Pevsner or on the Net. As yet I was only at the orient of Duke Street where old Liverpool is even odder, and the streetscapes are like the dreamscapes of a film. Across the road three corniced facades with pedimented lintels rested with blind windows and boarded doors. It was late September and I half expected the wraith of the street’s most infamous denizen, Maggie May, to mince up and mouth a soundless solicitation before departing forever to that sunny yet even bleaker ria of Botany Bay. The Decoration was of Roman rectilinearity but far from uniform. One of the houses asked me “Do you like your neighbours?” which I thought was a strange thing for a house to ask until I perceived the tendency of other graffiti at impossible heights elsewhere along the empty street. High on one wall a geeky and bespectacled young man with fly’s wings beamed down at me. Other more intelligible scrawls lacked the banal narcissism you associate with this medium from other cities. Little trees grew diffidently from behind parapets and ferns sprouted with spruce confidence from the architraves, as if to dispute the Liver Bird his old high eyries. Green fronds of the Boreal rain forest are happy to try a footing here, through ledges spurned by the blooming Buddleia and other blossoms of the soft South. Shuttered and crumbling edifices where slavers had once retired to Catonian respectability bore signs in Chinese characters. Looking to the street corners I found to my surprise that the street names were rendered in both Roman and Chinese script. I wondered if the latter were translated phonetically or literally: Either way the linguist tasked with “Duke” may have had a happy moment only to be tried more sorely by “Colquit”. After a perfunctory remission for the benefit of the lunchtime shoppers, the rain resumed its fierce onding. My twenty-year-old Italian right boot started to admit the puddles badly for cool reality to remind me of the mortality of purpose. I deliquesced into my usual incoherent indolence and turned my rain- lashed course towards The Baltic Fleet like some tired but happy Togo. Through Chinatown, along Nelson Street and St James Street, past Jamaica Street to Sparling Street I returned towards the waterfront. The Baltic Fleet Hotel bends a stuccoed brick bow in the acute angle between Hurst Street and the modern dual carriageway of Wapping. Pevsner affords The Baltic Fleet only passing mention, perhaps because the current structure is only of the 1850’s whilst its pleasant if unremarkable detailing was typical of many Palmerstonian era pubs of the British ports and quaysides. The design is clearly from a builder’s pattern book and I do not know the architect. The pub’s http://www.wappingbeers.co.uk/ website confirms that the building is Grade II Listed. The awful red piping external paint scheme has been reverted, and the silly red and black “Cunard funnels” on the roof removed. The tasteful powder blue and white stucco scheme has been restored. The pub brews its own ales in the basement from where three “secret” tunnels ( now bricked-up ) are said to lead to the old foreshore in two cases, and one to Shaw’s Alley in the landward direction. Clearly, these were dug in the days of much earlier structures on this site.

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The seaward tunnels were probably used to load ale, spirits and provisions ( not necessarily contraband ), whilst the landward tunnel may have been convenient for patrons visiting the brothels behind, or seeking urgent evasion of The Press. ( And I don’t mean the paparazzi! ). This large tavern is the last survivor of Liverpool’s genuine waterfront sailors’ bars. In the olden days younger patrons would often have used bowsprits to cross the busy road into its upper stories. Today two old gentlemen were the only patrons in the bare taproom. They enthusiastically reviewed to one another the cherished history of Wapping without a pause to eye the dripping stranger. I say “old” though each was in their late fifties and thus my junior: I say “gentlemen” because unlike too many of my townsmen, at no point in their animated disquisitions did they seek recourse to The Universal Epithet.

Porter and Scouse in The Baltic Fleet Hotel

I was greeted by a smiling young landlady with bright hennaed hair. I asked “Do you have Malvern Magic?” She said “No, we have run out, but we have Blackberry Cider”, as she angled the tinplate pump-lever label a little towards her viewpoint as if she did not quite believe it herself. “Is that just its name or is it really made of blackberries?” I giggled in my usual silly manner. “I think it is made with blackberries, but you can try a little if you like”. The offer, which I have never before enjoyed in any establishment astonished me. She proffered a gill glass with twenty milliliters in the bottom.

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I sipped the brew and remarked “It’s different”, with a dissembling simper. Pointing to a different pump offering a 5.8% “Baltic Fleet” porter beer, I added “I’ll have a pint of that. Do you serve lobscouse here?” “Yes, we have some over there”, she said, indicating a vast chrome tureen. The Baltic Fleet laudably boasts that it has no jukebox, no muzak, and no gambling machines. The landlady played her tranny unobtrusively as she worked. I took my porter and adjourned to the room next door, where I was the only patron and found a scrubbed table. Presently the landlady brought my lobscouse. The virile but velvety ebony porter proved excellent, but the lobscouse was even better. Lobscouse is a classic English maritime dish, essentially a slow-cooked, course-cut stew of scrag beef in a melange of potatoes, carrots, beans and other cheap but wholesome vegetables. There are Scandinavian variants, and Irish stew is essentially similar, but more finely comminuted. An ancient key ingredient, sailors’ hardtack would not now be expected. To be pedantic, what I was served was plain scouse, with the beef element replaced by mutton that is usually a strongly-flavored and oily meat, but in this case was good. Scouse is the characteristic Liverpool dish, born of the poverty that garnered scraps, the spillage of the shovels, and the leavings of the wharfage. A native of Liverpool is fondly called a “scouse” or “scouser”, as is his or her distinctive accent, foreign alike to Ireland and to Lancashire. The term is not derogatory, but is occasionally resented: You have been warned!

The Lounge at the Baltic Fleet

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When I had lapped the last drop of my scouse and chewed the last morsel of my buttered fresh bread I decided to take some pictures, including that of the rest of the lounge shown. I want to tell you that with great skill I photoshopped in the romantic haze vignette, ( highly technical that ), redolent of the homely shag fug smoked up by contented jacks, home from the sea long ago ( from which you would hopefully infer that I had a fine vernacular sensibility ). I would tell you all that knowing you would be less likely to believe that it was an ectoplasmic emanation engendered by the many ghosts who abide in this very haunted hostelry. Alas, the truth is more prosaic. When in Colquit Street I had attempted to demist my lens thinking the mist superficial, rain had entered the delicate mechanism of my camera’s tiny nictating shutters, preventing one from closing. Moisture then condensed deep upon and among the internal optical elements giving this persistent mist. When at The Baltic Fleet I realised what had happened I transferred the little camera from its soaked canvas case to a cosy breast pocket deep inside my safari jacket, fortunately only slightly damp within my Goretex outer windcheater. Unlike its owner, the trusty Casio Z1200 soon dried out, closed its shutters and resumed its perfect behavior, as for the previous uncounted thousands of frames it has taken in the last four-and-a-half years. Like any Casio Computer Company product that is actually made in Japan it is paragonal, and like their watches and calculators I have used it could give ten or twenty years of continuous service. Leaving The Baltic Fleet I returned inland to pace the mile or so to Hope Street and the town’s University Quarter, and a very different pub.

The Philharmonic Hotel

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The Philharmonic Hotel is a pseudo-Baronial structure of blond sandstone, with oriels flanked by crow-stepped gables. It would possibly look more apt in Glasgow rather than Liverpool. Situated on the corner of Hope and Hardman Streets, this suite of bars and restaurants was built in 1898-1900 by Walter W Thomas. The fantastic Art Nouveau interior ( “sumptuous” says my Pevsner ) is of carved mahogany and beaten copper by H Bloomfield Bare, a noted Liverpool interior designer of the time. Diagonally across the intersection is another internationally-important Listed building, The Philharmonic Hall, headquarters of The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Europe’s four or five major recording Classical orchestras. The Hall is an Art Deco edifice of 1936-39 by Herbert J Rowse. The Hall, too, houses important interior artwork, including a memorial to the musicians who died aboard the Liverpool-registered RMS Titanic in 1912. With suitable Scouser irony I might say that the pub interior is “exceedingly Bare” whereas, with apologies to the late Peter McGovern, the celebrated Epstein statue down the road is merely nude. ( For readers of a nervous disposition I should point out that the figure in question is by Jacob Epstein, not of Brian, and represents “Liverpool Resurgent” ). Flanked by the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Lavatories ( the latter the only Grade I Listed lavatories in the UK ), the impressive circular bar faces the sumptuously-furnished mirror-paired snugs, Brahms and Lizst, between which a short passage leads to a remarkable Art Nouveau Grand Lounge.

In the Grand Lounge

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The Brahms and Liszt Snugs from the Bar

The well-known vulgarism “Brahms and Liszt” is not rhyming slang but a twee homage to the purpose of these two sister snugs. Whilst we are on the subject of Liverpool’s contributions to English idiom, which is not of course unconnected with its many literary sons and daughters, I sadly have to tell you that you are forty years too late to take a “bevvy” in The Bevington Bush, as celebrated in the poem and song “Whiskey on a Sunday”, and a favorite of polite excursionists for three hundred years. The entire street was obliterated in the nineteen-seventies, except for a pathetic cobbled remnant of some twenty meters closed-off by verges and a brick substation bearing a slightly-pointless name sign, which like those of Penny Lane in Wavertree may largely be for the benefit of sentimental tourists like me. ( Please resist all temptations to think “bevvy” is somehow cognate with bibo ). The barman asked “What would you like?” I replied “What do you recommend?” with an abruptness as unintentional as his. “Are you after a lager or a bitter?” I said a bitter, and he made a recommendation. The barmaid interjected “It’s off” The barman then asked me if I would like the chocolate orange ale, another unlikely concoction foreign to my experience. As if to pre-empt demurring the pretty young barmaid said “Would you like to try a little?” and proffered a sample in a gill glass. Sipping gingerly I lifted my eyes and said “That is okay. I’ll have some of that” The barman said

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“A pint or a half?” And I replied “A pint” I entered the Brahms snug and settling in the softest and deepest Victorian armchair you could imagine surveyed the glass and mahogany expanse about me. A sepia lithograph of the eponymous composer gazed with unblinking disinterest behind the restrained but ornate electrolier.

In the Brahms Snug

I was disappointed to find no scouse on the menu, only the expensive standard dishes of the chain. As I nursed my Casio back to condition a burly Ulsterman in pinstripes took a table with his back to me, and was presently joined by a well-dressed blonde. They talked about the virtues and shortcomings of a specific brand of teenagers’ careers-advice software, a topic developed by a distinguished-looking rep in a gray suit. The rep joined a little later, having bought the drinks. Like many big men the Irishman chattered quickly and seemed unsure of his ground, whilst the woman and the rep talked calmly if dutifully about a subject they seemed to find dreadfully dull. Despite my forty-year interest in computation and mathematical methods I tended to agree we them, silently of course, to sympathise, and to be complacently glad that I was now largely excused such tedious discussions.

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The Philharmonic Hotel’s Grade I Listed “Adamant” Gentlemen’s Lavatories

I returned to the rain and was soon on Mount Pleasant facing the Wellington Rooms. Paid for by public subscription this suite of assembly rooms and ballroom were built 1814-16 to a winning design by Edmund Aikin, and largely unaltered since the internal addition of an 1894 Supper Room. The small complex has been largely unused since about 1997. It struck me that the central porch was very like a Vesta temple, and whilst Pevsner remarks that the engaged Corinthian pilasters at the corners were modelled on those of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, his opinion is that the porch, originally open to the elements, owes more to The Monument of Lysicrates at Athens. For my part I like to see trees and shrubs growing from the high ledges of fine buildings, as they frequently do in Liverpool. It lends the edifices the beard of

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authority, and fondly reminds me of the acanthuses I photographed many years ago growing quietly in the Forum Romanum: A classic case of Nature imitating Art. I realise of course that these living things must hasten the decay of human works, but decay must supervene sometime, and in the interim I delight to see these works of God soften the works of Man, a voiceless and most apt elegy for great cities.

The Wellington Rooms

Now on Mount Pleasant I was looking forward to walking a hundred meters downhill to Reid’s Bookshop. This very cosy second-hand bookstore is in a tiny premises constructed in 1785, and apparently unaltered ( except for wiring ). It is the oldest functioning purpose-built shop in the World. Squeezing fatly through the shelves I made my way to a little place with a fire grate and a small desk. A moustached man in his early sixties otherwise with the appearance and voice of Donald Sutherland, though with a kinder smile and style, sat there, were he had been serving other customers. “Good Afternoon, it is raining cats and dogs out there”, I said by way of introduction. The man looked quizzically at me. “Do you have Williams, I think it is called ‘Numerical Methods’, or numerical something?” I said unhelpfully. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. We do not have many books of that sort. We have a science fiction, and a science fantasy section over here...” “Oh this is not fantasy, this is something very concrete” I replied with a smirk. “I might have the details printed-out from your website. Your price is ten pounds”, I added.

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Ratting around in my now sodden backpack I eventually found the moist but readable sheet, and gave it to him. “You could wait until the proprietor comes back. He has gone out for an hour and he may have it in the back. I am only here for four weeks from Canada.” It always amuses me how inevitably Canadians, like New Zealanders, create an early juncture to advise you of their provenance, in case you have mistaken them for something less reputable. I gave him my details but said I would only be in the city for another two-and-half hours. The man said that the proprietor would give me a telephone call in a few days. As Marlon Brando once said, that call may never come. “I have seen something I would like” I said, picking a 1940’s copy of “Makers of Science” by Ivor B Hart from the shelves. It struck me that the author must have suffered many annoying hours as a boy at school, his only consolation that at least he was not Ivor Longbottom.

A Scene in Henry Bohn’s Bookshop

I paid and went on my way to London Road. This and its Eastern extension Pembroke Place were definitely the seediest streets of the city I had yet encountered, infested with betting shops, modern pawnbrokers, down-at-heal furniture stores and gaunt Irish bars. But for once the pavements were crowded, and with working-age people of all races. I had come to visit Henry Bohn’s bookshop, possibly the only shop where you could purchase a leather-bound tome published in 1771 for £10, or some sort of hardback for 10p. It might repay a more leisured perusal but I was not motivated to buy at the time, given that anything would have to be humped through two changes of train in the heavy rain.

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I was now just round the corner from Lime Street Station and as is my custom in a strange city I went into a convenient newsagents shop to buy a copy of the local newspaper as a souvenir. I picked a reasonably clean and dry copy of the “Liverpool Echo” and was immediately confused by the front page. “High School Exclusive: Letter to Parents: Please don’t buy or take drugs outside school gate”. It seemed that drugs were a teaching resource like computers and medicine balls, and that it was okay to borrow them as long as they were not removed from the premises. Then the sad truth dawned. And I wondered what Brian Blundell and his beadles, men of the world every one, would have thought of a Pool where parents bought drugs at a school gate. More immediately accessible to my intellect was an arresting picture of a policeman standing shin-deep in filthy water behind a small urban hatchback stalled in a flooded road. But again I struggled. The fit young man, his profession and predicament belied by his clean-cut and sensitive visage, stood stock and mute in his glistening uniform, arms folded and legs apart. The policeman wore at front a magnificent pair of brass handcuffs with a shiny black gas canister, and showed a large expensive-looking watch with whose steel bracelet a determined assailant could have broken his wrist. Beyond the tiny car, a mere twenty meters away, a shallow acclivity rose to dry land. What I took to be the muzzle of a sub-machinegun hung about his lower back, but closer inspection suggested it may have been the rear windscreen- wiper of the car. “DELUGE: STRANDED: A policeman guards a car stuck in floodwaters at Brimstage, Wirral” proclaimed the caption of this Late Edition. It occurred to me that the place name “Brimstage” was rather fortuitous but I later checked with MultiMap and it proved that there was indeed a Wirral hamlet of that name. I wondered why the young man did not push the tiny vehicle to the dry standing and solicit assistance ( if only from the photographer ), or if he was really lazy, curl up on the back seat out of the rain and await developments. My own inclination would have been to retire beneath a tree on the dry slope, and wait for some obliging thieves to move the car to my position, whereupon I would arrest them and satisfy several needs at a standing, so to say. A few days later it occurred to me that this was one of those special constables who raid hen parties to perform an extended ecdysis and if necessary restrain giggling inebriates with brass bracelets, or subdue with a salutary burst of cologne. Above the pretty policeman the red banner of the tabloid bore a sorry Liver Bird. Once he ranged far and free bringing to his Mistress the Bounty of the Sea. But this poor creature carried a rolled-up newspaper in his beak, like a dog might imploringly offer one before your seat, a cosseted creature but servile and unfree. Before The Bird in stark capitals the word “ECHO” appeared, whether as provocation or incantation I could not tell. The Oread nymph ’H χώ facilitated the adulteries of the King of Gods, Ζε ύς , by distracting his Wife, ‘ Ηρη , with fables. When Queen Hera discovered the ruse, she cursed Echo to be forever dumb, except to repeat whatever was said to her. This so frustrated Echo’s own later courtship of her beloved mortal, Νάρκισσο ς, that poor Echo pined away till only her voice was left.

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The withdrawal of tide and trade withered the life and powers of Athens and Rome, and now Liverpool and the rest, but their voices survive in the hearts and minds of men, informing new values, new strivings and new glories. The shopkeeper’s counter was scratched and scored as if a thousand scally alley cats had made a mad scramble for the ciggies cabinet. I tendered my 55p and left. As the train crossed Cheshire the rivers were now bankfull and the heavy rain continued to Crewe. The eye of a great anticyclone had stood over Liverpool for several days, and her raging vortex had surrendered her all to it and the adjacent parts of Britain. The news next day said that it had been the heaviest September rainstorm for thirty years: That the Crewe-Chester railway, the next to the West, had been severed by floods, as had several major railways, and that the A1 in Eastern England and many other key roads had been closed. Some large rivers had risen thirty feet and many towns had been badly flooded, including York. The Aberdeen coastal suburb of Footdee was inundated by sea-foam. I had been lucky. My trains had belted along dry tracks at a hundred miles an hour, on time, to a dry Bloxwich, a dry house and a patient wife.

Reference

“Liverpool” Joseph Sharples with contributions by Richard Pollard Pevsner Architectural Guides Yale University Press 2004 New Haven and London ISBN 0-300-10258-5 pp 332

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