The Bluecoat LIVERPOOL biq 4 5 Publisher Progressive Media Group 91 Charterhouse Street London EC1M 6HR United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-903077-64-1 The Bluecoat LIVERPOOL biq History was founded on the profits of slavery in order to Tim Abrahams save others from poverty. The Bluecoat Chambers simultaneously stands apart and remains entwined with the commercial traffic of the city. As the trade of Liverpool expanded throughout the 19th century, the city surrounded the old school. The school’s pupils with their long dark coats belted at the waist, with white neck decoration, would struggle to school through the throng at the heart of the second city of the Empire. In 1906 the school institution left for the suburbs of Wavertree, and the building was saved again by a wealthy philanthropist. It was bought by William Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme, who founded 10 the soap manufacturer Lever Brothers (now part Bluecoat Chambers is the oldest building in Liverpool’s of Unilever). He built the model worker’s settlement, city centre and one of those remarkable buildings that Port Sunlight on the opposite bank of the Mersey. stories cling to. It was built as a school for orphans He bought the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and then through the largesse of one Bryan Blundell, a master gave it to its inhabitants. Lever had the intention mariner, who settled in Liverpool in 1708 to trade. of turning Bluecoat Chambers into an art gallery According to the writer Henry Bourne, ‘It was certainly but was prevented from doing so by the First World a happy thought that led honest Bryan Blundell to War. Although a progressive employer and advocate abandon the sea… He was mayor in 1721 and again of the old-age pension during his term as a Liberal in 1728. He had stately ships of his own trading with MP, Lever Brothers was using forced labour on their Africa with North Carolina, Jamaica and Nevais as well palm plantations in the Belgian Congo. In 1923 he as other parts of North America and the West Indies. gave the building to a Trust. In 1941 it was hit by one But he never forgot his charity school.’ of the 2,315 high-explosive bombs dropped on the city in the May Blitz. The triangular relationship between the city, Africa and America means that Blundell, like many Liverpudlians During the 20th century, though, Bluecoat Chambers at the time, was involved in the slave trade. This has been a home for artists. Although it housed beautiful oases built in 1717 in the Queen Anne style, the first major post-Impressionist exhibition outside London, including works by Picasso, Cezanne, progressive work that engrained itself into the place, Matisse and Van Gogh, it has thrived not as but as Alastair Upton points out – through creating a receiving house but as an art-space run by artists new work the memories will return to the building, for artists, finding a real sense of purpose in the perhaps changed but still there. 1960s. Yoko Ono, sponsored by the Destruction In Art Symposium performed her Fog Piece there It has been a rich and memorable experience learning in 1967, in which she asked the audience to wrap the history of the building and meeting those who her from head to foot in gauze. The director of the have given it new life. This book was published two gallery approached Captain Beefheart, a pioneer months after the London architectural establishment of the musical avant-garde, to exhibit his visual gathered at the Kings Waterfront in Liverpool for the art at the Bluecoat for the first time ever in April 2008 RIBA Stirling Prize. It seems strangely apposite 1972. He produced 30 small canvases in three that the Bluecoat Chambers was overlooked. It sits days, especially. There was a patina of bohemia right in the middle of an economic re-ordering of the to the place. city but still is detached. Yet, if Liverpool has made a significant contribution to world architecture during Indeed, Bluecoat Chambers is one of the main the Capital of Culture, then it is the one which 11 reasons why you can still catch the flavours Professor David Dunster has described so well of the Sixties counterculture in the music and in the following essay. writings that has emerged in the city since then. It is there in the music of Shack and The La’s or the poetry of Adrian Henri. It has provided a discrete space from which to imagine new links with northern England and the rest of the world. The new studios that biq has so ingeniously carved from the old building are the ideal places for this kind of thinking to continue, even if at more than 300 years old, the building is finally finding itself a note of middle-aged respectability thanks to the £12.5m redevelopment, funded by the Lottery and regeneration money from London and Brussels. Those who remember it fondly from a few years ago, especially the artists who created work there, may miss the tangible evidence of the Context Liverpool, by which I mean its inhabitants, identify Professor their city through symbols of Liverpool’s imperial past. Of these the most used, and never abused, are the David Dunster twin Liver birds that sit on top of the Liver Building, headquarters to the Royal Liverpool Assurance group. This 20th-century building takes the twins from a medallion at the Bluecoat Chambers in the city centre which was constructed in 1717, possibly the first representation of the mythical birds at a time when the city was seeking to appear cultured. In the past 100 years, coincident with the city’s most obvious economic and political decline, Liverpool has not produced much architecture that matches that built during the previous hundred. Twentieth- century architecture has passed Liverpool by. There 14 are notable exceptions – experimental schools from the 1950s, a few very well-considered private houses tucked away in semi-private parks, the Electrical Engineering Building at the University – but they are incidents rather than statements. Had Colin St John Wilson’s Civic Centre been constructed, and James Stirling been given something more serious than a conversion there could have been an inheritance of British modern architecture such as can be found in Sheffield or in Leeds. Instead, the current vogues now Bluecoat Chambers was wreak their revenge. What this means is that despite built in brick and stone. a history of important planning tactics – the docks, It was completed in 1717. the two tunnels under the Mersey, and the building of a major ring road in the 1930s – the city lacks a clear plan and has done since the 1970s. Is Liverpool unusual in this? Perhaps not, but most Western European urban history proves that capitalism in whatever colour and at whatever stage cannot Institute of Technology) in Zurich. Liverpool has operate satisfactorily without clear urban planning. particularly lacked such proponents, preferring Limits, pace Engels, always establish the truth of instead the pop-shot of icon. freedom. Liverpool’s decline is certainly not solely caused by laissez-faire principles. For most of the None of this, however, is to say that the city lacks century there was precious little capitalist enterprise a strong survival instinct. National figure of fun at to make such demands. Consequently, the city one level, home to a great football team at another; is a mess in architectural terms once anyone steps parodied for its accent and attitude yet also home outside the Victorian chaos so beloved by those to two Cathedrals and two universities; a tragic and who designated the central business district a World continuous rate of unemployment and at the same Heritage site. There still persists an obedience time the birthplace of major cultural, political and to development pressures, but once a building is entrepreneurial figures. Like most cities, Liverpool listed in the historical categories then it is absolutely is impossible to sum up without paradoxes, though sacrosanct. Preservation on tick-box principles few glory in them as much. Yes, there is a self image privileges individual buildings over fabric. What is glimpsed in a distorting mirror, but there is also a preserved gets squashed between new developments sense of civic pride which has yet to find a focus 15 and establishes a weak context, so new buildings try outside sport. The securities are outweighed by the to mimic the skyline, or ski down in curious triangular insecurities, however, and these have dominated so forms to kneel before the past. that risks in forming the city have rarely been taken and the potential of architecture to foster civic pride has This is a reading of context never envisaged by those not been grasped. The artistic community of the city who argued for context in the post-modernist 1970s – has, however, always been strong – supporting two a view which sees the development of a city as a result major art galleries, one good symphony orchestra and of pick-and-mix styling. A deeper reading of context a culture of poerty and comedy which was stronger in requires the kind of analysis that is not based on taste the past than it is today. or historical preferences but on what can be seen and a humble attitude. If we were to seek examples The Bluecoat Chambers was always the nexus of the of it then we need to go back to the Ticino school city’s more bohemian activities, strangely detached that operated in Switzerland in the 1970s; to the from the commercial activity around it.