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Liverpool: Capital of Culture
Contemporary Review, May, 2004 by Richard Whittington-Egan
Behind a massive river-wall, lapped in whispers by the murky waves, is a vast open space that smells of seaweed, tar, and salted mud--the Pier Head. The western limit of this windy plaza is the river itself, with its half-mile stretch of landing-stage, boasted the biggest floating structure in the world, and its bustle of pert little ferry-boats which, dodging like terriers between the prows of the big ships, carry their human cargoes over the water to and from the dormitory towns of the Cheshire shore. To the east it is bounded by what is probably the best-known landfall in the world--the sky-scraping Royal Liver Building, with its masthead eyrie of 'liver' birds, the solid, foursquare, down-to-earth Cunard Building, and the skittishly cupolaed Dock Board Offices Building, with, solemnly presiding over all, the black fret-work lantern of the Mariners' Church.
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Here, on this Tom Tiddler's ground, poised between land and water, is the key to the whole character of Liverpool, for nowhere can one long forget that it is a city and a port. Southampton may have stolen much of the glamour of the big liners, the passenger traffic, but the merchant-venturer romance of the sea belongs to Liverpool, cannot be wrested from its historic grasp, clings still about quays where the pungency of eastern spices, mingling with the gentler, less sharp, fragrance of oranges out of Africa, seems yet to perfume the air.
It is here that Liverpool garnered the harvest of the Seven Seas, stowing it in gloomy cyclopean warehouses--one of which, the Stanley Tobacco Warehouse, is the largest on earth--ranged bleakly along the river lip.
Liverpool is distinctly cosmopolitan and has been aptly described as 'the provincial metropolis of the United Kingdom'. Many factors have contributed to this, the chief one of which, perhaps, is that not only river, but human tides also have washed the city's shore. And Liverpool is a city of contradictions. It has been--is--a place of considerable wealth and culture, as well as somewhere where the pinched face of what passes for twenty-first century poverty can still be painfully plain to see.
Reflected, however, in the mirror of Liverpool's prosperity are the city's fine buildings. There is the fabulous St. George's Hall, 24-year-old Harvey Lonsdale Elmes' architectural masterpiece, apostrophised by John Betjeman as 'surely the finest secular hall in England', and one for the preservation of which he would willingly be burned at the stake. Within it is the Assize Court, which has been the scene of such notable British trials for murder as those of Mrs. Florence Maybrick, the lady of the fly-papers; the terrible sisters, 'Catty' Flanagan and Margaret Higgins, the arsenic poisoners of Scotland Road; the Veronica Mutineers; Lock Ah Tam, the gentle Chinaman; William Herbert Wallace, the Man from the Pru'; and the Cameo Cinema murderer, George Kelly: hanged in 1950, conviction pronounced unsafe in 2003.
There is the Walker Art Gallery, which opened its doors in 1877, and contains a superb collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and the Tate Liverpool, founded just sixteen years ago, where is housed the National Collection of Modern Art in the North of England. There are the magnificent libraries: the circular Picton Library, modelled on the Pantheon, domed like the skull of an intellectual, to which Hall Caine, brought up in Liverpool, always referred nostalgically as his university, and the neighbouring William Brown Library. There is the Philharmonic Hall, replacing the original--where my great-grandfather, Jakob Zeugheer Herrmann, was the first conductor--burned down in 1933. It is fascinating to learn that Herbert Rowse, the architect who designed the new Philharmonic, opened in 1939, found a source of inspiration in the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen.
