‘A dazzling concrete crown': Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral gets long overdue appreciation
Liverpool's majestic cosmic wigwam has always faced a hard time from critics. Classicists lamented that it replaced an earlier swollen baroque design by Edwin Lutyens, which was cut short by the second world war and rising costs. Modernists found it too prissy, a brittle British version of more muscular concrete creations emerging from sunnier southern climes – a piece of Oscar Niemeyer's Brasília lost in translation between the hemispheres.
Time has proved them wrong. Frederick Gibberd's striking upturned funnel is one of the finest postwar buildings in the land, standing as the most prominent Catholic cathedral of any British city, as well as the most original. It is shocking that it wasn't already Grade-I listed – a fact that reflects a broader antipathy for buildings of the era, which is slowly being corrected by a new generation.
The building's genius is in its response to the site, bridging history with modernity. Gibberd's competition-winning design of 1959 cleverly drew on the unfinished crypt of Lutyens' 1930s project, using the latter's brick-and-stone vaults as a rugged rocky plinth on which to erect his startling white tent. Made of reinforced concrete clad in Portland stone, the crisp conical pavilion rises from an expansive open platform like a moon lander, extending slender radial ribs out in all directions. These flying buttresses rise to support a 2,000-tonne lantern, a floating stained glass cylinder topped with a crown of toothpick-thin steel pinnacles, ready to impale the sky.
'The great cathedrals of Christendom are generally crowns of the urban composition,' wrote Gibberd. 'Giles Gilbert Scott's tower [of the 1900s Anglican cathedral] already provided one crown for Liverpool and it seemed to me that, if it could be balanced by a tower of the Metropolitan Cathedral, the city would have a unique topography.' Thanks to him, it does, the two mighty buildings standing as spiritual bookends to the axis of Hope Street. The plinth, meanwhile, has become a vital public space, host to ballgames, lunch-hour sandwiches, and fitness fiends jogging up and down the steps.
Entered through a monumental wedge-shaped bell tower, carved with abstract reliefs by the sculptor William Mitchell (who also designed the big bronze doors), the cathedral's interior is a radiant Las Vegas vision, washed with electric blue and pink light from the stained glass windows. Sixteen boomerang-shaped concrete columns rise to support the great conical roof, framing a series of side chapels below. Edged with blue glass, they are designed as individual forms, which read from the outside like a conclave of bodies, gathered around in a circle.
Eschewing the usual cruciform layout, Gibberd's circular 'altar in the round' form was a direct response to the dictates of the second Vatican council, which encouraged architects to make congregations feel closer to the celebrants. 'The ministers at the altar should not be remote figures,' John Heenan, the archbishop of Liverpool, wrote in his instructions to the architect. 'They must be in sight of the people with whom they offer the sacrifice.'
The resulting democratic vision is centred on an altar made of a single colossal slab of white marble – a 19-tonne block sourced from near Skopje in North Macedonia – above which hangs a spiky baldacchino canopy of aluminium rods. It is an extraordinary thing, looking as if a hi-tech spider had been asked to weave its web into a crown of thorns.
Such daring comes at a price, and, over the years, the building has suffered its fair share of hiccups. Soon after opening, the aluminium roof leaked and the glass mosaic tiles fell off the concrete frame. Gibberd was sued and the archdiocese was awarded £1.3m in an out-of-court settlement. Repairs of varying quality have continued ever since, but this upgraded listing should hopefully ensure that Liverpool's dazzling concrete crown sticks around for many more generations to marvel at.
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