Liverpool Cathedral

In 1903 a committee looking for an architect for a new Anglican cathedral chose, out of 103 entries, a twenty-two-year-old with no completed building to his name who was also a practising Roman Catholic. They stuck with him. Giles Gilbert Scott spent the next fifty-seven years on it and died before it was finished; the building was completed in 1978, 74 years after the foundation stone, and it is the largest cathedral in Britain. It is also free to walk into. This guide covers what is actually in it, and which of its many superlatives survive checking.

Seventy-four years, one architect, four monarchs

The competition

Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century was one of the richest ports on earth and had no Anglican cathedral. The 1903 competition drew 103 entries. The assessors picked Giles Gilbert Scott: grandson of the Sir George Gilbert Scott who built the Midland Grand Hotel, aged twenty-two, and with nothing built.

Two things about that decision were genuinely contentious. He had no track record — the often-repeated line that his only previous work was a pipe rack is a good story with no source behind it, so treat it as legend. And he was a Roman Catholic, which for an Anglican cathedral committee in 1903 was a real problem. The compromise was to appoint the experienced Gothic architect G. F. Bodley as joint architect alongside him. Bodley died in 1907, and Scott had the building to himself.

The redesign that made the building

The design that won had two towers. In 1909–10 Scott tore it up and replaced them with a single massive central tower rising between twin transepts — and that is the decision that produced the silhouette Liverpool is known by. The client let a twenty-eight-year-old rewrite the scheme they had already started building. It was the right call.

The dates run: foundation stone laid by Edward VII in 1904; Lady Chapel consecrated in 1910; the cathedral consecrated in 1924 with George V and Queen Mary present; work stopped and restarted through two world wars; and finally completed in October 1978, at a service attended by Elizabeth II. Four monarchs, and an architect who died in 1960 without seeing it done.

Scott's other work is worth knowing while you stand in it: Battersea and Bankside power stations — Bankside is now Tate Modern — and the K2 and K6 red telephone boxes. The same man designed the most-photographed object in British street furniture and the largest church in the country.

The stone, and the hole it came out of

The cathedral is built of Woolton sandstone, quarried a few miles away, and it sits on the edge of a much older hole in the ground: St James's Mount, above a quarry that supplied stone for Liverpool's Georgian buildings. In 1829 that quarry was converted into St James's Cemetery, laid out by John Foster Jr, and about 57,000 people were buried in it.

It is now a public garden in a ravine directly below the east end, restored in recent years with lottery money — ramps, paths, the catacomb arches cut into the rock face, and the mausoleum of William Huskisson, the MP who in 1830 became the first person killed by a passenger train. At the entrance stands the Oratory, Foster's Greek Revival mortuary chapel of 1829, now a sculpture gallery run by National Museums Liverpool with limited seasonal opening. Most cathedral visitors never go down there, and the view back up at the building from the bottom is the best one there is.

The visitor's cheat sheet

The superlatives, checked

This building attracts more contested claims than any other cathedral in Britain, so here they are sorted:

• Largest cathedral in Britain True, uncontested, and the cathedral's own claim.
• Longest cathedral in the world True, but only on overall external length of 621 feet, which counts the Lady Chapel projecting off the side. On internal length — 480 feet — it is well behind St Peter's and Seville.
• Fifth largest cathedral in the world by volume This is the cathedral's own claim and it is widely repeated. Rankings vary with what counts as a cathedral, so it is worth attributing rather than asserting.
• Largest Anglican cathedral in the world Disputed. St John the Divine in New York is larger by volume, but has never been finished. Safest: one of the two largest Anglican church buildings anywhere.
• Highest and heaviest ringing peal in the world True on both counts, and the best superlative the building has. More on the bells below.
• Largest pipe organ in the UK True, on pipe count and on speaking stops.

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Well and the Dulverton Bridge

You come in at the west end into the Well: a sunken area of floor beneath the great Benedicite window, with the Dulverton Bridge — a stone span carrying a walkway — crossing above it and separating the Well from the main volume beyond. It is a deliberate compression before the release, and it works.

Mounted at this end is Tracey Emin's pink neon, I Felt You And I Knew You Loved Me, commissioned as a temporary piece for Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 and never taken down. A neon sentence that could be about a lover or about God, in a cathedral, is exactly as awkward and as good as that description suggests.

The Great Space

Then over the bridge and the building opens. The Great Space is the cathedral's own name for the vast central volume running from the bridge to the high altar, under the tower, and the numbers matter less than the effect: the arches beneath the tower are the highest Gothic arches ever built, at 175 feet, and there is no screen, no pulpitum, nothing between you and the far end. Most great cathedrals are a sequence of rooms. This is one room, and it is the whole point of the design.

The Lady Chapel

Off the south side, down steps, and completely different in character: smaller, richer, more delicate, more Victorian in feeling than anything else in the building. That is because it is the oldest part — consecrated in 1910, fourteen years before the cathedral itself, and designed when Scott was still working with Bodley.

Its windows are worth looking at properly: the original scheme commemorated notable women, and the glass was largely destroyed in the May 1941 blitz and remade afterwards. It is the one place in this enormous building that feels human-sized.

The organ

The Grand Organ is by Henry Willis & Sons, the instrument of Henry Willis III, begun in 1923 and dedicated in 1926: 10,268 pipes and two five-manual consoles, and by pipe count and number of speaking stops the largest pipe organ in the United Kingdom. It is also one of the largest church organs in the world.

If there is any way to be in the building when it is played, take it. The cathedral runs a regular recital series; times change, so check the what's-on listing rather than a guidebook. A full organ in a single 480-foot room is a physical experience rather than a musical one.

The bells

High in the tower hang the Bartlett Bells: thirteen bells weighing about sixteen and a half tons in total, hung 220 feet up. That makes them both the highest and the heaviest ringing peal in the world, and unlike most of this building's superlatives, both halves of that hold up.

The hour bell is Great George, at about fourteen and a half tons — the third heaviest bell in the British Isles, not the heaviest; Great Paul at St Paul's is bigger. If you are up the tower when they ring, you will not need telling.

The tower

The Tower Experience takes lifts and 108 steps to a platform 500 feet above sea level, and on a clear day you get the whole city, the Mersey, the Wirral, and on the best days the Welsh mountains and Blackpool Tower. You also get the two cathedrals in one view, which is the photograph worth making the climb for.

It closes for bell-ringing on scattered dates and it is limited by lift capacity, so book it, and book it for a clear day if you have the flexibility.

The windows

Almost all the glass is twentieth-century, which is unusual enough to be worth noticing. The Benedicite window at the west end runs to some 1,600 square feet on its own. Where the older English cathedrals are patched medieval fragments, Liverpool's glass is a complete, coherent, modern scheme executed in a deliberately traditional idiom — and much of the Lady Chapel's had to be done twice, after 1941.

The other cathedral

Half a mile north, at the far end of Hope Street, is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King: Frederick Gibberd's, consecrated in 1967, a circular concrete drum with a lantern of coloured glass by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens over a central altar. It sits on the crypt of a vastly larger cathedral by Lutyens that was begun in 1933 and abandoned — the Lutyens crypt is still there and can be visited, and it is enormous.

Locally it is called Paddy's Wigwam, or the Mersey Funnel. The first nickname is affectionate in Liverpool and refers to the city's Irish Catholic population; it is worth knowing you will hear it, and worth not being the visitor who uses it.

The two buildings are a fifty-year argument about what a cathedral is, at opposite ends of one street. Do both.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Great Space One room, 480 feet of it, under the highest Gothic arches ever built. Walk to the far end and turn round.
• The Lady Chapel The oldest and most delicate part, consecrated fourteen years before the cathedral around it.
• Tracey Emin's neon At the west end: a pink sentence installed for one year in 2008 and still there.
• St James's Gardens The quarry-cemetery in the ravine below the east end — 57,000 burials, catacomb arches, and the best view of the building.
• The tower 500 feet above sea level, and the only place you see both Liverpool cathedrals in one frame.
• The organ 10,268 pipes, the largest in the UK. Time your visit for a recital if you possibly can.
• The Metropolitan Cathedral Ten minutes up Hope Street, and the Lutyens crypt underneath it that was meant to carry something four times the size.

Insider tips

Come on Sunday afternoon rather than Sunday morning. The building is given to worship until noon; after that it is quieter than a Saturday.

Go down into St James's Gardens. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, almost nobody does it, and the cathedral from below is a completely different building from the cathedral from the door.

Check the tower calendar. Bell-ringing closes it on scattered dates, and lift capacity limits numbers on busy days.

Eat in the Welsford Bistro or don't eat here at all — and note it shuts at 4.30pm, ninety minutes before the building does.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The Georgian Quarter around the cathedral and Hope Street is the pleasantest part of central Liverpool to stay in: quiet streets of red brick and stucco, good restaurants along Hope Street and Bold Street, and a fifteen-minute walk down to the waterfront and the Albert Dock. It is calmer and better value than the city centre proper.

More English cathedrals

• York Minster — the medieval opposite: 800 years of glass, and the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe.
• Durham Cathedral — the greatest Norman building in Europe, two hours across the Pennines.
• Lincoln Cathedral — the Angel Choir, the Imp, and a deliberately crooked vault.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →