The Liverpool Cathedral is Just Like A Ship

The Liverpool Cathedral is exactly and in every way just like a ship. A huge, mossy, Gothic hulk of a ship, with falls and gushes of stained glass windows, made of chocolate, and bobbing out there among the chimney pots and shining slate roofs on a ridge above this sea-faring town.

The ridge on which the Cathedral was built, provides a beautiful river vista. It was once the place the townsfolk would promenade of an evening, and was, simultaneously, it seems, a quarry (prime promenading terrain, in my book) and a garden, and is now, for some reason, the carpark for the John Moore's University Business Department, so on this, one of the first sunny afternoons of the spring, the Peugeots and Audi washing up at the cathedral's feet were sparkling like surf.

I'd come at it broadside from the west, its starboard side, which is not the direction sanctioned by the Tourist Board or the Liverpool Police Department I'm guessing. I set off through a tricky, but ideal-for-body-dumping construction site, through a mews of apartments, its dog shit and garbage sacks duned up against a maze of prison-y fencing, and bumbled around through the kind of spiny landscaping planted mostly to deter forced entry full of ensnared and shredded plastic grocery bags and Lucoade bottles, and twelve year old boys huddled by some daffodils, industriously scraping swastikas into a wall.

I had to ask directions twice, which seemed ridiculous, since the structure was looming right over us like a cliff, once from a man with eyebrows as long as my pinkie, which is pretty long for eyebrows, who, when I chimed, "Excuse me!" and came at him across the sidewalk, he looked like I'd just caught him murdering cats. But, for as hunched and hooded as everyone was, they were cheerful and helpful, and when I said, "Oh thank you, very much," they said, "Yeah. Ta luff," which means either, "Why, of course, you delightful woman. It's my pleasure to present my magnificent town to you." or "Yeah, whatever." until, at last I staggered out like a battered pilgrim, pulling shredded grocrey bags from my ankles and leaves out of my hair, and into the John Moores parking lot where there's the damn building right there. The John Moores people going to their cars in the afternoon probably bump their shoulders against it getting in their Hondas butting right up against the foundation stones that boil right out of the licheny rock all tumbled with lavender and birch and heathery shrubs. Both imposing and invisible.

The Liverpool Cathedral is shaped like a ship with a gargantuan central tower with louver blinds, forty tons of bells, and a bow and a stern and eighth of a mile apart. It is crammed with nautical imagery like dolphins worked into the wrought iron and corvettes and clippers in full sail ornamenting the copper downspouts, and gaunt saints, like Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, standing on little shelves, gazing quietly onto the top of my head. I sat on the steps under the vast western arch in the afternoon sun with the dolphins and the Audis. Little bits of mica twinkled in the stone all around me, and the arch was like a big quiet cave, or a cove, maybe, where I and a lot of twinkly flotsam had washed up. Very pleasant.

In the 1880's, wanting their own cathedral to one-up Chester down the road, but worried that a puny classically styled cathedral would be upstaged by all the silvery domes and columns and huge clocks (the biggest clocks in England, I have read) of Liverpool's knock-your-eye-out-grand waterfront, the diocese chose to build it on a ridge of rock just south of the city, a prime vantage point from which to glower down disapprovingly on the worldly workings of the counting houses and insurance buildings of the world's busiest, and wealthiest port.

It took something like forty years to build full of waxes and wanes of money and interest and direct hits from German bombs one of which smashed through the four feet of the church's copper-coated concrete roof, lost some omph when it fell onto the curved vaulting ceiling just below, rolled off hard enough to smash through an upper vestry wall, shoot out into space, and blow up in the cemetery smashing all the windows on that side. It was finished in 1968, just as Liverpool was really going down for the count and unemployment was at 30%. It oversaw the Toxteth riots across Parliment Street when the Rialto Ballroom was set on fire and its copper dome glowed all night. The Georgian townhouses lining Hope Street, now a painfully posh address principly because of their stunning views of the cathedral's sunrise side, were just ten years ago being given away so derilict and rife with prostitution were the cathedral grounds and its wilderness of a cemetery, that settees were put out for those waiting their turn on the mattresses under the bushes. Ew.

You wouldn't know all that by looking at it now, unless you come at it from the starboard side.