Few cities which can boast an antiquity at all comparable with that of Liverpool have so ruthlessly obliterated all the visible memorials of their past. Though it is seven hundred years since the borough was founded, it contams no building of any importance which is two hundred and fifty years old and only two (St. Peter's Church and the old Bluecoat School, both apparently doomed to destruction) which carry us back as far as two hundred years. Scores of towns and villages of less antiquity and dignity than Liverpool can at least show a church dating back to the fourteenth century or earlier. But Liverpool has demolished its ancient churches, and rebuilt them in modern style: the church of Walton, which was mentioned in Domesday Book, and is the mother-church of all this district, was rebuilt in instalments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the ancient Liverpool chapel of St. Nicholas, which had been the centre of the life of the borough ever since its erection in the middle of the fourteenth century, was demolished and rebuilt by our unsentimental ancestors during the same period; the still more ancient little chapel of St. Mary of the Quay vanished altogether. — Muir Ramsay, Bygone Liverpool (1913).

Architecture

Monuments, Sculpture, and Parks

Liverpool before Victoria

Cityscapes and Related Landscapes

Reference

Muir, Ramsey. Bygone Liverpool illustrated by ninety-seven plates reproduced from original paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and prints with historical descriptions by Henry S. and Harold E. Young. Liverpool: Henry Young and Sons, 1913. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of Toronto Library

Victorian Web Victorian architecture Classicism in Victorian Architecture Places

Last modified 14 January 2013