12 C O N T E X T 1 0 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 JOHN yATES Bottom up in Liverpool The IHBC’s previous chair celebrates a city, a hotel, a gents’ lavatory, a magical history tour, a civic monument and a remarkably good-tempered annual general meeting. The approach to a great city can say a lot about the place. Liverpool gives us a choice of the picturesque or the sublime. As a child I used to choose the picturesque, paying my 6d for the ferry trip from Birkenhead Woodside to Liverpool, weaving a course between the great ships as the panorama of the city ahead grew larger. The trams ground around their looped tracks on the Pier Head, the Overhead Railway rattled above a teaming dock Road, it was all going to last forever. Stop! nostalgia warning! nostalgia, the soft underbelly of conservation… Fast-forward to the early 21st century. There I was again, but this time taking the sublime approach to this great city. The train trundled through the stygian depths of those dauntingly deep sandstone cuttings that feel like a Piranesi engraving, then the space opened out into the welcoming arched roof of Lime Street Station, and another trainful disgorged into the very heart of the city. Wow, I thought, this is a good start, only slightly marred by a momentary failure of spatial awareness leading me off through an obstacle course of streetscape improvements and into a nowhere/anywhere shopping mall. And so to the Adelphi Hotel, and some familiar faces. If the first hero of the 2007 IHBC Summer School was Liverpool itself, then the second hero must be this extraordinary hotel. Imagine eastern europe just at the point when the rust spots were breaking out on the Iron Curtain, then apply the standard c2000 hotel colour scheme. I had a bath plug, but then I was the chair of the institute at that point. Many of the institute’s members would admit to having at least a sneaking regard for picturesque decay, unsustainable though it is. deep down in their hearts they may even prefer the ‘before’ to the ‘after’ photographs. Well, at the risk of being off-message, I can tell you that if you can identify with that, parts of Liverpool are still the places for you, and make sure you stay at the Adelphi. I loved it. Unfortunately, I had arrived too late for a visit to the Conservation Centre of the national Museums Liverpool (one legacy of the political, economic and social implosion of the city in the early 1980s is that the city’s main museums are run by a national body rather than the local authority), so I went straight down to the reception at the Port of Liverpool Building. More familiar faces, and lots of new ones too, now in edwardian Baroque pomp and circumstance. even a few of the minority interest canapés still lurked in the corners of their trays. So a leaderless gaggle set off through some fairly mean streets (oh, all right, regeneration opportunities) to seek out a historically authentic Chinese meal. They may even have found it, through a triumph of collective spatial awareness, but I will never know. The main benefit of being old is that meals become optional. A smaller detachment found its way, via the soviet splendour of the Adelphi, up the hill to the legendary Philharmonic, a public house of unimaginable glory and delight, even in that throatgrabbing recent historic period when smoking was still IHBC ANNUAL SCHOOL 2007
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=