How good to be in Liverpool after a long time away – and no, I wasn’t there for the Labour party conference. My first stop: Alfred Waterhouse’s magnificent terracotta Victoria Gallery & Museum to see the novelist Jonathan Coe on stage with another writer close to my heart (my husband, in case I sound like a stalker) at the literary festival. My second: the eternally lovely Walker Art Gallery for a steady gawp at the gargantuan Christ Blessing the Little Children by Benjamin Robert Haydon, a Victorian artist who will make a star appearance in On Disappointment, a series of essays I’ve written for BBC Radio 3 (it’s on next month, and all I can say is that I hope it does not disappoint).
Liverpool is a brilliant walking city, so many spectacular and sometimes deeply strange buildings in close proximity. But oh, how a quick circuit makes the heart ache. Two sights especially had me balling my hands into fists. Next to Peter Ellis’s beautiful proto-skyscraper of 1864, Oriel Chambers (the first building in the world to feature a metal-framed glass curtain wall), there is now a branch of Hooters, the American sports bar famous for the attributes of its female staff. And while I knew it would be so, it’s still horrifying to see that The Wellington Rooms (1815), where society once danced the night away having been delivered there in carriages and sedan chairs, continues to stand derelict. One day quite soon, I fear, its Robert Adam-style ceiling and Wedgwood friezes will be lost to us forever.
