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.
Custard prize
It used only to be artists and writers who had residencies: plum stints in institutions keen to support their work with admiration, a temporary base and, best of all, a stipend. Of late, however, chefs have got in on the act: most recently, the great Rowley Leigh, formerly of Kensington Place and Le Café Anglais, who is for the time being installed in a Notting Hill gaff, Chez Rowley, under the auspices of a ritzy private members’ club.
How long will he be there? This isn’t yet clear, which means that those who revere the early work had better go sooner rather than later. The scallops with pea purée Leigh served at Kensington Place are not on the menu, but the parmesan custard with anchovy toast from Le Café Anglais most definitely is. My advice: order one per person, plus another – this is the delicate way of putting it – “for the table”.
Talking of Freud
Alas, I’m not currently enjoying a residency myself, though I remain open to offers. But I have been curating something, if I’m allowed to join the rest of the world in wildly misusing the word (even Spotify playlists are curated now). At the Freud Museum in London, I’ve put together a series of talks with writers in a season we’re calling Provocations, or Difficult Conversations in the Home of the Talking Cure. The idea, of course, is to raise funds for the museum, and in the process to give anyone who buys a ticket an interesting and enjoyable evening. But I hope, too, that the building will take its effect on guests and audiences alike, encouraging them to feel no subject to be off limits, even in these fractious and divided times.
It was in this building in Hampstead, after all, that Sigmund Freud lived in the last year of his life. His library is here, and so is his psychoanalytic couch, given to him by a patient in 1890. While I’d better not talk of ghosts – yes, I’ve read Freud on the uncanny – the aura should, nonetheless, be conducive to honest investigation.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
