Gracious, grand and cosmopolitan, Liverpool confounds expectations

Liverpool, I owe you an apology.

I imagined a grimy, defunct port town clinging to life through Beatles tourism and football. A fan of neither, I'd never been tempted to detour from other explorations of the Northeast to see what the city had to offer. My determination to see the Chinese warriors transcended my apathy, but I wasn't happy about their location. I made sure there was secure parking for the car in what I imagined to be a blighted city centre, and worried about safety while walking our dogs at night. Given the length of the drive, I booked the hotel for two nights but doubted there'd be much to see after the exhibition. We could always get out to lovely Chester or North Wales if it was too much of a bust.

How wrong I was. The financial collapse, the derelict inner city, the riots are all a short blip in the city's otherwise impressive history. As the most significant port on the west coast, Liverpool has been a commercial hub since Anglo-Saxon times. Throughout the empire it was fabulously wealthy, giving it a legacy of magnificent Georgian, Victorian, Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings and an impressive museum quarter. It's also been a hub of innovation, adapting technology to build ever better docks as the world switched from sail to steam, canal boat to rail. In a rare lack of foresight, Liverpool failed to spot the revolution brought by container shipping. Thousands were made redundant when they were no longer needed to unload ships. The docks emptied. The city, its game seemingly over, became known for poverty and radical unionism.

But the next chapter isn't so told as often. Liverpool invested in container ports. The business is back. Motorways leading out of town are lined with distribution warehouses. They've poured regeneration money into the city centre, now a bustling, clean, affluent mix of lovely restored architecture and beautifully designed new buildings. High tech and creative industries are booming. Locals are proud of their city and warmly welcoming, if a little difficult to understand for southern ears. And it turns out it's a city of thriving cosmopolitanism. The Chinese warriors came here because Liverpool has the oldest Chinatown in Europe, is twinned with Shanghai and actively fosters its Asian trade links. The Irish community is better known, and brings with them so many Irish pubs with live music you'd think you were in Dublin. According to the Council, the city's four major universities host 50,000 students from 100 countries, who contribute more than £300 million to the economy every year and drive a diverse social scene. We ate at a Brazilian restaurant (after considering Thai and Cuban) and stayed at a hotel staffed by French, Italians and Spaniards. This is the only part of the North that voted to stay in the European Union. Liverpool is a grown up, sophisticated city of the world and worth every moment of the three days we spent within her borders. Here are some highlights.

BUS TOUR
Liverpool is a remarkably walkable city; most of the top tourist attractions are no more than a 20-minute stroll from the riverfront. It's still worth buying a ticket for a hop-on hop-off bus tour. There are two companies. We opted for City Explorer and their live guides (rather than the other company's recorded tours ... though their multi-lingual capability was clearly the choice for non-English speakers).  Combine your bus pass with a Mersey Ferry ticket for £16.50, all good for 24 hours. Though the guides clearly have a set of facts they're supposed to impart, they have lots of flexibility and different areas of expertise. So it's worth switching buses and repeating parts of the route. We had one guy who was clearly a Beatles expert (got a bit tedious) and another who was serious about history and architecture (our favourite). Do this first to get an idea of what you want to come back to explore in more depth.

CATHEDRALS
Liverpool's two 20th century cathedrals are polar opposites architecturally, and their position a short stretch from each other down the appropriately named Hope Street makes for a fascinating half day of compare-and-contrast exploration.

The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral is ruthlessly modern: a brilliant white upside-down funnel commonly known as "Paddy's Wigwam". The interior is essentially a vast theatre in the round, with abstract shards of stained glass from the central tower and side walls providing dramatic lighting. If you're a fan of late 1950s and early 1960s modernism, this is a fascinating representation of it, especially in the decorative work in the side chapels and the stations of the cross. It's MadMen does God. Despite understandable local boasting, however, the style is not particularly unique. The Madonna delle Lacrime shrine in Siricusa, which I wrote about here, and the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Louis (aka Priory's church) in my home town are both examples of the post-Vatican II trend in round Roman Catholic churches. (I think the St. Louis version, an early masterpiece from renowned architects HOK, actually does it best.) Were Liverpool's example a theatre or lecture hall, I'd give it high marks. But for me the space is too devoid of any spiritual feeling to be successful as a church.

The Anglican Cathedral down the street does a better job on this front, starting with the reliably religious Gothic style for sanctity, then adding modern twists. Architect Giles Gilbert Scott is better known for giving us the iconic red phone box, but he came from a long line of architects famous for gothic revivalism and he was clearly carrying on grand family traditions here. I've never been in a church quite like it.

It changes levels dramatically, starting with an entrance porch six feet below below the rest of the church. Ceiling heights fluctuate along with the floors. It's more like a series of separate grand spaces that have been pushed together rather than a single church. This adds excitement, with a sense of discovery and constant movement. The style is a stripped down, modernised gothic with elements of art deco veering towards fascist overlordship. If they'd done Christianity inGame of Thrones, it might turn up as something like this. And yet that's making it sound rather brutal. It's filled with delicate design touches, from paintings behind the choir stalls that looks more like Arthurian legend than anything religious, to exquisitely embroidered altar hangings, to a gold-encrusted high altar that looks like it's been kidnapped from Spain. It is a startling pastiche, and I loved it.


PUBS
The height of Liverpool's affluence happened to coincide with the golden age of the British pub. A weekend's wandering suggested to me that there are more spectacular examples in a higher density here than in London, and that's not including the Irish places, modern chains and Beatles-themed spots. We're talking Victorian opulence here, with polished brass, frosted glass, exotic tile work and yards of ornately-carved mahogany. At the top of the list are the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, known locally as The Phil. Don't let the name throw you off; "dining rooms" was a sop to the temperance movement agitating in the city. Today, in a delightful demonstration of irony, a statue of Baptist temperance advocate High Stowell Brown now stands across from the doors, gazing upon drinkers 24/7. There is a restaurant upstairs, and they serve food throughout, but it is most definitely a pub.

Enter beneath an arch of writhing art nouveau brass scrolls to find an enormous horseshoe-shaped bar fronted with floral mosaic. The ceiling is jacobean-style strapwork, leaded glass windows with stained glass insets stand at the back, while straight ahead an enormous fire beckons. The snugs on either side are encrusted with repousee copper panels, more mosaic and intricately carved mahogany. And that's just the first room. In classic high Victorian style this place is divided into a warren of smaller spaces, including two elegant drawing rooms named after Brahms and Liszt (the whole place is themed on classical music to honour the Philharmonic concert hall just across the street). There's a particularly grand central hall where almost life-sized classical figures in plaster stretch above the wainscot to support a grand ceiling embedded with more stained glass. In the time it took to drink one pint in a cozy wingback, this became my favourite pub in all of England.

CULTURAL QUARTER
There's no better place to see proof of Liverpool's affluent past than in the Cultural Quarter, now a UNESCO World Heritage site thanks to its unique concentration of Victorian neo-classical buildings. (Well, not quite unique. It's very similar to Berlin's Museum island. The Berlin museums probably have more significant collections, but Liverpool has more and better architecture.) Built at the same time and in similar Greco-Roman style, the buildings are given added dignity by the way they cascade down a hill atop which the Duke of Wellington stands on a towering column.

The architectural assemblage includes the World Museum (where the Terracotta Warriors exhibition is now on), the Walker Art Gallery, the County Sessions house and the magnificent round, colonnaded Central Library. All these bow before the enormous St. George's Hall, architectural historian Pevsner's pick for one of the finest neo-Greek buildings in the world. It's an odd combination of law courts and concert hall. The area includes gardens, grand statues and cobbled open spaces. Modern additions like the Art Deco WWI memorial and the recent Hillsborough disaster monument are in a sympathetic style that fits with the wider scheme.

ALONG THE MERSEY
The Albert Docks contain a long string of grand red-brick warehouses that introduced the world to concepts like fireproofing and bonded storage (where you don't pay customs until you sell your goods). The city came very close to tearing them down in its darkest days. Now they're at the heart of  a renewal that stretches along the riverfront in either direction. It's a thriving place during the day, with a branch of the Tate, shops, restaurants and attractions like a pirate ship and a Beatles museum. I found it surprisingly quiet on a Friday night when walking my dogs there, however ... after dark nothing seems to be going on outside the restaurants.

A short walk west along the Mersey brings you to Pier Head and the buildings known as "the Three Graces": the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building. Tucked in behind the last is a magnificent Art Deco pile that appears to be a mysterious HQ without windows, and turns out to be a ridiculously ornate extraction chimney for the tunnel below. The Graces themselves all offer different takes on grand, early 20th century neo-classicism. Pier Head will remind you a lot of New York's grand buildings of the 1920s and '30s, unsurprising considering the direct passage of people and goods between the two cities.  Turns out European directors regularly use this area as a stand-in for New York when filming. The New York of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is actually Liverpool.

Modern architects have taken a stab at giving the city three new graces in the Mersey Ferry building,
the Museum of Liverpool and another gallery and office building. The last is black, the other two white, and all three have striking, shard-like angles as if the iceberg that sunk the Titanic drifted into town. They've been sensitively inserted into the scheme and their undecorated, reflective exteriors make a satisfying foil for the Graces. The Museum presents an excellent overview of the city's history and is free to enter. There's a statue of the Beatles outside the Ferry Terminal that tourists queue up to get a photo with.

Directly inland from the Albert Docks is a modern retail development called Liverpool One. It is essentially a three-story shopping mall with John Lewis as anchor, but the architects have literally ripped the roof off, creating an open-air canyon. A fourth story on the landward-side is filled by restaurants; glass and chrome bridges fly over the chasm below to a grassy expanse bigger than a football pitch, from which you have wonderful views of the docks and on which the city regularly stages concerts and festivals. Other restaurants line the west side of the field while the south (river) side falls away in terraces of trees and landscaping. It all feels like a sylvan park on a big hill, into which the shopping mall has been carved. A clever illusion, as the hill covers a car park. It's a neat bit of urban planning, and has clearly been successful as the streets spreading out from here are bustling with more big brands in both retail and dining.

Thus far, Liverpool has been successful in mixing old and new, but they are walking a knife edge. UNESCO recently threatened to pull the city's world heritage status over plans to build a complex of glass skyscrapers just west of the Three Graces, which critics say will destroy the city skyline.

WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE WITH MORE TIME
I didn't think I'd fill two days in Liverpool. After three, I walked away with a hefty list of things I missed. Though we bought tickets, we never had time for our ride on the Mersey Ferry. Beyond The Phil, there were all sorts of charming pubs I would have liked to explore.

We didn't delve into the food scene at all. Exhausted and much in need of down time, we managed to stumble across the street to a Brazilian steakhouse (Bem Brasil) that was a good example of its type but nothing special on our first night, and stayed in the hotel (the Novotel, near Liverpool One, allows dogs) for a perfectly passable but unremarkable dinner the next. Our bus tour guides made big claims for the city as a booming foodie destination, with the Baltic Market and Cain's Brewery Village being the hub of the scene. Distillers and microbrewers are gaining traction. One of our guides claimed that Ma Boyle's pub near the Three Graces has better corned beef sandwiches than New York. Considering I've never had a corned beef sandwich in England that gets to good on a New York scale, I was intrigued. I also spotted three separate restaurants that specialised in desserts only. Given Liverpool's long association with the sugar trade, is this a local thing? It could have used more research.

On the cultural front, the Walker Art Gallery is supposed to have one of the best pre-Raphaelite collections in the world. I would have loved to get inside St. George's hall. The Liverpool Philharmonic is much respected and is Classic FM's official orchestra in the North. Seeing them at home means getting inside a listed Art Deco concert hall. (And going back to The Phil.) Speke Hall is a rambling half-timbered National Trust manor house on the outskirts of town.

And, I suppose, it wouldn't do any harm to stick my head into the Cavern Club. I still think the disproportionate attention given to the Beatles and football distracts attention from the charms of this place, but at least now I can argue for the bigger picture.