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Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Irish Immigration

  • richardtw
  • Apr 19
  • 6 min read

Liverpool's Reconciliation Chapel

Make your way up the stairs into Liverpool's Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King and into the first chapel to the left, and you'll be faced with Stephen Foster's altarpiece sculpture showing Christ on the cross.

Stephen Foster's wooden altarpiece sculpture, as described in the article: Christ on the cross is centre, surrounded by pairs of people reaching out to each other, while Liverpool's two cathedrals tower overhead (below Christ's arms).
Stephen Foster's altarpiece in the Reconciliation Chapel

All around him, pairs of figures reach out to one other, in the shadow of two towering buildings which sit just below Christ's outstretched arms. On the right, recognisably a church with a tall, squared tower: Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, down the road. And on the left, a more curious, circular, tower on top of what looks like a concrete tent: the Catholic cathedral, known as Paddy's Wigwam or the Mersey Funnel.


Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral is a product of its time

The Metropolitan Cathedral burst onto the Liverpool scene in the mid-1960s, and it really looks like it. Unlike the sandstone megalith down the road, the Catholic cathedral is built mostly from concrete, ceramics, glass and metal.

Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral seen from the street outside the front entrance. There are steps leading up to the concrete facade, behind which rears up the sloped roof (it's called a wigwam for a reason) and then the glass funnel on top.
Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, from Oxford Street

Where the Anglican cathedral makes me think of vast expanses and timeless, divine might, the Metropolitan makes me think of the Space Age. It reminds me of how TV producers of the 60s and 70s looked forward to the future and thought we'd have moonbases by 1999. When it was new, locals described it as looking like something that had landed from outer space, not been built by humans.


The 1959 design brief specified that the altar be the primary focus – the then-archbishop insisted that enshrining the high altar was a cathedral's whole purpose. So architect Frederick Gibberd produced a circular nave, essentially undivided. It's a singular, flowing space with the altar dead centre and surrounded on three sides by seating for just over 2000 worshippers, none of whom are more than about 80 feet away.

The cathedral's interior, with an aisle between two sets of long, curving wooden benches. At the end of the aisle, several small steps lead up to a solid block of white marble serving as the altar, above which is a deconstructed baldacchino. Around the walls are various smaller chapels, framed with glowing blue stained glass.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral interior - with the marble altar sitting under the central funnel

The space therefore fulfils the requirements of the Catholic church's mid-century approach to worship, by giving worshippers a greater degree of access to the main action. The sightlines are all good, with no interfering pillars. It's an incredibly democratic space, which realises the goal of fostering intimacy for the worshippers with each other and with the priest at the altar.


Crowning the whole structure (pun intended; the cathedral's dedicated to Christ the King) is a lantern tower of stained glass, which funnels light down onto the altar. That's the most striking aspect of the design, which you can see on the approach, and which stands out in Foster's altarpiece.

The cathedral from the front entrance, close-up. To the right, the huge concrete (almost Brutalist) belltower. Rising up in the centre, the concrete wigwam and the glass lantern, or funnel, on top. Rising from the top of that, a ring of spikes clearly reminisicent of a crown.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, with the belltower (right) and lantern (centre).

Where did Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral really come from?

Plans for Liverpool's Catholic cathedral had been in the works since the early nineteenth-century, thanks to the growing Irish immigrant community that made Liverpool one of Victorian England's most diverse (arguably, least English) cities.


Although the city's population boomed largely due to immigration from rural Britain, the influx of Irish workers was probably more noticeable. It was also more alarming, with contemporary writers blaming the explosion of disease and squalor on the Irish labourers rather than the economic forces (and Irish Famine) that had pushed so many people together so quickly.


Some immigrants moved on to other industrial areas, but those that stayed in Liverpool settled down with enough Irish culture to set them apart – including religion. It wasn't all Catholicism; a few brought the Ulster-flavour Protestantism that saw Orange Lodges springing up as early as 1807.

A display showing some of the earlier designs for the cathedral - one, an English cathedral of the traditional Gothic style, and the other Lutyens' sprawling, domed monster that would have overshadowed even the Anglican cathedral eventually built down the road.
Some of the earlier designs for the Catholic Cathedral

Orange Protestantism, as you can still see in Belfast, brings with it a strong current of nationalism and anti-Catholicism (attitudes British Protestants could sympathise with, especially when facing a flood of Irish Catholic labour). In Ulster, it defines itself against the Republican and Catholic causes. That specifically Irish conflict, with its two embattled identities, was imported to Liverpool.


In the twentieth-century's first decade, Liverpool was annually hosting around 30 religious marches of the kind that stirred up sectarian tension (and often violence) in Belfast – the aim in Liverpool was similar, with Orange lodges deliberately marching loudly through Catholic areas, whose residents found innumerable small ways to express their own hostility. Violence and segregation, though not on the scale of Belfast's, were common up until around 1914.


Liverpool Metropolitan's St Joseph Chapel - he was a carpenter, hence the scultped wooden walls, with Stephen Foster's work depicting his life. Centre is the black marble tomb of Archbishop Derek Worlock, of whom more later...
St Joseph's Chapel - including the tomb of Archbishop Derek Worlock

By this time, the Irish-Scouse had been in Liverpool for a century. Several factors contributed to easing (though not ending) the violence. These boiled down to, on the one hand, outside developments taking the heat out of both the nationalist and religious differences, and on the other, the interwar demolition of slums breaking up entrenched communities and behaviours, including the marches.


The Need for Reconciliation

Such a history suggests a city in need of healing, and a secondary meaning behind the Chapel of Reconciliation.


The first, and perhaps most explicit, meaning is that of sinners being reconciled to Christ through the blood shed on the cross – as depicted in Foster's altarpiece. But the inclusion of the two cathedrals in that altarpiece is meant to do more than just signpost which city the sinners are in.

Liverpool's massive sandstone Anglican cathedral, seen from the street. It's tall, and long, with a square tower in the centre, neo-Gothic and imposing.
Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral - completed in 1978

Completed almost within a decade of each other, the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals became symbols of Liverpool's postwar revival and gradual rebuilding. That rebuilding gave the city a new geography, one that undid the old tribalisms and allowed a fresh start. But there was still work to be done, and those divisions still cut deep through the city's social fabric.


Fish & Chips

The Anglican bishop and Catholic archbishop was took up their roles within months of each other in the mid-1970s were keen to build on their predecessors' record of ecumenical cooperation, and went to great lengths to present a united Christian front in tackling the city's social problems and still-simmering sectarianism.


A public sculpture memorial to David Sheppard and Derek Worlock, on Hope Street. Both men are carved in relief on upright slabs of metal, Sheppard to the left, and Worlock to the right, allowing the viewer to walk between them.
The Memorial to Sheppard and Worlock on Hope Street, between their two cathedrals

David Sheppard and Derek Worlock – nicknamed Fish & Chips, because they were so often in the newspapers together – were warned against pushing too hard on that door, for fear of undoing the progress already made. Pressing on regardless, they were able to secure formal agreements between Liverpool's various Christian groups that saw them commit to seeking visible Christian unity together. That would have been unthinkable just decades earlier.


Interestingly, they were able to use the geography of their respective cathedrals to further their aims, and began holding ecumenical processions along the half-mile road that runs between the two sites. These involved congregations from both sides, but also Queen Elizabeth II during her Silver Jubilee visit, and Pope John Paul II in 1982. Services and prayers featuring both leaders, at both cathedrals, helped heal lingering divides, and brought together a wider community.

A composite image to show the proximity of the two cathedrals. One the left, the Metropolitan seen from Hope Street, where it seems to bookend the road. On the right, the Anglican looms in the clouds as seen from the steps outside the Metropolitan, with Hope Street running down from one to the other in an (almost) straight line.
(L) Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, down Hope Street. (R) Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, from the Metropolitan's steps, down Hope Street

But those walks also served to overwrite memories of earlier sectarian marches, and repurposed the urban space for a more unified community of Christians, and the secular city. This was a deliberate effort by the bishops to make a meaningful symbol out of the coincidence that the connecting road is called Hope Street.


The Visible Unity of Christ's Church

A shot of the Metropolitan Cathedral from high above, on the tower of the Anglican Cathedral. The shot is framed by sandstone buttresses, and we can see Hope Street running up in a silvery line to the steps outside the Metropolitan. In the foreground, more of the Georgian area of the city, including LIPA.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, as seen from the tower of the Anglican Cathedral, Hope Street running along up to the Metropolitan entrance.

Historically, Liverpool has been a city divided by more than football. Sectarian division might not have entirely faded, but the Metropolitan Cathedral stands now as a symbol of the work done to overcome those divides and reconcile the city's Christians both to each other, and to Christ. Built to support the Catholics, it has done so not by strengthening their segregation, but by bringing them into closer communion with their fellow Christians, thus serving the wider church and the city itself.



Further Reading

Online:





Godfrey Butland, ‘Sheppard, David Stuart, Baron Sheppard of Liverpool (1929-2005)’ on ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/96978


Vincent Nichols, ‘Worlock, Derek John Harford (1920-1996)’ on ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/61980



J M Richards (revised by Alan Cox), ‘Gibberd, Sir Frederick Ernest (1908-1984)’ on ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31144


Print:

Graham Davis, 'The Irish in Nineteenth Century Britain' in Saothar Vol. 16 (1991)


Frederick Gibberd, Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King (1968)


Brian Hatton, ‘Shifted tideway: Liverpool’s changing fortunes’, Architectural Review, January 2008


Gareth Jenkins, 'Nationalism and Sectarian Violence in Liverpool and Belfast, 1880s-1920s' in International Labor and Working-Class History No. 78 (FALL 2010)


Jan Moran, ‘From Sgt Pepper to the sublime: in praise of Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral at 50’ The Guardian 3rd Jun 2017


David Sheppard & Derek Worlock, Better Together: Christian Partnership in a hurt city (1989)


Nicholas Taylor, ‘Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool’ in Architectural Review, June 1967


Daniel Warner, ‘When two tribes go to war: Orange parades, religious identity and urban space in Liverpool, 1965-1985’ in Oral History Vol. 47, No. 2, Worlds Collide (Autumn 2019)

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