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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Marion Leonard, ‘Legacies - Immigration and Emigration - Liverpool’, BBC Archives
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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