From this point on Hope Street, you are faced on either side with two of Liverpool’s most iconic buildings. The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral, to the north, stands light on its feet in its modern tent-like form ; The Liverpool Anglican Cathedral to the south, is a bulky and imposing structure in the Gothic Revival style. All seems quite standard so far.
What if I told you that the Anglican’s red elephant is in fact a younger animal than the Met’s white swan (well, arguably that is).
See, the Anglican Cathedral was completed in 1967. Design Started in 1903 when Architect Giles Gilbert Scott (designer of Battersea Power Station and of the famous telephone box) won the design competition while he was still a student. The design and construction of the edifice outlasted his career and the cathedral eventually opened in 1978, 20 years after his death.
In Contrast, the Metropolitan Cathedral was commissioned in 1930. Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to design an appropriate response to the Anglican Cathedral, which was to become the second largest church in the world. While construction of the classical style building started in 1933, it was quickly interrupted by the Second World War. Due to a subsequent lack of funding, only the crypt was completed in 1958, on which the current cathedral stands to this day. Adrian Gilbert Scott (Brother of Giles Gilbert Scott) proposed a scaled down version of the old design which was negatively received and left unbuilt. The current modernist design was proposed by Sir Frederick Gibberd and construction finally resumed in 1962. The building was opened only 5 years after in 1967, just over 10 years before the Anglican Cathedral.
