Merseyside was a rich source of subjects for leading photographers Bedford Lemere, finds Laura Davis

BRICK by brick the stately home was moved – each piece carefully numbered and transported on the whim of a homesick shipping tycoon to a location on the other side of Wirral.

Some 25 years earlier, when a different industrialist was in charge of its fate, Bidston Court was pictured in its original spot by the nation’s foremost architectural photographers.

In those days the process was still in its infancy and the photographer would have had a long wait on his hands while the glass plate captured the intended image.

Slowly, the black and white half-timbered house, built in Tudor style by the soap manufacturer Robert Hudson, would form on the thin piece of glass ready for development.

The resulting photograph is fascinating now, not just because of its crisp quality, but also because it shows the building in its original location, before it moved to Royston Park and became Hillbark.

GALLERY: Preview of the Age of Confidence exhibition

Bedford Lemere & Co, the company which took the picture, was based in London yet Merseyside was its second most photographed location.

In the 19th century, when Liverpool’s port was booming, merchants’ bank accounts were bulging and there seemed to be a new building springing up every few months, there was plenty to record.

Ocean liners, factory assembly lines and fine architecture were all seen as fitting subjects for the most highly regarded architectural photographers in the country.

Forty-three of these will form the exhibition An Age of Confidence, which opens at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight tomorrow.

“At the time the company was working, Liverpool was such a rich and vibrant city and the amount of work they did here reflects that,” says Sandra Penketh, head of the Lady Lever, who worked with English Heritage to select the images on display.

The charity took property of Bedford Lemere & Co’s archive, including 21,800 large-format glass negatives, through a merger in 1999 and is working its way through conserving, cataloguing and scanning them.

“We look at these pictures and think of them in historical terms but a lot of the buildings being photographed were new,” says Penketh. “There’s a nice synergy between the sense of pride we feel about some of the new developments in Liverpool today and how people felt in the past.”