St George’s Hall: Great symbol of a city of contrasts

Jan 16 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

The most expensive stage set for Ringo Starr? The world’s biggest village hall? What is St George’s Hall actually for? Peter Elson reports

SHOULD St George’s Hall have been built? When this colossal civic building was constructed, it deliberately cemented Liverpool’s image as second city of the British Empire.

Last week, it was the sensational centrepiece of the outdoor opening ceremony for Capital of Culture, wreathed in light shows and Ringo Starr’s rooftop performance.

However, while this civic showpiece was being constructed from 1844 – 1854, just a few streets away lived tens of thous- ands of citizens in dire poverty.

With an almost total lack of sanitation, their lives were often destroyed by epidemics of cholera and malaria which swept unchecked through these filthy areas.

This is one of the questions to be addressed by Steve Binns, Liverpool’s community historian, in a series of lectures starting this month at St George’s Hall, to coincide with Capital of Culture.

His blindness somehow gives him a far clearer perspective about the city’s story, rather than create a hindrance to understanding.

He comes down on the side of the city fathers’ belief that, in spite of the many dreadfully blighted Victorian Liverpudlians, St George’s Hall was then, and remains, a good thing.

“It’s too simple an equation to assume that, had money not been spent on St George’s Hall, it would have gone on welfare or hospitals,” says Steve, who is now based at the hall.

This building is a remarkable part of its age, a paean to Liverpool’s past international prestige.

It also effortlessly combines the seemingly opposite functionality of concert halls and law courts.

“If Dante gave me my sight back for five minutes, one thing I’d want to do is look down the extraordinary gallery that links the Great Hall and law courts together.

“St George’s Hall is really a capital city project. You don’t see anything else of this size and quality outside first cities.

“Such was its impact that, once they’d launched the building project, they had to finish it, even if this took 150 years. When the Lord Mayor Walmsley was teased in the 1870s about the hall’s shortcomings, he responded that this was missing the point.

“He emphasised that the most important thing was that the hall stood outside Lime Street station, then the premier arrival point in the city. That was the real point: the hall was a stupendous statement to those coming into the city. They could only be impressed.

“The hall did fulfil its ambition to be a place for the ordinary people. For example, within weeks of its opening, it hosted a meeting for the Plasterers’ Benevolent Association,” says Steve.

Also, St George’s Hall was a venue for concerts when music was simply inaccessible for most people. Each of its organ concerts attracted two or three thousand people.

“Being greatly egalitarian in image, St George’s Hall’s audiences were far more of a social cross-section than the Philharmonic ever achieved, with the latter’s dress codes and exclusivity,” says Steve.

“Likewise, Charles Dickens, the king of story-telling orators, insisted on holding ‘penny readings’ here in its Small Concert Hall. This meant that practically anyone could attend, especially those who thought it was not for them. He gave them food for their minds.