New role for red-brick masterpiece

Jan 26 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Peter Elson gets a sneak preview of what could be Liverpool’s greatest legacy from European Capital of Culture

IT’S a building that played an important role in Britain’s history, one that lent a nickname to a whole generation of universities that boosted the country’s world status.

But for years, Liverpool’s Victoria Building which gave the term “red-brick university” to the language was more akin to another familiar phrase: white elephant.

Its towering gothic bulk, darkening bricks, already coated with more than a century of northern grime, emanated an increasingly forbidding and less inviting air of a long-lost age.

Outgrown by the University of Liverpool, out-paced by newer and more flexible buildings, it was left behind by the demands of modern education. It was no longer fit for purpose.

Yet, even in decline the Victoria Building’s uncompromising stature and unbending style continued to make a statement across the city, with its chiming Jubilee clock-tower visible for miles.

Now an £8.6m restoration project is well underway to transform the building into an art gallery and museum to coincide with Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture.

It will almost certainly be the most impressive and longest lasting tribute to 2008. Not only will this project bring this landmark building back into circulation, but it will open and reveal its treasures to the public for the first time.

It is believed that no other British university will have an equivalent building that will attempt to bring “town and gown” together so closely.

“This is the first time we’ve ever had a building specifically open to anyone who just wants to visit,” says Prof Kelvin Everest, university public orator and manager of its Capital of Culture programme.

Other such establishments at universities around the country are usually reserved for staff and students only, with local residents and unofficial visitors barred from entry.

The university’s superb collections of fine art, furniture, silver, ceramics and sculpture were hitherto in store or exhibited in the highly-restricted space of the former University Gallery, in Abercromby Square.

The newly-named Victoria Gallery & Museum Building will also be the first time Liverpool University has had its own museum, although there were a few small specialist department museums such as dentistry and archaeology dotted around the campus.

Its first floor will be largely devoted to paintings, with works by Lucien Freud, JW Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby.

This means entire rooms can be dedicated to specific works, such as the world’s greatest wildlife painter John James Audubon.

Audubon came to Liverpool from his native New Orleans to seek patrons and was taken up by the Rathbone banking family, who were also great benefactors of the university.

“We have three original oil paintings and watercolours, plus a very rare self-portrait,” says Matthew Clough, curator of the Victoria Gallery & Museum Building, who was in charge of the former gallery.

The Sydney Jones ceramic and silver collection will occupy the large pillared, former women’s common room. It will lead into a fine sculpture gallery that will receive works by modern masters like Hepworth, Frink, Dooley and Kenny.

Beneath these curving rooms on the ground floor will be the new entrance, leading into what will become Liverpool’s grandest cafe, situated in the former great hall.

This at last addresses the Victoria Building’s design fault of having a cramped entrance onto the busy Brownlow Hill. Instead, the architects have very cleverly relocated this around the corner to Ashton Street, without diminishing the building.

Although the Victoria Building was the original university centre for students, lectures and administration, within 40 years it was branded an unfashionable gothic monstrosity.

THE chair of architecture, Prof Charles Reilly, wanted to pull it down in the 1930s when he designed the Arts Faculty next door in his Liverpool neo-classical style.