And then one would like to appraise the elusive atmosphere of Bold Street—that intimate, elegant avenue of rare fabrics and shopping women and the ripe, drumming ripple of automobiles—the Bond Street of Liverpool, whose wood pavements make a sudden chosen silence in the midst of the clatter, which is held beautifully inviolate from electric cars and sandwichmen, and at the head of whose discreet vista the tower of St. Luke’s rises gravely up, faintly remindful of the manner in which the towers of Sainte Gudule survey that other road of women and priceless elegancies in Brussels. And with this so purely feminine apartment one would proceed to contrast, properly enough, some such exclusively male possession as Brunswick Street. It, too, is highly chosen and conserved, and the sober, archaic front of the old Heywood’s Bank at the upper end of it prepares one at the outset for exactly the unostentatious sobriety of the lower, where it passes under the influence of the Corn Exchange. It seems to reflect, and the brokers one meets there seem exceptionally to reflect as well, something of the spirit of that fine race of merchants who wore leathern watchguards but stocked a most excellent port, whose word was good for thousands and who lunched at the little tavern which still stands there, like an old-fashioned waiter, with so engaging an air of homely dignity.
And it would be impossible, of course, to avoid comparing Brunswick Street with that other exclusively masculine quarter, Victoria Street, which passes, in spite of its consistent virility, through three successive phases. In the first, where it lies between North John Street and the Post Office, it has an almost Stanley Street-like aspect—a wider and less viscid Stanley Street, with the red stream of mail-vans exchanged for a black swarm of clerks and merchants, hiving about the Produce Exchange. In the second it grows aridly official, the fidgety pomp of the Post Office towering away on the right, the Revenue Offices marching with much cold grey dignity on the left. And, finally, in its third phase, it grows positively dramatic and unintentionally spectacular: the offices of the town’s protagonistic newspapers, the Post and the Courier, confront one another threatfully—silent at sunset, but romantically vociferous towards dawn, and, from close beside them, one gets (especially on a morning of sunshine) the most delightful glimpse of the entirely noble sweep of architecture that rises up—dreaming, reduced, subtile—beyond the quick, green flash that sings out from among the statuary of St. John’s Gardens.
And so one could go on, disengaging the essential spirit of street after street, hoping that all the readings, taken together, would build up into the gross effect of the whole thing, would cleanly spell out the essential spirit of the City. As, indeed, they no doubt would. But in the way of the adoption of that course there lies one rather serious objection. To make its final result veracious, it would have to be followed with uncompromising thoroughness; and if it were followed with uncompromising thoroughness this chapter would never end.
§ 2.
So, then, although it carries us a certain distance, that bundle of street analyses, even if it were considerably enlarged, must not be looked upon as final. The alternative method, of course, is the eclectic—a searching out of “notes,” of the vistas, the groupings, the buildings, that leap incisively out from the mass and engage the memory—an arrangement of these things in some considered order.
LIME STREET STATION
And to such a collection that bunch of street-portraits (their subjects, to be frank, having been chosen rather less off-handedly than might appear) forms an admirable nucleus. And since it is at the moments of arrival and departure that the nerves are most sensitive to aspects—since it is, in consequence, the first or the last glimpse of a place that remains, for most of us, its practical, portable symbol—the collection should next include a note of the way Liverpool reveals herself at each of her four great vestibules—at the Landing Stage, at the Exchange Station, at Lime Street Station, at the Central Station.
From within the railings that fringe the tiny courtyard outside the last, for instance, it is as a neatly compacted vista of twinkling shops, of converging roofs, minarets, and flag-poles, that, in the day-time, she rather alluringly presents herself. There is much delicate cross-hatching of shade and shine, much blithe gold-lettering on the walls. There are flower-sellers on the kerb, a string of hansoms glisten in the roadway, an electric car, double-decked and yellow, surges down the hill from Ranelagh Street and provides the due top-note.... Emphatically, a most efficient place, this Liverpool, glossy and high-stepping, at once elegant and active. And with nightfall it emerges as a place of quite exceptional loveliness. That checked curve of the receding buildings, giving the prospect depth without diminution, grades the lights without disparting them, knits them together, both the near and the far, into one exquisitely modulated chorus. Moon-green, mistletoe-white, orange, amethyst, and pearl, are their principal colours, and in this chamber of converging lines the massed clusters branch and leap and linger with the most wonderful effect of tender ardency.... Emphatically, a place, this Liverpool, possessing very singular possibilities of beauty.
The Liverpool that awaits one outside the orifices that lead from Exchange Station, however, is of a vastly different quality.[3] Roofed with a remote, unimportant sky, floored (say) with a vague shimmer from recent rain, and hung monotonously about with carefully unobtrusive buildings, it seems less like one of the central spaces of the City than a mere ante-chamber to rooms—possibly magnificent, possibly squalid—that lie somewhere beyond; and in the mornings, when the hosts from the northern suburbs are pouring silently through, that effect is irresistibly emphasized. It is all neutral, non-committal. The solitary stains of colour are the hoardings that flame up before the Moorfields entrance, and the immemorial fruit-barrow that picks out against the grey in Bixteth Street.