One of Liverpool’s most striking pieces of twentieth-century architecture, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King occupies a prominent position on Mount Pleasant, at the top of Hope Street. Completed in 1967, the circular concrete structure is Grade I listed and draws immediate attention from across the city skyline. Locals have long given it two affectionate nicknames – “Paddy’s Wigwam” and “The Mersey Funnel” – both references to its distinctive tent-like silhouette. The building is the seat of the Archbishop of Liverpool and the mother church of the Archdiocese of Liverpool.
A Long Road to Completion
The story of the cathedral stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century. The Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 drove roughly half a million Irish Catholics to England, many arriving through Liverpool or settling permanently in the city. Recognising the need for a Catholic cathedral, Bishop Alexander Goss commissioned Edward Welby Pugin in 1853 to design one on the grounds of St. Edward’s College on St. Domingo Road in Everton. Only the Lady Chapel was finished, by 1856, before funds were redirected to Catholic education. That chapel later served the local parish under the name Our Lady Immaculate until its demolition in the 1980s. A second attempt came in 1930, when the Church purchased the 9-acre former Brownlow Hill workhouse site. Sir Edwin Lutyens was hired to produce a design grand enough to answer the Neo-gothic Anglican Cathedral further along Hope Street. His plan would have produced the second-largest church in the world, with a dome measuring 168 feet in diameter – wider than the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Construction began on Whit Monday, 5 June 1933, funded largely by working-class Catholic parishioners. Wartime restrictions in 1941 halted progress, and costs had risen from £3 million to £27 million. Work on the crypt resumed in 1956 and was completed in 1958, but the full Lutyens design was abandoned. A restored model of that unbuilt cathedral is now on display at the Museum of Liverpool. Adrian Gilbert Scott, brother of the Anglican cathedral’s architect, then proposed a reduced design in 1953, but that too came to nothing.
The Gibberd Cathedral
Architect Frederick Gibberd won a worldwide competition for the final design, and construction began in 1962. Just five years later, in 1967, the cathedral was complete – an outcome that contrasted sharply with the decades of failed attempts that preceded it. The finished building stands at the top of Hope Street, which remains one of the few streets in the world to have a cathedral at each end, the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral occupying the opposite end some distance to the south.