Nourishing body and soul
Figure 42 Holy Trinity Church, Breck Road, built mainly to serve the villa community, was the first church in Anfield, opening in 1847. [DP045348]
Figure 43 Richmond Baptist Church, the earliest Nonconformist church in Breckfield, thrusts itself among the ordinary lives of working men and women, occupying a site on what was emerging as the area's main commercial street. [AA045103]
Figure 44 The former English Presbyterian Church (now the Temple of Praise) with its adjacent manse on Oakfield Road. [AA045092]
Figure 45 The former Free Welsh Church, Donaldson Street. [AA045091]
Figure 46 Anfield Cemetery as depicted in an engraving published by Rock & Co in Views of Liverpool, 1864. The three mortuary chapels served (from left to right) the Roman Catholic, Church of England and Nonconformist communities. The lower buildings in between served extensive catacombs. [Liverpool Record Office,
Liverpool Libraries H942.7214 ROC]
Figure 47 Three board schools: (a) (opposite, left) Venice Street; (b) (above) Granton Road, both Liverpool School Board, 1886 and 1880 respectively; (c) (right) Anfield Road, Walton-on-the-Hill School Board, 1885, much enlarged c 1900.
[NMR 20748/20; AA045096; AA041068]
Figure 48 Hotels and pubs often exhibit some of the liveliest architecture of the suburban landscape; in Anfield and Breckfield nearly all compete for business on the main thoroughfares, usually on corner plots: (a) (left) The Windermere, dated 1866, and its twin The Breck, Breck Road, were among the earliest competitors of the old Cabbage Hall Inn [AA045101]; (b) (below) The George, showing vestiges of 'late-Georgian' design, curves around the major intersection of Breck and Oakfield Roads [AA045104]; (c) (opposite, top left) The Midden, Rydal Street, is one of only a handful of pubs on the area's side streets, but this unusually named pub still asserts its superiority over its residential neighbours through its scale and ornament [AA045099]; (d) (opposite, top right) The Flat Iron (formerly The Breckside), Walton Breck Road, construction of which prompted the owner of nearby Breck House to sell up and leave [AA041070]; (e) (opposite, bottom left) The King Harry Hotel, Anfield Road, dated 1885, is a fanciful evocation of Merrie England [AA045085]; (f) (opposite, bottom right) The Arkles (formerly The Royal Hotel), Anfield Road, late 1880s, occupies part of the site of Annfield House, once home to banker George Arkles. [AA041064].
Figure 49 Continuous parades of shops line much of Oakfield Road whilst the side streets are uniformly residential. This row (the name Plas Buildings suggests a Welsh builder or owner) dates from 1904. [AA045068]
Figure 50 Nos 96, 98 and 100 Breckfield Road North, built c!885. No 100 (nearest), originally the premises of a bread-and-flour dealer named Richard Taylor, has a long taking-in slot in the left-hand wall for receiving goods on the upper floors. [AA045107]
Figure 51a 8 Attwood Street was built as a cow-keeper's house, mid-1880s; the cowhouse roof is visible above the blue gate. [AA045083]
Figure 51b The word 'DAIRY' set prominently over the entrance. [DP027841]
Figure 51c The 1:500 map (with the house and cow-house highlighted; the yard in a paler tone) shows how cow-houses typically occupied awkward spaces left over when laying out residential streets. [Reproduced from the 1891
Ordnance Survey map, surveyed 1890]
The rapid influx of population to Anfield and Breckfield created a variety of human needs which either had not existed in the locality before, or for which existing small-scale provision now proved inadequate. All the larger villas enjoyed the mobility which a stable and coach house conferred but the smaller semi-detached villas erected from the 1840s onwards generally lacked such provision and the later terraced houses nearly always did so.Being relatively elevated the area was not penetrated by railways, but in 1866 the Canada Dock Branch of the London & North Western Railway skirted it to the east and north, and from 1870 until 1948 passenger trains called at Walton (from 1910 Walton & Anfield) and Breck Road Stations.
Horse-drawn trams served the area from 1870 until about 1900 when electric trams were introduced, running until the 1950s when they were replaced by buses. Tram routes were established along Breck Road, Breckfield Road North, Robson Street, Oakfield Road and Walton Breck Road, providing services not only to central Liverpool but to a number of adjoining suburbs. But, at a time when most people could afford neither to keep their own horse nor (even after workmen's fares were introduced on the railways in the 1880s) to make regular use of public transport, numerous facilities needed to be within reasonable walking distance of people's homes.
In the wake of the terraced housing, therefore, came churches and chapels, shops and pubs, cow-houses and dairies, a large public park, and later schools, a football ground and a police station. The manner in which these buildings were distributed, and the forms which they took, tell us much about the nature and workings of the late 19th-century suburb. Across the nation unmanaged urban growth in the first half of the 19th century had outstripped the provision of churches, as the 1851 Religious Census confirmed, and the perceived godlessness of the nation's towns and cities dismayed many.
In the decades that followed many faiths vied for the souls of the new urban and suburban populace. Churches and chapels, in many cases combined with schools, sprang up quickly in Anfield and Breckfield, reflecting a wide variety of Christian denominations. In the countryside the dominance of the Anglican Church was often reinforced by local landowners who could withhold building plots from rival sects, but in the growing towns social control was looser. Most had a long Nonconformist tradition and in Liverpool this was particularly, though not exclusively, associated with the growing Welsh community. Liverpool also had a considerable Roman Catholic population, much of it of Irish extraction.
The various faiths and sects sprang from diverse cultures and their buildings project these differences in the landscape. The Anglicans were first to address the needs of the fledgling suburbs of Anfield and Breckfield, creating a perpetual curacy within the ancient parish of Walton-on-the-Hill and building Holy Trinity Church, Breck Road, in 1845-7 (Fig 42). The beneficiaries of this Gothic stone church designed by John Hay would initially have been villa-dwellers in the main, many of whom actively promoted its construction, though a capacity of 700 suggests that new development was anticipated. The Baptists were next off the mark, their brick-built Italianate-style Richmond Baptist Church, designed by J A Picton, opening further along Breck Road in 1865 at a time when the construction of mass housing was poised to begin. Though an imposing building on a corner site, the church's immediate neighbours were shops and pubs in what was the area's first and most important commercial street, giving it a less exclusive, more workaday air (Fig 43). Its energetic first minister, Frederick Hall Robarts, is probably commemorated in nearby Robarts Road.
By the 1870s Anglican parishes were proliferating to meet the challenges posed by the influx of population. A second foundation, St Cuthbert's Church, Robson Street (demolished), was built in 1875-7 to a design by T D Barry & Sons. Constructed of stone in the Decorated style of medieval church architecture, it exploited a prominent site with three street frontages: the west front was placed at a raking angle to the newly laid out Robson Street, with a steeple rising from one corner (see Fig 73). The result was that it stood apart from, and towered above, its neighbours in a way that the Richmond Baptist Church did not. The vicarage was a substantial villa placed somewhat aloofly on the more exclusive Anfield Road (most ministers of religion, of whatever faith, lived alongside the villa-owners). A later Anglican church, St Simon and St Jude, Anfield Road (T C Edby, 1893-6; demolished), was executed in brick without a tower, sounding a less strident note, but it occupied a similar triple-frontage site suggestive of the determination of the established church to assert its supremacy.
The Catholic community in the area appears never to have been very numerous, and typically congregations were less wealthy than those of the Anglicans. The Catholics did not acquire a chapel until 1889 when All Saints, Oakfield, was opened with an attached school. This was evidently found wanting and in 1910 the present stone church was built alongside to a relatively elaborate Gothic design by J & B Sinnott, the chapel becoming part of the school. The present church incorporates a rose window in the east end, but it lacks the soaring accents of more lavish church building, and it nestles unobtrusively in one of the surviving villa enclaves.
The other places of worship in the area are all Nonconformist churches and chapels. Like the Richmond Baptist Chapel they can be imposing structures but their landscape setting mirrors their less exclusive social standing, and typically they mingle more evenly with the general run of houses and commercial buildings. One of the liveliest designs, dating from shortly before 1896, is that of the former English Presbyterian Church (now the Temple of Praise) with its adjacent manse on Oakfield Road (Fig 44). Others, like the austere and industrial-looking former Free Welsh Church (now Crete Hall), Donaldson Street, built c1900 on the site of a former quarry, speak of the determination of a fiercely independent and far from wealthy immigrant community to preserve its identity in a new setting (Fig 45).
None of the churches mentioned above has a graveyard. The Burial Act of 1852, a response to the shockingly overcrowded state of graveyards in London and other large towns and cities, led to the creation of large multi-denominational cemeteries on the rural fringes. Anfield Cemetery, laid out between 1861 and 1864 north-east of what was to become Stanley Park, served the parish of Liverpool, but it also took burials from the immediate neighbourhood (Fig 46). The work successively of William Gay and Edward Kemp (landscaping) and Lucy & Littler (buildings), it is divided into Anglican, Roman Catholic and Nonconformist zones, each originally with its own chapel.
A number of the churches and chapels were built with, or subsequently acquired, schools for either daily or Sunday attendance. Prior to the 1870 Education Act the various religious denominations were the main providers of education for the less well-off, and even after 1870 state educational provision initially aimed at filling gaps in the existing network of schools rather than supplanting the church authorities. In promoting education the churches were fulfilling a Christian mission but they were also competing with one another for congregations. The popularity of Sunday schools waned during the 20th century and most have been demolished, but the Welsh Wesleyan Methodist Church and Sunday School on Oakfield Road, built between 1906 and 1908, remains, as does the Sunday school attached to the Richmond Baptist Chapel, albeit as rebuilt in 1930-1 (see Fig 80). Not all schooling was in the hands of the church. William Gawin Herdman (1805-82), one of Liverpool's foremost artists, ran a drawing academy in his house at 41 St Domingo Vale. His family included his artist sons William and James Innes, whose work is reproduced here (see Figs 4,12 and 18), and his wife Martha, who ran a music academy. A number of other villas hosted small schools for 'young ladies'.
Under the 1870 Education Act school boards were established wherever gaps or shortfalls were identified in the existing church and voluntary educational provision. Keeping pace with rapid suburban growth was understandably a major preoccupation. Breckfield fell under the Liverpool School Board, which opened premises in Granton Road in 1880 (demolished 2005) and Venice Street in 1886; in the same year Anfield, which was the responsibility of the Walton-on-the-Hill School Board, acquired its own school in Anfield Road. All three schools were built on a substantial scale but those in Venice Street and Granton Road strikingly sit at the heart of their communities - not on the main thoroughfares but in residential side streets, where as a result they sacrifice some of the visual potency of their tall, well-mannered elevations (Figs 47a and b). The large and much-extended Anfield Road School more conventionally (for a major public building) occupies a key street frontage, where its ventilation spire is a striking landmark (Fig 47c). All three schools were influenced by the Domestic Revival style of architecture, dignified yet approachable, and resolutely secular in contrast to the Gothic styles favoured by most church authorities.
Prominent street corners, so attractive for the siting of churches, were also seized upon by brewers, whose ministry to corporeal needs assumed very different architectural forms, some revelling in the challenge of using a triangular plot effectively (Fig 48). The larger public houses of the late 19th century temptingly offered a home from home - a heightened version of the domestic ideal. They are substantial, ostentatious and frequently gaudy, their exteriors - often brightly coloured with glazed brick or terracotta, and incorporating fanciful embellishments -promising instant gratification for the senses rather than rewards in the hereafter.
Typically containing two or more bars and a separate area for off-sales as well as function rooms, letting rooms and accommodation for the publican's family, they required careful planning and preferably multiple entrances - one factor in the popularity of corner sites. Besides serving refreshments the larger establishments, like The Arkles (formerly The Royal Hotel) and The King Harry Hotel, both on Anfield Road, provided meeting places for a range of purposes, and since they were eye-catching they became natural reference points for residents and visitors alike. There were few pubs on the residential side streets but where they occur (The Midden on Rydal Street is characteristic) they are smaller, though still taller and more ornate than their domestic neighbours.
The manner in which shops were distributed in the suburb was rather different from that of pubs. The vast majority, and all the more prestigious examples, were on a small number of main thoroughfares -Breck Road, Oakfield Road, Walton Breck Road and Breckfield Road North - and most were grouped in rows or parades running from the junction with one side street to the next (Fig 49). Behind these main streets shops of any kind were rare. Two lesser thoroughfares -Thirlmere Road (c!870) and Blessington Road (1880s) - served less affluent parts of the suburb; here, although a modest shop stood on practically every street corner, the intervening plots were mostly taken for ordinary houses. Most of the shops in the suburb would have served essentially local needs - provisions and domestic necessities of one sort or another - and consequently they are not lavish in appearance. All the shops in the suburb combined retail and domestic accommodation, the shopkeeper and his family living 'over the shop' in most cases. The most interesting buildings are perhaps those that illustrate the relationship between retailing and the warehousing of merchandise (Fig 50).
A number of the shops were dairies, which remind us of the importance of local milk supplies at a time when home refrigeration was not widely available. When the suburb was new and fringed with fields, local farms would have supplied milk but as the population grew and the countryside receded purpose-built town dairies sprang up. Now largely forgotten, town dairies provided fresh milk for local distribution drawn from cows kept in nearby cow-houses. These humble buildings were tucked away on the scraps of land least attractive to house builders, often triangular spaces remaining to the rear of houses following the laying out of an irregular parcel (Fig 51). Cow-keepers were not, on the whole, wealthy members of the community either, and their terraced houses seldom rise above the level of those they adjoin.
It requires an effort of the imagination to visualise the streets of Anfield and Breckfield as they would have appeared in the closing decades of the 19th century. The great majority of wage-earners would have worked outside the locality, and there would have been a considerable flow of people, mostly on foot, but some on trams and omnibuses, towards the city and the docks in the early morning, and back again in the evening. Children would have flocked to the three board schools. During the working day women, servants and the elderly would have been more conspicuous, buying the day's food. Many women, however, would have had paid work, and for them, and for many of their male counterparts, shopping for food and other items would have continued into the evening. Horses would have been much in evidence, drawing tradesmen's carts and the lighter equipages of wealthier residents, the iron-shod hooves and wheels resounding on the setts that paved the main thoroughfares and the rougher cobbles of the side streets.
Cattle driven to and from the local cow-keepers' premises would have been a rarer but evocative sight, briefly recalling the sounds and smells of the countryside. The day would be punctuated by the deliveries of draymen and coal merchants, by the closing of many shops at lunchtime, by the noisy afternoon outpouring of schoolchildren and, in the evening, by the reconvening of family life and a variety of social, educational and sporting pursuits, some centring on the numerous pubs but many, for children at least, in the open street. Recreation, relaxation and spiritual nourishment dominated the short weekend, from Saturday afternoon (when football fixtures would be held) to Sunday evening.
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