Architectural Urban Myths

I've just posted an example on my other blog of something that people like to tell each other even though it can't be true.

The demeanour when passing on one of these curious adult fairy tales, following a rhetorical enquiry regarding your awareness of the 'fact' in question, is usually that of condescension mixed with surprise at your ignorance.

If you refuse to play along by feigning surprise at your own lack of a sense of intellectual engagement with your environment, followed by rueful recognition of the strange circumstance you've failed to register and appreciation for its illumination, and can be bothered to point out why it can't be true, the demeanour quickly changes to truculence and disappointment at your lack of appreciation for their generosity, almost as if you've spurned membership of a club that they're proud to be part of.

The examples I'm going to give here are "buildings they built back to front", both major civic structures whose architectural significance is on a national if not global scale.

The first is St George's Hall, Liverpool, and the story goes something like this:

"Oh yeah, St George's Hall - you know they built it back to front? Yeah, and when the architect found out, he committed suicide."

I've been listening to that one since I was a child, and it's sometimes followed up with one about the lions in front having no teeth - apparently they were copied from the ones on Trafalgar Square, and by the time someone noticed there were no teeth, it was too late.*

The St George's Plateau set is completed by poking ridicule at the sculptor of the statue on top of the column to the north east of St George's Hall, sometimes described as being of Nelson, sometimes, correctly, as Wellington, for depicting his subject wearing a Roman toga with jackboots and a sword.

St George's Hall is a pared-down neoclassical building on a superhuman scale which presages the style favoured for public buildings in the 1930s in Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, the USA, and most notoriously, Nazi Germany. One of the many crimes of the Nazi regime, albeit on a minor scale by comparison, is the damning of this ultimate development of classicism by association with rally grounds and militarism.

It was designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes in 1842, who did in fact die before it was completed in 1854, but from exhaustion, not suicide.

Aside from the idiocy of suggesting that Victorian surveyors couldn't use a compass, or Victorian builders follow a plan, and that the architect wouldn't visit the site before the walls were raised, there's nothing in the building's aspect or design that suggests it's the wrong way round. 

Here's an aerial view ©webbaviation

On the left is Lime Street, Liverpool's main thoroughfare, and St George's main entrance here faces Lime St Station, Liverpool's main railway station.

On the right is an ornamental garden with no vehicular access.

And the lions do have teeth, and they couldn't have been copied from Landseer's at Trafalgar Square because those were designed in 1866, eleven years after Cockerell designed the lions for St George's Plateau.

As you can see here, Wellington isn't wearing a toga either, although perhaps the cape might be mistaken for a toga from the back - but the statue is at the NE side of St George's plateau, with its front facing the city centre.

The other building I've heard people say was built the wrong way round is in Glasgow. 

It's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, built for the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901.

Here's the front, on Argyle St, one of Glasgow's main thoroughfares, with a large porticoed entrance:

and here's the back, overlooking the River Kelvin, with no entrance:

For it to be the wrong way round, Glasgow would have to have been still living in the canal age in 1901.

 PS - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkdale_Palace_Hotel for perhaps the most celebrated example of this architectonic histeron-proteron delusion.

* An urban myth about Reading's Maidan Lion statue and its sculptor combines elements of the St George's Hall and associated lion statues myths: "It was rumoured that Blackall Simonds killed himself as the lion’s pose was not accurate. This is not true! He studied the movement of lions at London Zoo and it shows the moment when a lion is moving at speed. Experts from London Zoo have even confirmed that the pose is accurate."