Britain, culturally introverted as it was in the early 1900s, was nevertheless still part of the wider processes of cosmopolitanism associated with early European Modernism. Liverpool, because of its cultural and geographical circumstances, found itself closer to American ideas of modernity: in relation to architecture, particularly American ideas about building technology and how it could relate to design. These ideas became institutionalised within the city's cultural structures and further, as they became increasingly influential nationally, and then internationally, were to play an important role in the spread of design practices that we now characterise as culturally progressive.

That there was a clear relationship between some ideas seen as belonging to the Arts and Crafts, and to those of the Beaux Arts as conceived in Liverpool, is indisputable. These ideas relate to the Arts and Crafts conception of the ideological purposes of design; what its methodology should be, and what it expresses, or should express, socially. The difference between the Arts and Crafts and the Beaux Arts is merely one of physical expression. The look of objects has traditionally been seen as the most significant means of their analysis, because it emphasises differences immediately. If however one looks for correspondences and continuities between objects and their design methodologies the evolution and development of ideas from one style into another becomes clearer. During the period 1880–1914, the Arts and Crafts conception of a vernacular, commonplace design – representing a material-based design philosophy co-operatively instigated – developed nationally into a baroque, art nouveau, individualistic design that bore stylistic similarities to the Arts and Crafts but which negated its agenda of the collective. At the same time as this transition took place, so did a rejection of the stylistic coding of the Arts and Crafts which had come to be seen as incapable of expressing what it had before: a cooperative, universal design ideology. This book explores developments in Liverpool, where the adoption of new industrial technologies and educational practices from the United States of America occurred alongside the adaptation of past ideas about the handcrafts. The new form in which these ideas were to express themselves was Beaux Arts derived. During this period the established Arts and Crafts union of methodology and style split into two.

There is a Lumière Brothers’ film of 1896 – among the first made for the Lumière Cinematographe – of the Liverpool Overhead Railway that ran the length of the city's docks. In addition to its main subject, the film, which is of several reels’ duration, shows a city of machines and people in a frenzy of activity. Liverpool at the turn of the nineteenth century was a busy cosmopolitan port where the new was both welcome and necessary. It was a city that relied on technological innovation for its continued financial success, and its success meant the influx of objects and ideas from other cultures. The Mersey was a link with the rest of the world, and at the turn of the century Liverpool was one of the most prosperous ports in the world. As a consequence of this, the city saw itself as looking out from, rather than into, the island culture in which it was situated. The city was part of the early modernist dialogue of internationalism, the city's cultural institutions expressing their cosmopolitanism largely through the adoption of American rather than European ideas.

The particular conditions that formed Liverpool as a city and cultural centre encouraged the intellectual transgression that characterised Modernism, and stimulated investigation into the the arts and sciences. The port and its town was physically and intellectually new, as isolated from the cultural history of England as it had been physically isolated from the centre of power. In 1907 Walter Dixon Scott wrote that Liverpool was

It was the modernity of Liverpool that made it remarkable in Britain. It was not unlike the cities of the United States, and its constant physical expansion was clearly visible as its maritime and mercantile structures increased.

NATIONAL initiatives, such as the Technical Instruction Act, enabled the development of ideas about architectural education in Liverpool, but were it not for its own vigorous cultural life the city would not have been able to capitalise upon the events taking place. The city had its own institutions and a number of powerful figures who were eager for cultural change. In examining their attitudes it is possible to see where Liverpudlian intellectual life meshed with national preoccupations and where and how the local initiatives developed. The interlocking web of personalities and the organisations created a cultural environment in Liverpool that contained the ingredients necessary for the instigation of the new venture in design education, and the political will to put it into operation. This sense of a city culture is important because it militates against the idea (as has been suggested in the past) 1 that the founding of the Liverpool School can be attributed to a specific individual, or to a single set of ideas. To do so is to neglect the wider cultural sphere with all its complications and contradictions, and to make the supposition that the concurrence of ideas by different protagonists also means their active collaboration. The city's institutions were neither self-sufficient nor self-enclosed. Institutions, whether the existing School of Art, the city council's Technical Instruction Committee, or the Liverpool Architectural Society were in constant negotiation with each other and with national bodies. Sometimes in agreement with each other, sometimes not, these multiple acts of institutional negotiation created the intellectual and practical environment in which the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Arts was conceived and founded.

Conway's last act in Liverpool, in partnership with Philip Rathbone, was the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry. He was acting outside his role as Roscoe Professor, although one must assume it was his status as professor that enabled him to gain the support of so many eminent practitioners. The Liverpool Congress of the Association was the first of three, the other congresses were held in Edinburgh and Birmingham, and Conway's resignation as secretary to the Association led to its ultimate demise.

IT should not suprise us that when the aims and objectives of the new Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art are scrutinised, a number of contradictions emerge. Neither should it be a suprise to find those contradictions have already been identified in the wider aspects of design culture within the city. A body of opinion sees the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art as a paradigm of Arts and Crafts education; yet even a cursory comparison between Jackson's inaugural address, and Professor Simpson's first scheme of work, shows substantial differences in expectation for the course. Jackson looked to a national vernacular design rooted in the past; Simpson looked to the new experiments in architectural education in the United States. What links the two men was their interest in methodology. If the early American influence on design thinking in Liverpool is emphasised, it fundamentally alters the traditional perception of the evolution of ‘Beaux Arts’ training in Britain, placing its origins in Liverpool a decade earlier than has previously been thought. It also alters the ideological perception of the Beaux Art style as practised at Liverpool in the early twentieth century, because the style emerged from within the Arts and Crafts debate, and was not solely a reaction against its ideas.

The Liverpool School was formally opened by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in the University Arts Theatre on 10 May 1895. His views on architectural education are not of quite the same authority as those of T. G. Jackson, who gave the inaugural address, but are worth a glance in order to gauge the local establishment's opinion of the experiment which was taking place in the city. In his opening speech the Mayor talked of Liverpool's ‘civic love of art’, and painted a picture of slow cultural progress from the instigation of the Society for the Encouragement of Designing, Drawing and Painting in 1768 to its culmination in the municipal funding of the School of Architecture. Philip Rathbone's role in helping to establish the School was formally acknowledged, and the man himself spoke with the cultural emphasis that would be expected from him. The Daily Post reported him saying that: ‘it was only right and fair that they should help skilled labour to become more common.

WITHOUT their local cultural environment, William Lever and Charles Reilly would not have been able to contribute to the development of town planning as they did. Equally however, they were themselves an important component part of that culture, and without their energies the channelling of contemporary ideas about planning in the city into the Department of Civic Design would not have taken place. Reilly first met Lever in 1904 after his appointment as Head of the School of Architecture. Reilly wrote to Lever in April of that year, and in his letter invited himself and his students to look at the church and one of the dwellings in Port Sunlight village. After some misunderstandings the meeting between the two men went ahead. ‘It did not,’ Reilly was to say some 30 years later, ‘seem a propitious beginning’. When Conway, formally Roscoe Professor, now Sir Martin, came to Port Sunlight to formally open Hulme Hall later that year, Reilly was invited to dinner by Lever and from this point on their mutually advantageous relationship began. Reilly provided Lever with proposals of a suitable dignity on which to spend his money, and thus enhance his reputation as an architectural patron, and Lever provided the finance by which Reilly was able to extend his power base, both within the University and nationally.

In July 1907 Lever was the victor in a libel case he had instigated against the Daily Mail. Encouraged by Reilly, Lever developed a ‘patronly interest’ in the School of Architecture and proceeded to spend the awarded damages on the School of Architecture and the Department of Civic Design. His first act of benevolence in June 1908 was the purchase of the Blue Coat Hospital. Within a week of Reilly's suggestion to Lever that it would be a good site for the School, Lever purchased an option on the building and then offered it to Reilly (or more correctly the University) rent free. Obviously emboldened by this success Reilly then suggested the formation of a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture. The wider cultural background to this event has already been discussed, but it does not diminish the sense of astonishment at the alacrity at which Reilly's initiative was taken up by Lever.

THE City of Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art was inaugurated in 1895. It has been briefly described by several authors in the past, all of whom acknowledge that the School was an innovative episode in the history of architectural education, in part because of its alliance with the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement. Its place in the history of architectural education is more easily established than trying to define the Arts and Crafts milieu in which it operated. It was not the first architectural course to be organised in Britain, although it was the first extra-metropolitan one. Nor was it the first full-time course – that had been established by Kings College London three years previously. What made the course unique was a combination of elements; its relative newness, its response to specific cultural circumstances, its funding in part by the municipal authorities, and its adoption of an integrated teaching programme that was briefly to become a teaching norm, principally under the direction of William Lethaby, firstly at the Central College of Arts and Crafts in London and then at the Royal College of Art.

The first architectural instruction in England was to be found at the Royal Academy Schools that were inaugurated in 1768. The value of such instruction was historically undistinguished until the Professorship of Architecture was awarded to Sir John Soane who held it from 1806–37. His commitment to his teaching at the Academy was the reason he felt unable to accept the Presidency of the newly founded RIBA in 1834. In 1870 the Academy set up a separate School of Architecture under Phené Spiers, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

The first certificated technical architectural education was offered by University College London in 1841 with the appointment of T. L. Donaldson (the first secretary of the RIBA) to the Professorship of Architecture. This took the form of a diploma offered by the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture. The year 1841 also saw the establishment of an architectural course at King's College London. Both these courses were seen as supplementing, rather than supplanting, the process of office training. During the 1840s the Government School of Design had architectural students in attendance, but there was no provision for an architectural education.