Geoffrey Johnson

The Secret History of Liverpool Cathedral Geoffrey Johnson

The building of a card model of Liverpool Cathedral needed a lot of research, and the Vere E. Cotton's work The Book of Liverpool Cathedral was the most helpful of all the sourcees of information. Written by a long-serving member of the Cathedral Building Committee it was a treasure trove of early photographs and drawings. The reason for the drastic alteration of the building from the competition-winning three tower building to one with a single tower in 1910 was never explained by the architect, and for 84 years people have looked at the architecture trying to solve the mystery without success. Because the project made the author look at the cathedral from a viewpoint other than at its architecture, which nobody appears to have done before, he discovered the secret purpose of, and the motivation behind, the radical redesign of 1910. In his book, Cotton virtually admits that he was mystified at some aspects of the building. Strangely, it also contains the clues which helped resolve the mystery. So this work is the sequel to The Book of Liverpool Cathedral as it exposes the architect's secret and explains how and why the present design evolved.