Our last full day in Liverpool and to give thanks for an excellent holiday we visited two religious establishments. The first was the Catholic cathedral which was built in the 1960’s and is known locally as “Paddy’s Wigwam”. It is a really nice building inside, the altar is in the centre and all 2,000 worshippers have a good view of the action. It is much more effective than the only other modern cathedral we have been to in Coventry.
Those of you who have been paying attention to the blog may remember I mentioned that the 1930’s design for the cathedral was for a massive building but that only the crypt had been built before the war broke out.
The 1960’s building has been built over one end of the crypt which has been retained as a huge hall underneath the church, it was closed today but apparently it hosts an important religious celebration each year – the Liverpool Beer Festival.
Talking of which the other place of worship we visited was a wonderful Victorian pub called the Philharmonic Dining Rooms which have the finest urinals in the whole of the UK.
Before all that excitement we did our last museum, the Victoria Museum and Gallery which is part of the University. They have a leaking roof so the Tate Hall was closed which is a shame as apparently it is a grand hall. Whilst the exhibits were fine the best thing was the building itself, over the top Victorian with glazed brickwork making all the walls shiny.
During our wanders round the many galleries this week we viewed a great many paintings including those by Picasso, Turner and Matisse as well as some good, less well known, works.
Our visit coincided with the Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art much of which Gill and I have difficulty getting our heads round. One artists work was described as:
These paintings capture a “familiar unfamiliarity”, as the artist describes it, where the viewer can insist on reorganising certain figures or forms, only to see them dissolve. For the artist, the stretched canvas provides a physical space onto which the material of the paint itself has the power to embody a vast range of characters, reflecting the fluid multiplicity of the human experience. Moving between abstraction and figuration the artist contemplates notions of identity in an attempt to recognise a sense of place in an uncertain world.
My translation – a load of splodges on a bit of canvas.
Tomorrow I head for home and Gill to Scotland to visit Tom & Co. I will write a "thoughts on holiday" on the way home, watch this space for the last exciting instalment.