Tales from The Crypt

As it prepares for a series of candle-lit tours for the Long Night this month, Lutyen's Crypt reveals its secrets to SevenStreets as part of our Underground Liverpool season.

We’re used to the city’s cellars revealing the seamier side of life. But, despite many an evening spent below decks seeking out some after-hours thrills or sweaty music gig, nothing could prepare us for the sheer, jaw-to-the-floor sensation we had when we visited Lutyen’s Crypt.

It’s rare you experience such a crunching of gears moving from street level to basement - we can think of nowhere in Liverpool that has such a transformative effect. But that’s the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King for you.

To us, the Cathedral’s always looked like it’s been transplanted from Brasília - there’s something of the open, non-dogmatic Latin American Catholicism about it. Above, it’s all strident 60’s Pop-Art geometry, jaunty mosaics and the sort of streamlined teak furnishings that Utility would die for.

Head downstairs, though, and you’re definitely moving from New to Old - and not just in Testaments. But architecturally and atmospherically too.

Lutyen’s Crypt is no ordinary ecclesiastical cellar. To SevenStreets, and the many hundreds for whom this space is sacred, this is Liverpool’s third Cathedral. A secret spiritual bunker. Hey, we’ve got a bombed out church, so it fits that we’d have a sunken Cathedral.

For first time visitors, Lutyen’s Crypt is a place of shock, and of awe. A cool white spiral staircase leading earthwards from the Cathedral’s Portland stone-cladded plateau takes you into another world, another time, and one of the city’s lost architectural gems.

In many ways, it’s only recently been rediscovered - or, perhaps, reclaimed - as a space not just for religious services (for the city’s Polish Catholics, and school children at the neighbouring St Nicholas primary), but for beer festivals, recitals, architecture exhibitions and conferences too.

Katie Lucas is our contact from the Crypt - and, today, our fact-filled tour guide.

“If things had gone to plan, we’d be standing underneath the largest Cathedral in the world now,” she says.

Craning our necks up towards the corbelled ceiling, thirty feet above, it still feels like we are.

The first thing that strikes us, though, is not just the meticulous brickwork, not just the scale of Lutyen’s ambition - a ghostly footprint of a gargantuan construction above: a Cathedral on a St Peter’s-scale that faltered when funds slunk away after the Second World War - but the deep, slate-purple colour of the brick, and the enormous granite pediments and coping stones, hewn from the Penryn quarry in Cornwall.

“The bricks were specially baked to withstand what was supposed to be the enormous weight of the Cathedal above it,” Katie tells us. There are, she says, over six million. Now these deep purple arches are bent in emptiness, over emptiness. But flying.

That they were originally destined to be plastered over is another chilling story altogether. Thankfully, following a £3million spring clean, which saw the Crypt ‘re-open’ last year, the bricks are shining, and plaster-free.

There’s a huddle of glass-fronted display cabinets telling, in newspaper cuttings and yellowing blueprints, the story behind the stones. Yes, the models and artist’s impressions of the intended Catheral - shown off in the Crypt’s permanent exhibition - show a staggering, be-domed behemoth, but we’re more than happy with our Liverpool compromise. A solid bedrock of tradition and skill, germinating into a wild burst of 60’s optimism and originality above. Put it that way, and you realise the story of the Metropolitan Cathedral is the story of the city it serves.

As we walk along the echoing halls of the Crypt’s symmetrical floor plan, we pass recessed chapels, with Indiana Jones-styled rolling marble portcullises - they house the tombs of three former Archbishops.

Presumably the image they were going for was the rolling stone that guarded the tomb of Jesus. But, trust us, the effect is more Harrison than God’s Son.

A treasure gallery gleams with the Crypt’s permanent collection of Catholic artifacts: chalices and plates worked in gold and other precious metals. All of which brings the irony stingingly to life: the Catholic Church “ran out of funds” to build the original Cathedral above? Really?

“Originally, this area would have been the cellars of a large Victorian workhouse that was demolished to make way for the Cathedral,” Katie tells us. A sprawling, gloomy institution that, doubtless, housed successive generations of Liverpool families, husband separated from wife, forced to work long hours, even while sick, for meagre rations of food (pic R taken during its demolition to make way for the Cathedral).

“Conditions in the workhouse were notoriously poor - legend has it that a tunnel was constructed to secretly transport dead bodies from the workhouse, direct to a medical lab where their remains were used for medical science,” Katie reveals.

“When Lutyen’s Cathedral was granted, he described it as ‘the moment of my life’,” Katie says. “Throughout his career, the project was the closest to his heart. There are reports of him requesting to see the plans as he lay on his deathbed.”

That a corner of the city so rooted in the misery of the past should now house two of our most glorious spaces is testament enough to our transformation.

Of course, religious spaces aren’t for everyone. And there are still many who’ve probably never stepped foot in the Metropolitan Cathedral. But SevenStreets implores you to make a pilgrimage to Lutyen’s Crypt.

Perhaps then you’ll gain a deeper understanding.

As part of the citywide Long Night on November 18, the Crypt will be hosting free candle-lit guided tours of the building throughout the evening between 6pm and 10pm. Guides will be on hand to talk through the Crypt’s architectural and historical significance.

Lutyen’s Crypt, £3
Mount Pleasant, Liverpool

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