Two cathedrals, one street. That is how Liverpool describes Hope Street, and although the line has been used so often that it has become almost a slogan, the geography behind it is genuinely improbable. At the northern end of Hope Street stands the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, the Catholic seat, completed in 1967 to a Frederick Gibberd design that locals nicknamed Paddy's Wigwam for its concrete tent of stained glass. At the southern end stands Liverpool Cathedral, the Anglican seat, the largest cathedral in Britain, completed in 1978 to Giles Gilbert Scott's red sandstone Gothic vision. Between them, exactly half a mile of Georgian terraces, theatres, the Philharmonic Hall, and pubs older than either church.
The name was already a gift to writers and preachers when the street was laid out. It belongs not to the theological virtue but to William Hope (1751-1827), a Liverpool merchant whose house stood on what is now the site of the Philharmonic Hall. The street itself was straightened in the 1790s, with residential building beginning around the turn of the century. The houses along Hope Street and the parallel Rodney Street, plus the elegant terraces of Gambier Terrace facing the Anglican Cathedral, together form the Rodney Street conservation area, the densest concentration of Georgian architecture in Liverpool. The Academy of Urbanism named Hope Street the Great Street of the United Kingdom and Ireland in 2013, judging it the best street in the country.
On the corner of Myrtle Street stands Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, home of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society. The current hall was designed by Herbert James Rowse and built between 1936 and 1939, replacing an earlier 1849 building by John Cunningham that burned down in 1933. Rowse's design is starkly cubic in brick, broken only by a pair of rounded stair-towers, with etched glass by Hector Whistler in the first-floor windows and main entrance doors. Across the street is a different Philharmonic: the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a Grade II listed Victorian pub famously decorated with mosaic, copper, and stained glass, including a gents' toilet so elaborately tiled and pink-marbled that it is regularly listed among the most beautiful in Britain. Beatles fans know it as the place John Lennon used to drink, and once famously said that the price of fame was "not being able to go to the Phil for a drink".
The Everyman Theatre on Hope Street has produced generations of British acting talent, including Julie Walters, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, and Antony Sher. The current building, opened in 2014, won the Stirling Prize. At the top of Mount Street, where Hope Street meets the Anglican Cathedral end of its run, stands the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the school Paul McCartney founded in 1996 inside the building of his old school, the Liverpool Institute for Boys, which had closed in 1985. Outside it stands a remarkable sculpture by John King called A Case History, unveiled in 1998: items of luggage cast in concrete and stacked on the pavement, the labels on the suitcases naming notable individuals and institutions of the city. The piece has become a quiet landmark, a memorial to the people who left and the people who came back.
Gambier Terrace runs along Hope Street facing the Anglican Cathedral. Numbers 2 to 10 were built between 1832 and 1837 by the developer Ambrose Lace, to a design in ashlar and stucco often attributed to John Foster Jr. The terrace was extended through the late 1830s and early 1840s. In the early 1960s, when Stuart Sutcliffe (the original bass guitarist of the Beatles) was at the Liverpool College of Art on Hope Street, he and John Lennon shared a flat in Gambier Terrace, which Lennon's first wife Cynthia later remembered as a chaotic art-school squat. The pair drank in nearby Ye Cracke on Rice Street, a small, dark, classic Liverpool pub that still has the snug they used to sit in. None of this is on a tourist plaque. The street keeps its secrets while broadcasting its name.
Walk Hope Street from the Catholic Cathedral toward the Anglican and the architecture gradually changes the light. The Metropolitan Cathedral's stained-glass lantern throws blue and red across its concrete drum. Move south past the Philharmonic, past the Hope Street Hotel, past the bronze Sheppard-Worlock statue commemorating the late Anglican Bishop David Sheppard and Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock, who together led the city's churches through the divisive 1980s. The street rises slightly. The huge red sandstone bulk of Liverpool Cathedral comes into view, with St James Mount and Gardens beside it. The light shifts from glass to stone. A street that takes maybe fifteen minutes to walk has framed two of the great twentieth-century buildings of Britain, and made you think, briefly, about whatever it is you mean by hope.
Hope Street runs through central Liverpool's Georgian Quarter, between the Metropolitan Cathedral at its northern end and Liverpool Cathedral at its southern end, at 53.40°N, 2.97°W. The street runs roughly north-south and is approximately half a mile long. Best viewed from 1,500-3,000 ft. Liverpool John Lennon Airport (EGGP) is 7 nm south-southeast. Look for the two cathedrals: the Metropolitan with its tent-like crown of stained glass to the north, and the Anglican's huge red sandstone tower to the south, with the dense Georgian terraces filling the half-mile between them.