Dome affairs

I called into the Town Hall today and thought you might like to see this dome over the grand staircase.

You may even enjoy a spot of civic history. If not... Look away now!

The 'free borough' of Liverpool was originally granted a charter by King John in 1207 but had to wait until 1515 before it got a town hall. Well, I say 'town hall' but it was basically a thatched barn (sounds rather nice actually!) which hosted all civic events. A more substantial building was constructed in 1673 but they must've hired some dodgy builders because the foundations proved decidedly dicey!

So - a flashy new architect, John Wood, was engaged to produce, more or less, the building you see here which was built between 1749 and 1754. As was the case with much of the city's civic development in those days a lot of the funding came from businesses associated with the slave trade and it is said that 16 of Liverpool's Lord Mayors were slave 'merchants'. Impossible to comprehend...

Although anti-slavery campaigners never attacked the town hall it was fired on by a ship's cannon when sailors went on strike over wage cuts brought about by a trade downturn at the time of the American War of Independence in the late 1770s. Further damage was done by a fire in 1795 but restoration work and modifications took place over the next several years.

In 1881 a bomb plot by Fenians (Irish republicans) attempting to blow up the building was discovered at the last minute... German bombing in 1941 was more successful but the building was restored once again and has had a relatively calm recent history unless you count the scenes shown regularly on TV at the time of Derek Hatton and the Trotskyite 'Militant' administration of 1983-87, just when I first started living around these parts.

I can't help but wonder what's going to happen next...