Palatine

The lettering on this very handsome buiding in the Liverpool One shopping centre reads County Palatine Buildings 1866. The word Palatine was not very familiar to me, and the nice man who stopped to talk to me didn't know it either. He remembered this part of Liverpool as home to a big Irish community and thought the building had been a theatre at one time, before it was Quiggins, the eclectic emporium which has moved elsewhere. Back home, I discovered that Liverpool used to be in the County Palatine of Lancaster, a huge county which retained a certain degree of independence from the Crown. Fascinating.