Exploring A Part Of Liverpool City Centre You May Never Have Seen

Описание: If you stand behind the Victoria Gallery & Museum in the university quadrangle you may not realise that the foundations of the first building on this site lie beneath your feet. An asylum was erected here in 1829 and served until 1881 where it was repurposed and converted for the use of University College Liverpool.

From an early account of life in the asylum we know that bedroom doors were unlocked at 6.00 am and patients were washed and the state of their skin examined. At 9.00am, following breakfast, they were taken to the airing courts and gardens while the wards were cleaned. Bedtime was at 8.00pm, and patients slept in long rows of beds that were two feet and six inches apart.

In 1881 the asylum and its grounds were sold to the London and North-Western Railway Company who intended to construct a new line from Edge Hill to Lime Street station. The new line passed right underneath the building which would have been distressing for the patients with all of the noise and smoke from the trains and so the asylum closed and the patients were moved to other local institutions like Rainhill.

Not all of the land was required by the railway company and in 1881 Thomas Cope, the founder of a Liverpool tobacco manufacturing company, bought the land for approximately £20,000 which he then presented to University College Liverpool as a loan. The Corporation of the City of Liverpool also applied to Parliament to raise £30,000 to secure the land and buildings on this site.

The college employed Alfred Waterhouse, who had extensive experience designing academic institutions in Oxford and Cambridge, to draw up plans to renovate the old asylum.

The conversion cost £20,000 and on the 14th January 1882, the college opened with 45 students.

The converted building served to accommodate Natural History, Physics, Engineering, Architecture, Modern Literature and Law, together with a lecture room, library, reading room, ladies' common room and professors' common room.

One story attached to the building is of a professor who was working late one night and found himself locked in the deserted building. He attracted the attention of a passing policeman from an upper window and said he had been locked in by mistake. To which the policeman replied "Ah! They all say that." But there is no mention if the professor was ever let out!

All that remains of the asylum is the shape of the current quadrangle which had grown up around the site and when the quadrangle was redeveloped in 2012 the original foundations could be seen under the ground. By looking at historic photographs of the site, ADP Architecture discovered that the quadrangle had originally had an oval shape and formed the basis of their designs for the Diamond Jubilee Quadrangle that we see today.

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