The Georgian Quarter: Liverpool's Arts District, Two Cathedrals and the Half-Mile Between

Climb the hill east from Liverpool's waterfront and the city changes character. The docks and the commercial centre give way to a grid of Georgian streets, terraces of elegant townhouses, and at the top of the rise, Hope Street, with a cathedral anchoring each end. This is the Georgian Quarter, officially the Canning conservation area, and often called the Arts Quarter. It is where the wealth that Liverpool made on the water turned into culture rather than more commerce.

The grid the merchants built

In the late Georgian period, Liverpool's merchants, made rich by the docks below, built their homes up here on the higher, cleaner ground away from the river. The result is one of the best-preserved Georgian grids in Britain: straight streets of brick and stucco townhouses laid out with a regularity that the tangled medieval waterfront never had. The second port of empire thesis tells the story of where that money came from, some of it entangled with the transatlantic slave trade; the Georgian Quarter is one of the places you can see it standing in stone, as domestic architecture rather than dockside warehouse.

Hope Street itself was laid out in the 1790s and named for a merchant, William Hope, whose house stood where the Philharmonic Hall now stands. Neither cathedral existed then. The street got its two great bookends much later, and the coincidence of its hopeful name became one of the best-loved accidents in the city.

Hope Street, end to end

The architecture tour walks the half-mile of Hope Street from one cathedral to the other, and the street is the spine of the whole district. At the south end stands the Anglican Cathedral, the longest cathedral in the world, Giles Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic mountain. At the north end sits the Metropolitan Cathedral, Frederick Gibberd's 1960s modernist crown of concrete and glass on the crypt of an unbuilt Lutyens scheme. Two cathedrals, two centuries of taste, one street.

Between them is the sediment that makes the quarter an arts district rather than a monument corridor:

• The Philharmonic Hall, a 1939 Streamline Moderne concert hall, home of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, one of the country's oldest orchestras.
• The Philharmonic Dining Rooms, an 1898 pub opposite, so lavishly decorated it is Grade One listed. The young Paul McCartney is said to have played here, and its gentlemen's toilets are famous enough that people ask to look at them.
• The Everyman Theatre at the northern end, a cornerstone of Liverpool's theatrical life for decades.
• LIPA, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, founded by Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone-Witty inside the 1837 school building where McCartney and George Harrison had been pupils, rescued from dereliction in the 1990s.
• "A Case History", John King's 1998 sculpture of stacked concrete suitcases, a monument to Liverpool as a city people emigrated from. It is often mistaken for a Beatles tribute; the full story of the suitcases explains why it is really about the port people left.

Eating and drinking on the hill

The Georgian Quarter is one of the better parts of the city to eat and drink because it is a real neighbourhood, not a tourist strip. Hope Street and the streets around it hold a run of independent restaurants, bistros and bars, with the Philharmonic Dining Rooms the obvious pint stop for the interior alone. The area fills up on concert and theatre evenings and quiets down in the mornings, which is also the best time to walk it if you want the audio and the architecture without the crowds.

Walking it

The quarter is compact and best explored on foot, roughly fifteen minutes uphill from the Pier Head or ten from Lime Street station. The Hope Street architecture tour is the natural way to read it, walking the two cathedrals and everything between as a single argument about how a merchant city chose to build its culture. If you want the wealth-and-water story that sits underneath the whole district, start with the Pier Head waterfront tour down at the river first, then climb the hill.

Start the Hope Street architecture tour free in the Roamer app.