Some of my first memories of the city from boyhood, are arriving in Liverpool after a long bus journey and travelling down Mount Pleasant past the Roman Catholic Cathedral... then a building site.
There was a real sense of excitement, seeing from the top deck, how the contractors Taylor Woodrow and an army of builders were bringing the dream to life.
They used tower cranes (a fairly new technique back then in the early 60s) and the pace of the work was quite frenetic. Men, it seemed, were working all over the site at the same time, in the dash to build "A cathedral in our time" in the words of the then Archbishop Carmel Heenan.
The shock of the new meant that few people of the older generation back then actually took Fred Gibberd's design to their hearts. It helped earn him a knighthood but was labelled "Paddy's Wigwam" and rather dismissed as something of joke by traditionalists.
The other day I happened to be walking up Mount Pleasant on a crisp clear autumn morning and took the trouble to wander up to the Cathedral to savour the sight.
I was not disappointed and whipped-out my camera to record the building for the umpteenth time in my life. And I have to say, that no matter how often I see it, I think the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King is the most stunning piece of architecture in the city. It is so striking and really quite breathtaking in its audacity and grandeur.
Okay, it has had and retains many problems - not least the leaky roof, which was fixed in the 90s. It is still plagued by terrible acoustics and the impossibility of heating the huge space in the Winter (but then I gather heating remains a massive headache in the Anglican Cathedral too).
What makes Paddy's Wigwam so impressive today is the approach - envisaged by Gibberd but not completed until this decade.
The flight of steps leading up to the entrance completes the awesome impact of this most stunning house of God. Now the former "dead areas" around it have been sympathetically built-in with the cafe and the university buildings, the whole thing really does, a long last, look complete and built to last for centuries.
I am not ashamed to say I love it.
This is partly, I recognise, because of a nostalgia for the 60s, but also I believe its daring design is symbolic of the city's character and stands as an icon to that era when Liverpool's official slogan was "City of Challenge and Change".
And I feel confident that Carmel Heenan's cathedral will carry his spirit of adventure and hope to future generations.
Closure of the CUC in Liverpool - sad day
(Tue 03/01)
Banksy the religious bigot
(Thu 29/12)
The Big Yin is on his way... I can't wait
(Thu 10/11)
A tale of two museums
(Tue 30/08)
Rosie Cooper - we need more politicians like her
(Mon 06/06)
