ABSTRACT
The city in which Holford arrived at the end of September 1925 was, as today, a place in but scarcely of the old county of Lancashire. It was a self-contained community with its own distinctive dialect, politics and trade, yet it had the cosmopolitanism of a great port, albeit one in gradual decline. By the mid-1920s it was recovering somewhat from the post-war depression, and was still a dynamic town with a certain sooty (and often squalid) glamour. Though the smoke and sprawling slums of Victorian industrialization had all but engulfed the classical architecture of the early nineteenth century, the great liners had not yet ceased to use the docks, and the city was still expanding in both population and area. Culturally, Liverpool accommodated a lively local elite. Socially it exhibited as pronounced a contrast between wealth and poverty as could be found anywhere in the country, as well as some of the most striking efforts of private philanthropy and public intervention to alleviate poverty’s effects. For one with a mind susceptible to the influences of its environment, it was a stimulating place in which to embark upon the study of architecture.
