ewan forster & christopher Heighes

An Installation in the Bell Tower of Liverpool Cathedral :: 14 -19 July 2004

Commissioned by Liverpool Cathedral Centenary Celebration, 1904-2004, with additional funding from North West Arts, and the Arts Council of England.


Over the period of eighteen months we have been developing a proposal for an installation in the tower of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. The proposal is derived from a body of work begun in March 1999 examining the transitional period of British architecture in the 1930’s represented in particular by the work of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Our proposal is an attempt to celebrate and articulate the grand silent spaces that characterise Scott’s work.


The Storm Cloud

On the 6th August 1880 at Brantwood, his home, artist and critic, John Ruskin identified what he believed to be an entirely new and ominous form of cloud. He wrote of it in his diary that day:

“prismatic, palpitating, ragged and icy, with long locks and tresses, as of hair at its edge, overlying the range of hills like an Hesperides dragon – ending northward in a clear sky against a black monster cloud. I believe these clouds to appear only between storms. They are assuredly new in Heaven so far as my life reaches.”

It was in the same year and into Ruskin’s polluted industrial world - a world in which the sky appeared to be dying - that the architect Giles Scott was born and it was between the two storms of First and Second World Wars, that the bell tower of his most famous commission, Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, was completed, rising majestically above the urban pollutants of Britain’s most important Atlantic seaport.

In the winter months the city’s weather creeps in through the oak louvres on the cathedral tower’s four sides. Fogs and mists hover around the bells, a supersaturated blanket attempting to dampen the clarity of their message. It is this urban cloud chamber, symbol of obscurity and revelation that we choose as the site of a unique experiment in broadcasting. Half way between a radio station and a weather station, both transmitting to and receiving from the city, our installation will also be a carefully constructed visual environment that can be encountered by the cathedral’s public.



The Radio Beacon

On the 13th July 1944 Giles Gilbert Scott made a recording for broadcast on British radio. It was his first public pronouncement on the cathedral building.

“The practical requirements of a cathedral are few and simple, but ‘appeal’, that much abused word, is an essential requirement dominating all others. This I feel is more important and fundamental than the questions of architectural style that seem so important to some people. I like to think of Liverpool Cathedral as one of the first buildings of a new age – an age we hope and believe will bring a higher appreciation of non-material values.”

In Holland at the same time Scott’s friend and contemporary Dutch architect Willem Dudok had just completed his Hilversum new town embellishing the tower of the Town Hall with its own set of commemorative bells. Of all architects, Scott admired Dudok’s ability to reinvent traditional approaches and materials in a truly modern aesthetic. Hilversum was to be a beacon to the modern world and soon became the centre of the European Broadcasting Industry.

The bell tower is the broadcast engine of the cathedral and the bells within it are ordained to communicate directly with the city. Developing this idea of the ‘broadcast’ space we propose to install a one watt erp radio transmitter in the bell tower of Liverpool Cathedral broadcasting for twenty-eight days on a short term restricted service licence. A one watt transmitter is sufficient for a city-wide broadcast. In the year prior to its centenary we intend to allow the building to speak for itself before its official history is articulated and celebrated by others. From the city suburbs or cathedral precincts the public will be able to tune into a unique broadcast cycle of spoken word, recorded discussion, live music, song, sounds, atmospheres, ringing cycles and forecasts that will simultaneously create an evocative soundscape for the solitary visitor to the installation in the tower itself. Over a period of weeks these broadcast compilations will make visible the connections the cathedral has with a number of other significant buildings, histories, practices and personalities locally, nationally and internationally.


The Wrestling Ring

Dudok’s work, like Scott’s was caught in the endless battle of the styles. Hilversum was seen as only ‘quasi modernist’ by the European hard-liners whereas Scott’s designs for Coventry Cathedral were criticised by the Royal Fine Arts Commission for being too overtly modernist. This aesthetic and ideological slugging match which has paralysed architectural debate for a century is written into the very fabric of Scott’s building, charting over sixty years his own gradual shifts from the High Gothic of his father and grandfather to the technologically liberating materials and techniques of international modernity. The vastness of the bell chamber with its brick and concrete functionalism foreshadows Scott’s modern masterpieces at Battersea and Bankside.The ringing chamber beneath it however is a claustrophobic Edwardian space filled with riveted iron struts and supports. A place of extreme physical exertion and coordination, evoking an unregulated wrestling ring, or cock-fighting pit - a site for violent and pointless struggle:

“For one night only Sir Edwin Lutyens bare knuckle fighting with the Mighty Smithsons. The Terror of Tblisi Berthold Lubetkin takes on The New Towns Commission, The Brown Field Barbarian John Prescott versus The Town and Country Planning Association for your entertainment…"

Scott the pragmatist was always more interested in the spaces his buildings created than questions of architectural form. His interest at Liverpool was the creation of an atmosphere for worship and this far outweighed the importance of a building that makes its statement from the outside. Scott recognised that the era of the community of craftsmen that was characterised by mediaeval cathedral building was gone. In the space of forty years from its commission, even the influence of Ruskin and the arts and crafts revivalist movement had dissipated and all but disappeared. These shifts: aesthetic, ethical and political are the basis for our installation.


Aims of the project:

Having recently produced work in a number of, complex ‘principled’ buildings; those designed to promote a particular philosophy or aesthetic movement (Non-Conformism at Union Chapel, London; social reform and the Arts and Crafts movement at Mary Ward House, London) - the current proposal to develop a project in the Bell Tower of Liverpool Cathedral offers the partnership an opportunity to consider an essentially ‘unwritten’ space.

Familiar only to the bell-ringers and a few cathedral staff, Gilbert Scott’s bell chamber, ringing chamber and sound void, derive their power not just from their vast size and monumental construction, but also from their relatively ‘unpeopled’, unmediated nature. High above the bustling nave they remain notional, ‘yet to be navigated’ spaces. Ostensibly built for one purpose, the transmission of bell sound, the tower is contradictory in nature; its many vents make it both open and closed to the world, and its massive height make it visible to all Liverpool and beyond, yet it remains essentially mysterious and unknown. Throughout the century of its building the tower has been a probe, absorbing, filtering and projecting the sounds of the city - sirens wailing, bombs dropping, crowds roaring, ships leaving port – carried on the moist, cold, dark and fast air of the weather, the presence of the city has inhabited the tower constantly.

The partnership’s interventions in the space will provide methods for witnessing this elemental possession, both close to and at a distance. Continuing, and building on previous work that explored spaces of dissent and debate (The Glossary, 1994 and Middle English, 2002) the project will provide the partnership with a further opportunity to develop the notion of ‘throwing something into the void’, whether it be an idea, sound, or artefact and allowing it to resonate, change, reform and disperse. The frequency at which such things can be experienced will be modulated by where the visitor is located– they may listen to a broadcast to their home, hear sound in the precincts of the Cathedral, or tune-in in their car, or discover visual, sensual elements in the spaces – but by whatever method, the occasion of their experience of the building will be partial and personal, they will be engaged in their own translation of Liverpool Cathedral, its fabric and histories - constructing their own map from fragments they encounter, thus maintaining the enigmatic and particular nature of the site.