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Nos. 3-9 Victoria Street

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Liverpool, Victoria St., Nos. 3-9

Also, known as Fowler's Building, Nos.3-9 were designed by James Allanson Picton for Fowler Brothers, produce dealers, and put up in two phases between 1865 and 1869. This was the first building of any pretension to be erected in the new street. Picton was a prolific designer of offices, and this is fairly typical of the style he used for such buildings, freely adapted from the architecture of Italian RenaissanceGlossary Term palaces. The columns on the ground floor are polished granite, and the windows of the floor above have curvy, almost BaroqueGlossary Term surrounds. Behind the front block with its decorative carved stonework there are ranges of much plainer brick warehouses. Fowler Brothers did not occupy the whole building - the offices and warehouses accommodated a number of different businesses.

Glossary

Baroque

The term, originally derogatory, for a style at its peak in 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, which developed the classical architecture of the Renaissance towards greater extravagance and drama. Its innovations included greater freedom from the conventions of the orders, much interplay of concave and convex forms, and a preference for the single visual sweep. The revival of the style in early 20th-century Britain, often termed Edwardian Baroque or Neo-Baroque, drew more on English prototypes than on the more expansive variants of the Continent.

Renaissance

The revival of classical architecture that began in 15th-century Italy and spread through Western Europe and the Americas in the following two centuries, finding distinctive forms and interpretations in different states and regions. From c. 1830 the Italian version was revived in Britain as a style in its own right (sometimes called Neo-Renaissance or Italianate), i.e. as distinguished from the native Georgian classical tradition.

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