Williamson, sandstone and style

Considering the volume of all the tunnels that Williamson’s men dug, the amount of sandstone that they excavated would have been far too big just to dump somewhere. So what did he do with it?

Bearing in mind that Liverpool sits on sandstone and that Edge Hill was a rocky outcrop, there was no shortage of this material in the early 1800s, when Williamson began tunnelling under Mason Street.

Much of the stone produced from his earliest diggings was used for houses he built on Mason Street and, indeed, to re-line the tunnels he was building underground; also to construct the massive boundary wall of his land (large parts of which still stand today). In many cases his typical blocks, three feet long, 12 inches high and 12 inches deep, would be dressed with a pattern by his workmen before use. The pattern, which can be seen in some of the tunnels today, is basic at close view but when stacked into a wall gives an attractive impression.

The early writings of Stonehouse and Hand, on which so much assumed knowledge of Williamson is based, state that Williamson never sold any of his sandstone but gave much of it away. They may well be correct in that with his wealth, he certainly had no need to profit from selling it and as time went on, he would have found it progressively harder to do so. By the 1830s, for example, a huge amount of sandstone was coming from excavations for the new railway passing through Edge Hill. St. Anne’s Church, up the road from Williamson’s house, was built with railway stone. By this time there was a positive glut and even less need for builders to turn to Williamson.

Perhaps the best known example of Williamson’s sandstone being used for a building other than his own was St. Jude’s church (shown in the engraving below), which stood on Montague Street, near the top of London Road, until the area was cleared for the construction of the new Royal Hospital.

The church was built in 1831, nine years before Williamson died, so he would have donated the stone more or less when his tunnelling was at its peak and, by implication, when he had the most stone to dispose of. St. Jude’s was designed by Thomas Rickman, who pioneered the revival of Gothic architecture in Liverpool.

One wonders whether Williamson had either influence or interest in Rickman’s design. The church was unusual and dramatic. It combined the fanciful ironwork of the European Gothic movement with the fine shafts of stone of the very English Perpendicular style. Both these styles were hundreds of years old when St. Jude’s was built so Rickman and, indirectly, Williamson weren’t breaking new ground in the strictest sense, but they were bringing something very striking into a fairly ordinary area.

Very little evidence exists of other buildings made from Williamson’s stone. Given this and the glut mentioned above it is all the more surprising that many of the houses Williamson fashioned on and around Mason Street were built of brick (which begs the question as to whether he ever traded sandstone for brick). That said, the structures underneath them often contained massive pillars and vaults constructed of his telltale sandstone blocks. One house he built on the other side of the street stood on huge sandstone ‘stilts’, creating an arcade beneath it. What a sight that must have been.

The exterior of the house was all ashlar (shaped and dressed stone blocks) with string courses (the thin bands) dividing each floor. The house is topped by a low parapet which hides the roof. This was a technique introduced in London to comply with fire regulations but was copied around the country.

The large doorway on the left, for driving in a carriage (or for pulling out barrows full of stone!) has an attractive relieving arch and keystone to lighten the load on the door lintel beneath. Although classed today as numbers 40-44 Mason Street, in 1820 Williamson’s house was number 18, as many properties were yet to be added to the street. However, the main door in the centre has no door number and no letter box. Statutory door numbering only became widely used outside London by the 1840s and letter boxes only became common as the Post Office sought to achieve delivery to every address towards the 1890s.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the house is that some of the windows are blocked up. This was how Williamson built it. Strange? Not when you discover that builders were burdened at the time by a ‘window tax’. In 1807 if a house had up to nine windows, the owner had to pay 2 shillings tax for each of them; more than nine and the rate was doubled. We suspect that he built frames for twelve windows, including those at the back, but blocked three at the front so as to avoid the higher tax - a common practice at the time. Between 1784 and 1850 there was also a brick tax. Goodness knows how much money they made out of him from that one!

An academic study of the house would class it as vernacular (built using traditional local materials and crafts) in the sense that it was constructed of local sandstone, but polite (designed according to formal rules and styles) in the sense that it conformed to late Georgian style. That said, the house was quite plain, more so than the typical Georgian house and nowhere near as ornate as the Regency houses which would appear later in the city.

All the more surprising, then, that elsewhere in the neighbourhood a significant number of courts were constructed - some even appeared opposite Williamson’s house on the east side of Mason Street and others between Mason Street and Highgate Street. The full horrors of these clusters of insanitary property are documented elsewhere, but at least the courts of the neighbourhood that we can make out on old maps were the open-ended type and not the deplorable closed courts which riddled some parts of the city.

Locals must have been struck by the contrast between the poor housing east of Mason Street and the grand, imposing, often bizarre properties lined up around Williamson’s. The first regulations governing the construction and siting of houses in Liverpool, and sounding the death knell of the courts, only came into force a few years after Williamson died. The combination of this ‘free rein’ and Williamson’s unconventional ideas surely contributed to the strange aspect of the newly built-up Mason Street and to the growth of the labyrinth underneath it.