BAYCLIFF, (Bishop's Lodge), Woolton Park. 1869-71.
Architect - Henry A. Bradley, 20 Basnett Street.

A large house of brick with stone dressings, the eastern entrance front with 3 gables - the one on the left much the largest - an asymmetrical composition balanced by the projecting porch and generous flight of steps, the south or garden front broadly symmetrical but with asymmetric details. To the west an extension built 1881 as a family sitting room when, probably, the north door was introduced. The conservatory is a post-war addition.

By this time brick was an acceptable, fashionable material for a Villa; neither the prestige material, stone nor its substitute, stucco, were obligatory any more. Here there is a limited amount of polychromy, and a band of half-timbering at eaves level and in the gables adds richness. Absolutely typical are the French Gothic caps of the columns to the porch, differing from each other in characteristically High Victorian manner (compare with the capitals of the columns on the Municipal Buildings, Dale Street of 1860-66, all different: this is a Gothic, not a Renaissance ambition, taken up by the High Victorians). Here the Caernarvon arch to the windows is some 5 years earlier than on the Police Station in Quarry Street.

The garden facade is noteworthy for being an exercise in the play of light and shadow. Note also the pretty oriel with its half-timbered frieze.

The striking feature of the extension is the soaring redbrick chimney stack of the Wealden type made popular by Nesfield and Shaw - interestingly enough there is no inglenook associated with it as there might have been had they been responsible for it. The half-timbering, however, is minimal and does not draw on local period precedent - whereas the gable of the garden front and the principal gable of the entrance front are decorated with quatrefoils such as may be seen at Speke and other half-timbered buildings in south Lancashire and Cheshire.

The new element of the High Victorian story revealed as it has been unfolding in these buildings we have been looking at is the influence of French Gothic e.g. on the capitals of the porch, and it was in the 1860s that this influence brought itself to bear on the High Victorian movement in architecture.

continued . . .