The Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas is in Toxteth, Liverpool, situated at the junction of Berkley Street and Princes Road. It was built 1870 in the Neo-Byzantine architecture style. The architects were W. & J. Hay and the church was built by Henry Sumners. It is an enlarged version of St Theodore's church in Constantinople. It is Grade II Listed building.
St. Nicholas' was built in the Liverpool neighborhood of Toxteth in a period when Liverpool's magnates were filling Toxteth with opulent mansions. The church stands in a neighborhood of substantial homes and in a cluster of houses of worship designed to advertise the wealth and status of a group of captains of industry that was remarkably ethnically diverse, by the standards of Victorian England. Immediately adjacent to St. Nicholas are the Princes Road Synagogue, whose oddly forbidding exterior masks the unparalled opulence within, and a handsome, early French gothic, Welsh Presbyterian Church.
The exterior is extremely ornate, featuring arches within arches, done in alternating bands of white stone and red brick. There is a row of three domes on the portico, and a fourth dome over the nave, all raised on drums. The interior, with white marble columns and Byzantine capitals, is surprisingly plain compared with the exterior.
Famous quotes containing the words greek, orthodox, church and/or nicholas:
“Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“If the jests that you crack have an orthodox smack,
You may get a bland smile from these sages;
But should it, by chance, be imported from France,
Half-a-crown is stopped out of your wages!”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“That poor little thing was a good woman, Judge. But she just sort of let life get the upper hand. She was born here and she wanted to be buried here. I promised her on her deathbed she’d have a funeral in a church with flowers. And the sun streamin’ through a pretty window on her coffin. And a hearse with plumes and some hacks. And a preacher to read the Bible. And folks there in church to pray for her soul.”
—Laurence Stallings (1804–1968)
“on a Saterday
This carpenter was goon til Oseney,
And hende Nicholas and Alisoun
Accorded been to this conclusioun,
That Nicholas shal shapen hem a wile
This sely jalous housbonde to bigile,”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)