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.
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A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
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“Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;”
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