St George’s Hall is a large Grade I-listed building in the neoclassical style. It was built in the early Victorian period to house concert halls, courtrooms and even prison cells and nowadays it is used for concerts, exhibitions, awards ceremonies and weddings.
Charles Dickens used to hold regular readings at the hall and he called it ‘the most perfect hall in the world’. St George’s Hall has also been used as a film set and films and television shows filmed here include Peaky Blinders (2013) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016).
What to see at St George’s Hall
The hall’s opulent interior includes a large corridor leading to the concert hall with the Great Willis organ located at the end of this space. The interior is impressive and features the widest barrel-vaulted ceiling in the United Kingdom and the world’s largest Minton floor.
The organ was the world’s largest when it was built and it is still the third-largest in the UK and the hall has been recognised as the world’s first air-conditioned building.
There is a heritage centre inside the complex that serves as a natural starting point for exploring St George’s Hall. The centre has exhibits about the hall and you can book guided tours of the building from here. There is also an accessible viewing gallery of the Great Hall.
The large space at the front of the building is known as St George’s Plateau. This area is home to several monuments including the Liverpool Cenotaph although it is best known as a venue for public rallies and demonstrations.
Visiting St George’s Hall
St George’s Hall is located in the heart of Liverpool’s city centre, right across the road from Liverpool Lime Street railway station and immediately south of the Liverpool Central Library and the Walker Art Gallery.
The building is open to the public from Monday to Saturday when there are no scheduled events and there are also guided tours of the complex that operate on a semi-regular basis.
The standard guided tour runs four days a week and lasts for 1¼ hours. This tour costs £9.35 takes you to most of the publicly accessible parts of the building.
Footman tours area a little more involved and feature footmen dressed in Georgian costumes that take you behind the scenes to show you parts of the building that are not normally accessible to the public. These tours cost more than the standard tour (£20) and only run once every couple of weeks.
Entry is free of charge if you are not taking one of the guided tours and most people who visit St George’s Hall simply come here and explore it at their own pace.
The Little Shoe is the building’s on-site cafe, which has a breakfast and lunch menu with light meals made with seasonal British produce.
It is a spectacular building and its location right across from Lime Street station means that it is easy for anyone visiting Liverpool to quickly pop in an have a look.
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