Liverpool · L1 9EN · Built 1783–1784

35 Rodney Street

The first house ever built on Rodney Street, raised on land leased by William Roscoe, and now a family home restored to how it stood in 1784.

Grade II* listed since 1952 First occupied 1787 Owners today a Liverpool family

“Built c. 1783–1784. 35 Rodney Street. First house to be erected on Rodney Street on a site leased by William Roscoe.” The black plaque on the front wall. You probably scanned the code a few feet from it.

The round black commemorative plaque set into the red brick of No. 35

The street

A field, a naval victory and three gentlemen

Until 1783 the ground you are standing on was waste land on a sandstone ridge above the town. Then three men took a lease on all of it, and named their new street after an admiral.

On 12 April 1782, off the islands of Les Saintes in the Caribbean, Admiral George Brydges Rodney broke the French line and won the Battle of the Saints. Liverpool, a port town with a great deal riding on the West Indies, celebrated the “Glorious Twelfth of April” at annual dinners for years afterwards. So when the Corporation leased this hillside in November 1783 to “Samuel Aspinall, Peter Hope, and William Roscoe, all of Liverpool, gentlemen”, the lease already described “the new set out street, called or intended to be called Rodney Street”.

Roscoe is the name that matters. An innkeeper’s son who became a lawyer, banker, poet, historian and Member of Parliament for Liverpool, he is best remembered as one of the few Liverpool men of his day to campaign openly against the slave trade, and he voted for its abolition in 1807. In 1786 the Town Council granted “Mr. William Roscoe, Attorney” liberty to quarry stone from the east side of Rodney Street “for the use of the buildings in the said street”, and that same year he became sole lessee of the plot for No. 35. Historians suspect the quarry sat where the front garden of No. 33 is now, which is why the house next door stands so far back from the pavement.

Street leased: Nov 1783to Aspinall, Hope & Roscoe
No. 35 leased: 1786William Roscoe, sole lessee
First resident: 1787Pudsey Dawson, merchant
Listed: Grade II*28 June 1952 · NHLE 1072949
Restoration: £500,000+by the present family

Nineteenth-century woodcut of 35 Rodney Street: a three-storey brick house with a pediment and round window, a walled garden with trees to its left, and iron railings along the pavement — “House in which the first Exhibition was held.” Drawn by Joseph Mayer and engraved by Llewellynn Jewitt for the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1853. The pediment, the round window and the garden to the left are all still there.

September 1784

The house where Liverpool first saw an art exhibition

“We have got an excellent place for the exhibition, a large new house of Roscoe’s, in the middle of his new street.” Thomas Taylor, Secretary of the Liverpool Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, to John Leigh Phillips of Manchester, 4 May 1784

In 1783 a small band of Liverpool men, with William Roscoe at their centre, formed a society “for the promotion and encouragement of art” and met every evening in a room in John Street to draw and hear lectures. Within a year they wanted a public exhibition, and Roscoe offered them his brand-new, still-empty house on Rodney Street. “Large cases of pictures from various quarters” arrived through the summer, and in September 1784 the first art exhibition ever held in Liverpool opened in these rooms, with Henry Blundell of Ince Blundell as its president and two pieces by Roscoe himself in the catalogue.

When the antiquary Joseph Mayer traced the story in 1853, he used Taylor’s letters to pin down which house it was: “the house in Rodney Street afterwards the residence of Pudsey Dawson, Esq., whose son, the present Pudsey Dawson, Esq., of Hornby Castle, was born there, and more recently occupied by the late Mr. Egerton Smith.” That is this house. The woodcut on the left is his.

Read Mayer’s 1853 paper, page 23

The house

Where Rodney Street began

No. 35 was the first house on the street to be finished and the first to be lived in, and it had already made its mark before anyone moved in: the 1784 exhibition above was held in rooms that still had the smell of new plaster.

Bailey’s Western and Midland Directory of 26 January 1787 lists exactly one resident on Rodney Street: Mr Pudsey Dawson. Dawson was a merchant who became Mayor of Liverpool in 1799, President of the Union News Rooms, a committee man of the Liverpool Exchange, a supporter of the School for the Blind and, in 1816, Chairman of the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks. He gave one son to the Royal Navy and lost two more in the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. The lease of the house ran from him, in 1809, in an unbroken line to the 1920s.

In 1931 the local historian Edna Rideout, who lived on the street, wrote that Professor Charles Reilly of the Liverpool School of Architecture had singled out No. 35 as “the most perfect example of the architectural style to which the whole of the street conforms”. Her verdict on the house and its first tenant: “Rodney Street at its best is exemplified. Its glory culminated at the beginning.”

The state agrees. No. 35 is listed at Grade II*, the middle of the three grades and the one Historic England reserves for “particularly important buildings of more than special interest”. Fewer than 6 per cent of England’s listed buildings carry a star. In practice it means that nothing about the fabric of the house, inside or out, can be altered without consent, which is why the restoration you will read about below was done the slow way, in the original materials.

The red brick front of No. 35 with its stone doorcase, seen from across the street in summer — Five bays of hand-made red brick, a stone doorcase and a pediment with a round window: the pattern the rest of Rodney Street followed.

Who lived here

1784

House completed. In September, Liverpool’s first art exhibition opens in the empty rooms, lent by Roscoe.

1787

Pudsey Dawson, merchant, is the only name listed on Rodney Street. He will be Mayor in 1799. His son, later Pudsey Dawson of Hornby Castle, is born in the house.

1790

Dr Ambrose Dawson is living here with Pudsey Dawson. He is the first doctor recorded on a street that would become “the Harley Street of the North”.

1800searly

Egerton Smith, printer and editor of the Liverpool Mercury, lives at No. 35. Margaret Smith runs a ladies’ boarding school in the house alongside him.

1825–34

The school changes hands: Wilson & Higgin, then Higgin & Lofthouse, then the Misses Smith and Mackenzie.

1924

The lease passes to A. D. Bigland, the last name in the Corporation’s register before the modern era. Like most of the street, the house spends much of the twentieth century as consulting rooms.

1952

Listed on 28 June, among the first wave of protected buildings in Liverpool. The house holds Grade II*, the grade reserved for “particularly important buildings of more than special interest”.

Today

Bought by the present family and restored, over several years and more than £500,000, as a private home.

The street then

Colourised photograph of a Georgian street hung with garlands, flags and a banner reading God Bless Our King and Queen, with horse-drawn cabs and people in Edwardian dress — A royal celebration in the Georgian quarter, around the turn of the twentieth century. The street sign reads Upper Duke Street, a few minutes’ walk from No. 35. Colourised.

Colourised photograph of Rodney Street lined with 1930s motor cars, two men in suits walking down the middle of the road — Rodney Street between the wars, by then a street of doctors’ consulting rooms and parked motor cars. Colourised.

Rodney Street in sunshine, No. 35 and its Georgian neighbours

The restoration

Put back the way it was built

When the present owners bought No. 35 it had been carved up and worn down by two centuries of tenants, surgeries and offices. They have spent more than £500,000 returning it to a single family home, and the rule throughout was simple: if it was here in 1784, it stays, and it is repaired with the same materials Roscoe’s builders used.

That means lime rather than cement, timber rather than plastic, and plaster mouldings run by hand from the surviving profiles. The original doors, architraves, panelling, fireplaces, sash windows and staircase were kept and repaired rather than replaced, and where something was past saving it was remade to the original pattern in the original material.

The family did not stop at the fabric. The house now has a swimming pool, a bar, a billiards room, dressing rooms and a solarium, a kitchen and a sunken garden with a fire pit, all fitted around the Georgian plan rather than through it. The listed rooms are still the listed rooms.

Swimming poolbuilt into the rear ground

Barlower ground floor

Billiards roomfull-size table

Dressing roomsoff the principal bedroom

Solariumfor the Liverpool winter

Sunken gardenwith fire pit and seating

Principal suitegilded ceilings, two chandeliers

And much morephotos being added

Before and after

From dental surgery to kitchen

Rodney Street has been a street of doctors and dentists since the 1790s, and No. 35 was no exception. This ground-floor room was a dental surgery when the family bought the house: partition walls, suspended ceilings, trunking and a vinyl floor laid over the Georgian boards. All of it came out, and the room is now the kitchen.

A gutted ground-floor room strewn with broken plasterboard, insulation and tools, partition walls torn out and a stepladder by the tall windows — Before: the surgery stripped back to the shell, the original sash windows uncovered.

The same room finished as a kitchen, with a long marble island, herringbone oak floor and a lit coffered ceiling — After: the same room as the kitchen.

Donna, the lady of the house, sitting on the end of the bed with her young daughter on her knee, both in red pyjamas under a crystal chandelier and a ceiling of red heart balloons — Donna and her daughter in the principal bedroom. Valentine’s Day.

The family

A home first, a monument second

For all the history, No. 35 is lived in. The lady of the house, Donna, and her daughter are the people you will most often find in these rooms, and it is their taste that runs through the restoration: gold leaf on the ceilings, crystal over the stairs, and a house that is used every day rather than kept behind a rope. It is Donna who posts the progress on Instagram, and the balloons in the photograph will tell you which day of the year it was.

Two hundred and forty years after Pudsey Dawson’s children grew up here, the house has children in it again.

The principal bedroom suite with gilded coffered ceilings, crystal chandeliers and gilt French chairs — The principal suite. Gilded ceiling panels, crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed wall panelling.

A dark-painted library sitting room with a marble fireplace, oil paintings, velvet sofa and tall sash windows — The library. Original marble fireplace, sash windows and plaster cornice, all kept.

Geometric encaustic floor tiles in cream, black and blue beside a gilded radiator and dark red panelling — The hall floor, laid in geometric encaustic tiles with a Greek key border.

A sunken outdoor seating area lit red at dusk, within the old brick garden walls — The sunken garden at dusk, inside the original brick boundary walls.

A cherry picker raised to the pediment of No. 35, with the brick gable and the walled garden gateway to the left of the house — Work at the pediment from a cherry picker. The garden wall and gateway to the left stand exactly where Mayer drew them in 1853.

A gilded sitting room with gold-leaf ceiling, crystal chandelier, four gilt damask armchairs and a marble-topped table, tall sash windows looking onto Rodney Street — The first-floor sitting room, gold leaf overhead, the original sash windows looking across Rodney Street.

A framed painting of the front of 35 Rodney Street, the brickwork built up from thousands of individual dots, hung on a white panelled wall — Paul Normansell, *35 Rodney Street*. Enamel on aluminium, every brick a hand-painted dot. It hangs in the house it depicts.

Art in the house

A house that has always collected pictures

The first thing ever to happen in these rooms was an art exhibition, and the present owners have kept faith with that. The house holds original work by world-renowned artists, and the piece that greets you in the hall is a portrait of the house itself.

It is by Paul Normansell, the Birmingham-born painter whose pictures are built from thousands of individual dots of glossy enamel on sheet aluminium, each one placed by hand with the panel lying flat so the paint dries without running. Normansell painted the cover of The Killers’ album Day & Age, which Rolling Stone named the best album cover of 2008, and has exhibited in Japan, Australia and the United States. Here he has turned the technique on Georgian brick: the pediment, the round window, the fanlight and the railings, with the flowers out and the door painted black.

Found during the works

What the house had been keeping

Open up a 240-year-old building and it tells you things. These are the three finds the owners did not expect.

Looking down a circular brick-lined well, moss on the bricks and light reflecting off water at the bottom

A working well

Beneath the lower ground floor the builders broke into a circular brick-lined well, still holding water. That fits the record: piped water did not reach Liverpool until two companies were formed in 1799, so the first Rodney Street houses “must have depended for their water-supply upon surface-wells in the basements”. The owners say it draws on a water table used since medieval times, and it still works today.

A weathered white marble bust of a bald, side-whiskered gentleman in a bow tie, standing on old brick steps

A 200-year-old marble bust

A carved marble bust, around two centuries old, turned up during the strip-out: a bald, side-whiskered gentleman in a bow tie and frock coat, carved with real skill. Nobody yet knows who he is, or which of the house’s residents brought him here. He is back inside the house now.

A room
nobody has entered
in over a century

The sealed room

Behind one wall the survey found a void: a room that had been bricked up and sealed for more than a hundred years. The owners thought about it, and decided to leave it exactly as they found it. It remains sealed and unopened today. Whatever is in there is still in there.

The excavated pool site behind the house: a wide pit cut down to bright orange-yellow sandstone bedrock, with the old brick garden walls and the back of the house above — The floor of the pool excavation: bare Sherwood Sandstone, roughly 250 million years old, a few metres below the garden.

Under the pool

The rock Liverpool stands on

Digging out the swimming pool took the builders through the garden soil and straight onto bedrock: the orange-yellow stone in the photograph is the Sherwood Sandstone Group, laid down around 250 million years ago in the Triassic, when this part of the world was a hot desert near the equator and seasonal rivers spread sand across it. Every Liverpool landmark sits on it. It forms the ridge that Rodney Street and the two cathedrals stand on, it was quarried to build the Anglican Cathedral and most of the Georgian quarter, and it is the stone Roscoe was given leave to dig from the east side of this street in 1786 for the houses he was putting up. It also holds water: the sandstone is one of Britain’s great aquifers, which is why the basement well a few yards from this pit has never run dry, and why the early Liverpool waterworks tapped “natural springs oozing out of the sandstone hill upon which Rodney Street stands”. The pool now sits in the same rock the house was built from.

Before completion

One of the most haunted houses in the country

Rodney Street has a long reputation for ghosts, and No. 35, the oldest house on it, had the loudest. By the time the present family came to buy it the house was being described as one of the most haunted homes in Britain. Before the sale completed, exorcisms were carried out in the building. The family moved in afterwards and have lived here ever since.

More of this story on the owner’s Instagram, below.

In the press

Inside No. 35

A first set of photographs. More will be added as rooms are finished.

Open-plan kitchen with a long island, herringbone oak floor and a coffered ceiling lit from above — Kitchen, with herringbone oak and a lit coffered ceiling.

A crystal chandelier hanging over the staircase, with panelled walls below — Over the stairs.

Buttoned velvet bed in the principal suite looking through to a gilded sitting area — The principal suite, looking through to the sitting room.

Bar room with timber-clad counter, leather stools, banquette seating and a cowhide rug — The bar.

Close view of the bar counter with tan leather stools and a mirrored back bar — Behind the bar.

A long tiled corridor with geometric floor tiles and panelled yellow walls — The lower hall.

Terraced garden with limestone steps, a circular brick fire pit and lit brick walls — The garden terraces and fire pit.

The garden at dusk, sunken seating lit pink, the house windows glowing — Dusk in the garden.

A bathroom lined floor to ceiling in gold-veined marble, with a stepped bath beneath a sash window — Marble bathroom, the bath raised on marble steps beneath the original sash window.

Close view of dark fumed oak herringbone flooring beside painted panelled cupboards — Fumed oak herringbone, laid by hand.

Aerial view of the rear garden under construction, the pool excavated and terraces being formed — The rear ground during the works: the pool excavated and the terraces taking shape.

The pool excavation in progress, with a digger and the back of the house behind — Digging the pool.

A detail of an old Ordnance Survey map showing Rodney Street and the surrounding blocks — Rodney Street on an old Ordnance Survey town plan.

Keep up with the house

Pictures will be updated. Follow the owner on Instagram.

Restoration progress, the rooms as they are finished, and the stories that don’t fit on this page. @CPD_WITH_DONNA

Follow @CPD_WITH_DONNA

Sources

Edna Rideout, “Rodney Street, Liverpool”, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. 83 (1931): the leases of 1783 and 1786, the quarry, the 1784 exhibition, Pudsey Dawson, Dr Ambrose Dawson, Egerton Smith and the schools, basement wells, Professor Reilly’s remark.
Joseph Mayer, F.S.A., “Roscoe, and the Influence of his Writings on the Fine Arts”, read to the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 3 March 1853 (Proceedings, vol. 5, pp. 143–148): the 1784 exhibition, Taylor’s letters and the woodcut of the house.
Historic England, National Heritage List for England, entry 1072949, “35, Rodney Street”, listed 28 June 1952.
Open Plaques and the City of Liverpool’s black plaque on the front of No. 35.
Liverpool Echo, “Life in townhouse on street called the ‘Mayfair of Liverpool’” and “One of Liverpool’s oldest properties is on the market for £845k”.
The present owners, for the restoration, the discoveries and the history of the sale.