St Patrick's is the oldest of Liverpool's early post-Reformation Catholic churches to remain in use. Erected in the third decade of the nineteenth century, close to the city's expanding docks, and designed to seat 1,800 people, it has a fortress-like construction, which took six years to complete, the foundations and burial pits being cut into the solid sandstone bedrock. In 1816 a group of far-sighted laymen took out an unusual 5,000 year...