The decision has been made. After talking to many of you about the venues you’ve loved over the last seven years of HIT Hot Topics we have decided to return to Lutyens Crypt under Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral. This will give us the space we need while also being one of the most beautiful venues we’ve used.

From the cathedral’s website:

…the Crypt is what remains of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ 1930’s designs – buried deep beneath today’s Cathedral’s Portland stone plateau.

Lutyens designed a cathedral for Liverpool with a dome bigger than St Peter’s Basilica in Rome – but plans faltered when funds proved hard to find after the second world war.

Still, the Crypt – forming a fraction of the footprint of the proposed Cathedral, reveals the scale of Lutyens’ ambition. But, more than just a glimpse at what might have been, the Crypt is a beautiful, atmospheric space in its own right, and its Treasury contains a dazzling collection of sacred vessels and vestments, all of which are on display and available to view.

The deep purple bricks (all six million of them) and enormous granite dressings hewn from Cornish quarries were chosen to take the weight of the cathedral above. Now, they line vaulted passageways, cool side chapels, graceful halls and concert room.