Wyncote Sports Pavilion

This sports pavilion, set in the Geoffrey Hughes Memorial Ground of Liverpool University, is one of a number of modernist buildings in the city designed by Beech, who was a lecturer at Liverpool School of Architecture. A winner of a Civic Trust Award in 1963, the pavilion and its surrounding structures are made primarily of reinforced concrete with some brick cross walls. The strong horizontal emphasis of the grandstand as it extends into the landscape formally counterbalance with the elevated clubhouse. The slightly cantilevered floorplates, large glazed curtain walls and oversailing roof are expressly modernist motifs that give the buildings a certain timelessness from this historical distance. The composition of the group helps to break up and order the playing fields themselves and though simple and orthogonal, the scheme manages the space with sophistication. It was praised by the Architects' Journal as 'a building on which rather more than the usual amount of thought and imagination has been spent'.