The Steble Fountain stands in William Brown Street

William Brown Street

William Brown Street in Liverpool, England is a road that is remarkable for its concentration of public buildings. It is sometimes referred to as the "Cultural Quarter"...

, Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

, England, to the west of Wellington's Column

Wellington's Column

Wellington's Column, or the Waterloo Memorial, is a monument to the Duke of Wellington standing on the corner of William Brown Street and Lime Street, Liverpool, England...

. It has been designated by English Heritage

English Heritage

English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 as a Grade II* listed building. It was donated to the city by a former mayor to fill a vacant plot to the west of the column.

History

Towards the end of the 19th century, this was the only undeveloped portion of land between St George's Hall and the buildings in William Brown Street. In 1877 Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Fell Steble offered £1000 (£ as of ) to the Improvement Committee of Liverpool City Council

Liverpool City Council

Liverpool City Council is the governing body for the city of Liverpool in Merseyside, England. It consists of 90 councillors, three for each of the city's 30 wards. The council is currently controlled by the Labour Party and is led by Joe Anderson.-Domain:...

 towards the erection of a fountain on the site. Steble had been Mayor of Liverpool from 1845 to 1847. The fountain was designed by Paul Liénard and was unveiled in 1879. The casting from which the fountain was derived had originally been designed for the Paris Exposition of 1867

Exposition Universelle (1867)

The Exposition Universelle of 1867 was a World Exposition held in Paris, France, in 1867.-Conception:In 1864, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that an international exposition should be held in Paris in 1867. A commission was appointed with Prince Jerome Napoleon as president, under whose direction...

. At the opening ceremony in 1879 the mayor turned the fountain on with a silver key presented by Steble, but the water pressure was low and the effect was "dismal". The water was pumped by a steam pump in the basement of St George's Hall, and the noise from this tended to disrupt the proceedings in the courts above. The steam pump was later replaced by an electric pump. The fountain was restored in 1992 when the Tall Ships' Race came to Liverpool.

Description

The fountain is constructed in cast iron

Cast iron

Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...

 with some bronze fittings. At the base of the fountain is a circular basin with a diameter of 30 feet (9.1 m). From the centre of the basin rises an octagonal stem on a cruciform

Cruciform

Cruciform means having the shape of a cross or Christian cross.- Cruciform architectural plan :This is a common description of Christian churches. In Early Christian, Byzantine and other Eastern Orthodox forms of church architecture this is more likely to mean a tetraconch plan, a Greek cross,...

 base with the statue of a marine god at each corner. These statues depict Neptune

Neptune (mythology)

Neptune was the god of water and the sea in Roman mythology and religion. He is analogous with, but not identical to, the Greek god Poseidon. In the Greek-influenced tradition, Neptune was the brother of Jupiter and Pluto, each of them presiding over one of the three realms of the universe,...

, Amphitrite

Amphitrite

In ancient Greek mythology, Amphitrite was a sea-goddess and wife of Poseidon. Under the influence of the Olympian pantheon, she became merely the consort of Poseidon, and was further diminished by poets to a symbolic representation of the sea...

, Acis, and Galatea

Acis and Galatea (mythology)

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis was the spirit of the Acis River in Sicily, beloved of the nereid, or sea-nymph, Galatea . Galatea returned the love of Acis, but a jealous suitor, the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus, killed him with a boulder. Distraught, Galatea then turned his blood into the river...

. Above this is a shallow octagonal bowl with a diameter of 12 in 6 in (3.81 m). It has 16 overflow outlets; these are decorated with scallops, Lancastrian roses

Red Rose of Lancaster

The Red Rose of Lancaster is the county flower of Lancashire.The exact species or cultivar which the red rose relates to is uncertain, but it is thought to be Rosa gallica officinalis....

, and marine grotesque

Grotesque

The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...

s. From the centre of this bowl rises another bowl about 8 feet (2.4 m) in diameter. This is surmounted by a mermaid

Mermaid

A mermaid is a mythological aquatic creature with a female human head, arms, and torso and the tail of a fish. A male version of a mermaid is known as a "merman" and in general both males and females are known as "merfolk"...

 holding a cornucopia

Cornucopia

The cornucopia or horn of plenty is a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers, nuts, other edibles, or wealth in some form...

. The total height of the fountain is 23 feet (7 m).