I’ve got to know Liverpool a bit better over the past couple of years – it’s useful having a daughter at university there – and by chance those two years have coincided with the city’s architectural Great Leap Forward.

Which is also, to judge by some of the comments I see written about it, a great leap backwards. Yes, there is more than a little controversy about some of the new buildings in the place. 

So it being the start of the new university year gave me the excuse to go back. I went to look at one of the most controversial of the latest crop: the ferry terminal building by Hamiltons architects, judged the winner of BD’s annual “Carbuncle Cup”. That fenestration is unfortunate, certainly, and the standard of detailing is poor. It’s watered-down Decon, and a bit embarrassing. If that really is the worst today’s architecture can throw at us however, we have nothing to worry about. But the ferry terminal has a rival, now taking shape on the Liverpool waterfront. 

In a spirit of neutral inquiry, I invite you to look at the nearby £120m Mann Island development of offices and apartments, right next to the Three Graces and the new Museum of Liverpool. A project of Countryside Properties, it is very big, it is clad in black glass, there is absolutely no escaping it, and it is rated BREEAM excellent. Its full visual impact is now becoming apparent. Its architects are Broadway Malyan. It has been sliced about a bit in an attempt to reduce its bulk. This is right bang slap in the middle of the World Heritage Site.

My jaw dropped when I saw it, and then went on dropping until it hit my shoes. I’d like to think that it will all somehow aesthetically resolve itself when it is completed. But I don’t have high hopes.  However, in Liverpool there’s plenty to take one’s mind off such things. The Stirling-shortlisted Liverpool One development by BDP with a huge supporting cast of other architects is holding up well. But the best architectural experience of all is provided by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral. Not only did he win the competition when he was only 23, not only is it almost alarmingly huge, but the journey to the top of its tower – and the view from the top – is stupendous. For one thing, you pass through the bell chamber, where the highest and heaviest peal of bells in the world looks like an upturned Moon rocket. Once on top, you can see right across the Mersey, across the Wirral to Wales on the horizon. You can make sense of all the recent redevelopment. And of course you get an unrivalled view of the other great cathedral of Liverpool, Gibberd’s Roman Catholic space capsule perched on Lutyens’ crypt.

Spend just a few minute up there on Scott’s tower and you realise that it is the topography of Liverpool, as much as its architecture, that makes it great.