he was lecturing to classes of 11 students, mostly drawn from Liverpool and its environs. He built up the annual intake over the years of his tenure; The Times obituarist wrote "In the ten years up to the 1914–18 war he made the Liverpool School of Architecture a thriving and influential institution to which students would come from the ends of the earth". Reilly lengthened the course to five years, and secured for his students exemption from the RIBA's intermediate examination, and later (1920) from its final examination also. He founded the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Architecture. The main building of the university, in which Reilly was at first based, was designed by his bête noir, Waterhouse. Reilly described it as having "glazed tiles the colour of curry powder". He successfully manoeuvred to have his department moved to the spacious Bluecoat Chambers, an outstanding Queen Anne building in the heart of Liverpool. The building had been in danger of demolition, and in working to save it Reilly found an ally in the philanthropic industrialist William Lever. Lever sponsored a fact-finding trip to the US that Reilly made in 1909. New American neo-classic architecture at that time derived in large measure from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Stamp characterises it as "rooted in the classical tradition [but] essentially modern." The restrained American style of Beaux-Arts classicism made a deep impression on Reilly, as did the methods of teaching he encountered in American architectural colleges. Town planning and Civic Design Part of Reilly's brief from Lever in his US trip was to study the American approach to the practice and teaching of town planning. Hitherto, little systematic town planning had taken place in English cities; new developments were haphazard and uncoordinated with one another. Lever's view, which Reilly shared, was that planning was simply "architecture on a big scale". With Lever's encouragement and generous financial backing, Reilly persuaded the University to establish a Department of Civic Design within the School of Architecture. The University authorities accepted Reilly's recommendation that the first Professor of Civic Design should be Stanley Adshead, a fellow-classicist and friend from his days in Belcher's practice. The importance of the work of the Liverpool School was quickly recognised within the architectural profession. Reilly was invited to join the RIBA's Board of Architectural Education in 1906, and he was elected to the Council of the RIBA in