 Following the purchase of the former Brownlow Hill workhouse site in 1930, Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) was commissioned to provide a design which would be an appropriate response to the Giles Gilbert Scott-designed Neo-gothic Anglican cathedral then being built further along Hope Street.Lutyens' design was intended to create a massive structure that would have become the second-largest church in the world.It would have had the world's largest dome, with a diameter of compared to the diameter on St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.