The Pier Head: The Port That Built the Empire, and Reckons With What It Carried

The full story of The Pier Head: The Port That Built the Empire, and Reckons With What It Carried, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

1. 1. Pier Head and the Three Graces: The Empire-Wealth Architecture

   You have arrived at the Pier Head. Stand at the riverside railing between the Royal Liver Building and the Cunard Building. The Three Graces run north to south behind you.

   First the architects. The Royal Liver Building, to your right as you face the river, is by Walter Aubrey Thomas. Foundation stone laid the eleventh of May, nineteen oh eight. Officially opened the nineteenth of July, nineteen eleven, by Lord Sheffield. Edwardian Baroque. Grade One listed by Historic England, designation number one three five six three seven oh. The twin Liver Birds on the clock towers are by the sculptor Carl Bernard Bartels, each one about eighteen feet tall. The Cunard Building, in the middle, is by William Edward Willink and Philip Coldwell Thicknesse. Construction nineteen fourteen to nineteen seventeen. The interior design consultant was Arthur J. Davis of the firm Mewes and Davis, who modelled the facade on the Farnese Palace in Rome. Grade Two star listed. The Port of Liverpool Building, to your left, with the large central dome, is by Sir Arnold Thornely and F.B. Hobbs, in collaboration with the firm Briggs and Wolstenholme. The design competition was launched by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board committee under Robert Gladstone in nineteen hundred. The design was finalised in nineteen oh three. Construction ran nineteen oh four to nineteen oh seven. Grade Two star listed.

   Now what those facts mean.

   The ground under your feet is reclaimed water. This was George's Dock, built in seventeen seventy-one, the third dock the city ever built. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board decided to close and infill George's Dock in eighteen ninety-eight. The land was sold to Liverpool Corporation in nineteen hundred, with the Board retaining the southern strip for its own new headquarters, which became the Port of Liverpool Building. The infill finished by nineteen oh seven. The Three Graces sit on what used to be open dock water.

   These buildings are not slave-trade-era. The British slave trade ended with the eighteen oh seven Slave Trade Act. The Three Graces were constructed a hundred years later. What they commemorate is the wealth the trade generated, compounded across the long nineteenth century into the cotton, the sugar, the palm oil, and the shipping fortunes of a port that had become, by tonnage handled, the second city of the British Empire. The argument of this tour, per Quentin Hughes's canonical Seaport: Architecture and Townscape in Liverpool, is that this is empire-commercial architecture built on slave-trade-derived capital that the city had spent the nineteenth century quietly compounding.

   Now turn north along the riverside walk. The next stop is the white-and-blue terminal between the Cunard and the Museum of Liverpool, on your right hand side.

2. 2. Mersey Ferries Terminal: The Working Infrastructure That Survived the Empire

   You have arrived at the Mersey Ferries Terminal. Stand at the railing facing the dockside. The black-and-white funnel of the Royal Iris of the Mersey, or the Snowdrop, will be at the berth or out on the river. Across the Mersey are Birkenhead and Wallasey, on the Wirral peninsula.

   Here is the thing about the ferry. It is the oldest continuous transport function in this city.

   Ferries have crossed the Mersey at this point since at least the twelfth century. Per National Museums Liverpool's Archive Sheet twenty-seven on Mersey Ferries, monks of the Priory of Birkenhead carried passengers across the river by the twelve hundreds. The first floating landing stage on the Mersey, the one that rose and fell with the tide, opened in eighteen forty-seven. The triangular service today runs Pier Head, Seacombe, Woodside in Birkenhead, on two vessels. The Royal Iris of the Mersey and the Snowdrop. Both were launched in the nineteen sixties as the Mountwood and the Woodchurch, then renamed and refitted.

   Now the contrast. The Three Graces are a hundred years old. The Albert Dock is a hundred and eighty. The Old Dock under Liverpool ONE is a little over three hundred. The Mersey ferries have run for at least eight hundred years.

   They kept running through the slave trade. They kept running through the cotton boom and the Edwardian zenith. They kept running through two world wars, through the post-war decline, through the Beatles, through the Toxteth riots of nineteen eighty-one, through the two thousand and four UNESCO inscription, through the twenty twenty-one delisting. The ferries do not commemorate the empire. They survived it. They are the only piece of waterfront infrastructure on this walk that operated continuously through every other thing the rest of the tour names.

   Now walk south along Strand. You will pass Mann Island on your left. Cross into Liverpool ONE shopping centre through the Paradise Street entrance and look for the diagonal pedestrian cut called Thomas Steers Way. There is a glass viewing window set into the pavement.

3. 3. Old Dock site: The Buried Foundational Dock

   You have arrived at the Old Dock viewing window, on Thomas Steers Way inside the Liverpool ONE shopping centre. Stand at the glass. You are looking down through the pavement at a section of original dock wall preserved in the basement.

   This is the city's first dock. The Old Dock. Also known as Thomas Steers' Dock.

   The engineer was Thomas Steers. Construction ran from seventeen ten to seventeen sixteen. The dock opened on the thirty-first of August, seventeen fifteen. It cost twelve thousand pounds, which is approximately three million pounds in current money. It measured roughly six hundred and sixty feet by three hundred and thirty feet. Per National Museums Liverpool's Ten Fascinating Facts about Liverpool's Old Dock, it was the world's first commercial enclosed wet dock. A wet dock keeps a ship at a constant water level by holding the tide back behind gates. Before Steers built this one, ships at Liverpool had to ground in the river mud at low water. The Old Dock changed how a port functioned.

   And here is the chronology.

   Liverpool's first two slave-trade voyages departed in seventeen hundred, fifteen years before this dock opened. The ships were called the Blessing and the Liverpool Merchant, per the Wikipedia trace-back to the Richardson, Tibbles, and Schwarz scholarship and to the Encyclopedia dot com Liverpool Slave Trade entry. They sailed from the river, before the dock existed. After this dock opened in seventeen fifteen, the trade scaled. By the mid-seventeen forties, Liverpool had overtaken Bristol as the pre-eminent slave-trading port in Britain. By the seventeen eighties, Liverpool was the largest slave-trading port on the Atlantic. The dock that you are standing on top of is the infrastructure that turned the trade into a city-scale economy.

   The dock was infilled in eighteen twenty-six to make way for the Custom House. The Custom House was bombed during the May Blitz of nineteen forty-one and demolished. The site sat under car parks and then under the Liverpool ONE retail development, which opened in two thousand and eight. The dock was excavated archaeologically between two thousand and one and two thousand and eight. A portion of the original wall was preserved and is what you can see through this glass.

   The foundational dock of the slave-trade economy is buried under a shopping centre. That sentence is the layer this tour is reading.

   Now walk south on Paradise Street to Strand. Cross to the riverside and walk south past Mann Island. The Albert Dock entrance is on Hartley Quay.

4. 4. Royal Albert Dock: The Engineering Apotheosis

   You have arrived at the Royal Albert Dock. Stand on the cobbles inside the main entrance, looking across the central dock basin. The four-storey brick warehouses on cast-iron Doric columns surround you on all four sides. The Dock Traffic Office, the smaller stone building to one…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

5. 5. International Slavery Museum: The Institutional Reckoning, Mid-Renovation

   You have arrived at the Merseyside Maritime Museum building. The International Slavery Museum is on the third floor, behind the works-hoardings. This is the climax of the tour. Slow down. The building you are standing in front of is one of the warehouse buildings Hartley and…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

6. 6. Stanley Dock vantage: Seven Miles of Docks

   You have arrived at the north edge of the Albert Dock complex. Look north along the riverside. The dark-brick mass you can see at distance, roughly a kilometre and a half north along the line of the river, is the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse. First the building at your back.…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

7. 7. Bramley-Moore Dock and the UNESCO-Delisting Viewpoint: The Reckoning Is Ongoing

   You have arrived at the viewpoint north of the Pier Head. Stand on the elevated walkway near Princes Dock and look north along the Mersey. The silhouette of the new Everton stadium is visible at distance, roughly a kilometre and a half north of where you stand. The Three Graces…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.