The Liverpool warehousing system
Anon 1820, 183-4
One of the principal requirements for a trading city is adequate and secure storage for the goods that flow through it, both those awaiting export or onward sea transport and those destined for the home market. In a city such as Liverpool, which dealt to a large degree in commodities subject to excise duties, the government attempted to control the traffic of goods so as to calculate and levy duties. The interests of traders and regulators were not always identical, and over the course of two centuries there developed a dual system of warehousing, one part serving the private merchant, the other the occupiers of the Custom House.
Long before the construction of the great dockside bonded stores, the private warehouse provided the exclusive means of handling merchandise, and it remained an essential part of the city's commercial infrastructure well into the 20th century. The range of types and designs of private warehouses will be considered in Chapter 3. Here it is important to understand something of their origin, function and distribution, and of the impact that they made upon the town.
We do not know when the first warehouses were built in Liverpool, but it is safe to assume that many were constructed once confidence had been gained in the future of the port. Early views of Liverpool show that warehouses of a type similar to surviving examples formed part of the urban landscape from the mid-18th century (Fig 8). As the trade of the port expanded, so more and more warehouses were built, at first in the heart of the old town and in the streets around Steers' Old Dock, later closely following the expansion of the dock system to north and south.
Figure 8 The scene on the quayside at Steers'Old Dock in 1773: the Custom House flies the 'Public Office Jack', and in the middle distance are three warehouses. The close connection between the dock and the town is vividly illustrated in this view. (Reproduced from W Enfield, A History of Liverpool (1773), Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]
The earliest warehouses were built by merchants, often adjacent to their houses or at the back of their plots. The relationship is revealed in an advertisement of 1760, which offered for let 'a large commodious house now tenanted by Mr Matthew Strong, merchant, containing four rooms on a floor, with a compting [counting] house; and a warehouse wherein may be laid 70 hogsheads [large casks] of sugar on a floor', and a survey plan of 1810 depicts such a property in Hanover Street (Picton 1875, II, 38) (Fig 9).
Figure 9 A typical house and warehouse complex in Hanover Street, redrawn from a sale plan of 1810. [Redrawn from an archive plan from Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]
Picton, recalling this early period of warehouse building, stated that in the Old Dock area 'almost every merchant had his counting house at his back door. Henry Street [which runs behind one side of Duke Street] was lined with offices belonging to the merchants who resided in the houses in front'. There was, at that time, no stigma attached to 'living over the shop', and, in Picton's view, the nature of the trade brought few nuisances: he states (1875, II, 275-6) that
the sugar, and molasses, and rum, with a few spices and fruit, which constituted the bulk of the returns, had nothing at all of a repulsive character in their aspect, and the hardware, clothing and provisions which were exported were equally harmless. The man-stealing process [that is, the slave trade which provided the third side of the merchants' Atlantic triangle] ... the horrors of the baracoon [slave barracks], and of the middle passage, never obtruded themselves into the thoughts of the polite circles of Duke Street.
The growing scale of business, the fierce competition for land in the areas close to the docks and changing ideas on the proximity of places of residence and work soon led to the detachment of house and warehouse, and from the early 19th century free-standing warehouses, unassociated with any nearby dwelling, became common. In the older commercial areas they were built on unoccupied plots or replaced housing (Fig 10), and in newly developed land they were interspersed amid the factories, courts of workers' housing and timber yards of the sprawling suburbs that fed off the trade flowing from the docks. They made a strong impact on visitors unused to the life of a trading city: the poet William Wordsworth, writing after a visit to the city in 1819, noted that 'in respect of visual impression, nothing struck me so much at Liverpool as one of the streets near the river, in which were a number of lofty and large warehouses, with the process of receiving and discharging goods' (Moorman 1969, 229), and Elizabeth Gaskell's terrified characters in Mary Barton 'rushed under the great bales quivering in the air above their heads' (Easson 1993, 273). Late 19th-century maps show whole streets built up with warehouses (Fig 11). Quite how many existed in the city cannot now be known, but there must have been many hundreds.
Figure 11 By the late 19th century, the area close to the docks was solidly built up with warehouses, housing and industrial premises. This fire insurance plan shows streets of warehouses, many used to store cotton. [Charles Goad Fire Insurance Plan, 1888, VolI, Sheet2, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]
Figure 10 The crowded commercial centre of Liverpool was full of warehouses in the early 19th century: two are visible here, on Mathew Street and Temple Court. [AA045283]
In 1851 sixteen warehouse keepers were listed in the Liverpool trade directory, most of them occupying office premises in the central commercial area and, presumably, owning warehouses in outlying parts close to the docks. The Liverpool Warehousing Co Ltd, established in 1895, came to own more than 400 warehouses, in Manchester as well as Liverpool, and in 1915 there were firms entitled 'The Liverpool Storage Co Ltd', 'The Liverpool Warehouse Construction Co Ltd' and 'The Liverpool and Manchester Cotton and Produce Storage Co Ltd' (Fig 12). The trade of the city had developed a long way from the stage when the typical business unit was that of a merchant operating from a small warehouse next to his house.
Figure 12 Warehousing companies advertised their presence with bold signs: this warehouse is in Maddrell Street. [AA045284]Dock estate and bonded warehouses
Complementing the private warehouse in Liverpool was the provision of secure, regulated storage connected with the administration of excise duties on imported goods. At first, Customs officers were obliged to assess duties on the open quaysides before goods were taken away to private warehouses, very much as depicted in a view of the Old Dock made in 1773 (see Fig 8). Opportunities for evasion of duty were common, and as trade grew the potential loss of revenue to the government became unacceptably high. A model for secure dockside storage was first provided in Liverpool by Francis, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who in 1783 constructed a large stone warehouse, in what was known as Duke's Dock, a little to the south of the Old Dock. The provision of bonded storage, under crown locks, was introduced in Liverpool with the construction in 1795 of the first Tobacco Warehouse on the King's Dock (Fig 13). This heavily charged cargo was henceforth transferred immediately to the crown warehouse. The capacity for storage was extended in 1811 when a new and much bigger tobacco warehouse was built at the same dock; together the two warehouses could hold 30,000 hogsheads of leaf. The security of crown stores worked not only to the excise man's advantage, for the merchants too benefited: if they re-exported the goods, no duty was payable, and payments on goods destined for the home market were deferred until they were removed from the warehouse.
Figure 13 The King's Tobacco Warehouses of 1795, with a ten-storey warehouse in the background. [From T Troughton, The History of Liverpool (1810), Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]
Bonded storage found wider application after 1805, when the provisions of the 1803 Warehousing Act, at first limited to London, were extended to Liverpool and other ports. In London the Act was a response to the construction of secure warehousing around new enclosed docks at the West India and London Docks of 1800-5. But in Liverpool nothing comparable to the West India Docks was built for nearly half a century. Instead, the Act led to the simple upgrading of the sometimes-leaky private warehouses in the town to meet certain conditions for secure bonded storage and to the appointment of lockers to keep these buildings under crown locks. Conversion of existing warehouses was relatively inexpensive, and despite the loss of a degree of independent action, many merchants clearly considered conformity to be in their interests, for by 1820 there were 164 bonded warehouses in the town.
Only with the opening of Jesse Hartley's Albert Dock in 1846 was London's enclosed warehouse-dock system, fully developed at St Katherine Docks in the 1820s, introduced to Liverpool. At Albert, the great warehouses that so offended Picton were an integral part of the scheme: ships in the dock unloaded directly on to a secure quay where duty could be assessed, and goods were then taken into the warehouses for storage without the payment of dues (Fig 14).
Figure 14 The Albert Dock and warehouses, opened in 1846, provided a secure environment for the unloading and storage of valuable goods. The contrast with the earlier arrangement around the Old Dock (see Fig 8) isdear.[AA029119]Albert at first mainly handled North American and Far Eastern trade, and the warehouses provided bonded storage for goods such as silks, cotton, tea, sugar, rice, wool and spices, in quantities that earlier warehouses had never approached: the stacks around the dock could hold approximately 250,000 tonnes of goods. The immense size of the warehouses reflects the volume of trade and the need for huge quantities of long-term storage space; cotton, for example, was stockpiled here awaiting favourable market conditions. The construction of Albert Dock was followed by the addition of further docks and warehouses on the same principle: Stanley Dock was opened in 1848 and Wapping Dock in 1855, and large warehouses, similar to those at Albert Dock, were built around them. As well as large, multi-storeyed warehouses, transit sheds were also constructed on the quayside, but, as the name suggests, they were intended only for short-term storage while goods were checked, weighed and sorted. Some later dock or dock-area warehouses were built for specific purposes. A huge grain warehouse, a pioneer in the loose handling of this commodity, was built from 1866 to 1868 at East Waterloo Dock (see Fig 42), and the Colonial Warehouse in Love Lane (demolished) stored colonial wool imports. But the greatest warehouse of all in terms of scale was the Tobacco Warehouse built within Stanley Dock in the years 1897-1901 (Fig 15).
Figure 15 The Tobacco Warehouse in Stanley Dock. Built in the years 1897-1901 to designs by Anthony George Lyster, the fourteen-storey warehouse has hydraulic lifts and hoists. [AA045290]
Fourteen storeys high (including the vaults), using steel beams and iron columns, and towering over Hartley's earlier buildings, this was said to be the largest warehouse in the world. If any single building expresses Liverpool's role in a great trading network, this is it.
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