CHAPTER 3

The design and construction of warehouses 		warehouse The warehouse is a simple building type with a limited range of design considerations. There is little evidence in surviving warehouses for the processing of goods, and overwhelmingly the dominant purpose of the type was the storage of commodities, which had to be kept in good condition, dry, and secure from pests, theft and fire. The design of warehouses, therefore, has a number of determinants. The availability of land influenced the 'footprint' of the building and therefore its overall form, and the nature of the packaging, the weight of loads and the means of lifting goods externally and internally dictated aspects such as floor heights, floor construction and the size of openings. The need for security and the containment of fire led to design changes in the 19th century, but always the form of warehouses reflected sober risk assessment and the search for the optimum balance between, on the one hand, the use of the building and, on the other, cost and quality of construction.
Early warehouses
The form of the most common warehouse type was established by at least as early as the mid-18th century, although no buildings survive from that date. Early views show that modestly sized, multi-storeyed warehouses formed part of street scenes in the old town centre. They occupied narrow plots, perhaps established hundreds of years earlier, and, unable to spread out to the sides and rear, succeeded in providing extensive storage space by stacking floors one on top of the other. Forced upwards rather than outwards by the size of their plots and the cost of land in the centre of the town, the warehouses required a means of lifting goods to the upper floors, and so a hoist, at this date manually powered, was set in the roof space, hauling sacks, casks and other loads up the face of the building to where they could be stored.
Colquitt Street Figure 16   One of the wealthiest Liverpool merchants and bankers, Thomas Parr, built his warehouse immediately behind his town house on Colquitt Street. [AA041183]

This type of warehouse was common in English trading towns in the 18th century, and some survive in ports such as Lancaster, Whitehaven and Hull. The earliest Liverpool warehouses that remain date from the late 18th century and are concentrated close to the earliest docks, where most of the wealthy merchants lived. Here are found a number of examples of the combined house and warehouse noted by Picton (and found also in Whitehaven and Hull).The grandest was built by the wealthy merchant and banker Thomas Parr on Colquitt Street, just off Duke Street (Fig 16).
Built in the 1790s, the fine mansion has a five-bay, three-storeyed block flanked by pavilions, and behind this domestic accommodation, on Parr Street, is a handsome, tall warehouse. In its size and with its fine stone details around windows, pediment and gables, the warehouse reflects the standing of the builder and the quality of his house. Other large houses associated with warehouses are 139 Dale Street and 9 York Street; at the latter the warehouse forms a wing attached to the rear of the five-bay town house. Much smaller is the three-storeyed warehouse at 42 Fleet Street, built as a wing to a short terrace of houses on Slater Street (Fig 17).

Fleet Street
Figure 17   The warehouse at 42 Fleet Street forms a wing to a short terrace of houses. [AA045285]

The scale of business operations and the close relationship between trade and domestic life in the late 18th century are vividly illustrated in these buildings: it is easy to imagine cotton or rum being checked into the warehouse under the watchful eye of the merchant, who had perhaps supervised transport from the nearby public quay, and we can understand how the proximity of the house provided a degree of security against theft.
The early warehouses are of simple form. They vary in height from the three-storey buildings on College Lane (Fig 18) to the six storeys of 46 Henry Street (Fig 19a-d) and share many common features. They are built of brick, attractive in colour and texture, although not intended for decorative effect. All the design features of the building - loading doors, pedestrian access, stair, hoist - are on or just behind the street elevation; behind this is simply space for storage. The central bay on the front wall is occupied by a tier of loading doors, set just behind the wall face, and over the loading doors there projects a timber hoist beam. The raised ground floor made it easier to move goods directly to and from carts. The position of the stair is indicated by the tier of small oval windows at one end of the elevation: designed to admit light, their size and the iron grilles prevented the pilferage of goods.
College Lane stair window elevation
Figure 19   46 Henry Street:
(a) detail of the stair window [AA045277];
(b) elevation [AA045275];
(c below, left) goods being hoisted into one of the upper floors; and
(d below) warehousemen grappling with a bale to pull it into the warehouse.
Figure 18   A pair of late 18th-century warehouses on College Lane: the timber doors and hoist beams and the small oval windows lighting the stairs are typical of the period. [AA045335]
illustration illustration Pedestrian doors, again narrow to discourage theft, give access to the base of the stair. Internally, nothing in the scale of most warehouses challenged the building technology of the age. In an era when much larger canal warehouses, military storehouses and mills were being constructed, these modest buildings represented an everyday constructional exercise for the jobbing builder. They had timber Moors of substantial joists laid on heavy, square-section beams, usually supported by timber stanchions (Fig 20). The stair was commonly of timber, with narrow treads rising around a newel (Fig 21). Roof trusses were of timber: where spans were modest, king-post trusses could be used, but in wider buildings queen-strut and collar trusses provided the necessary breadth. Because warehouses were commonly hemmed in on both sides by other buildings, natural light was in short supply: many warehouses had windows only in the front elevation and in some cases at the back as well. Oil lamps, a considerable fire hazard, were commonly used to provide more light. Ample lighting was not as critical in a storage warehouse as it was in, say, a Manchester packing warehouse or a textile mill, since for most of the time goods simply sat awaiting their next move: the light and clatter of a mill can be contrasted with the usual gloom and tomb-like silence of the warehouse (Fig 22). Conformity to the regulations governing bonded storage led to a reduction in natural lighting, for at warehouses like 38 Henry Street the original windows, of generous size, were blocked to incorporate a much more secure small opening (Fig 23). If the six-storey warehouse at 46 Henry Street appears large alongside many others of the same period, it was dwarfed by a few warehouses of prodigious size, higher than anything built in Liverpool until the construction of the Tobacco Warehouse at Stanley Dock in 1900. The first Goree Warehouses (their name was derived from the notorious slave-trading island off Senegal), built beside George's Dock by the Corporation in 1793 (but used by merchants as private warehouses), were said to have been in part of thirteen storeys, and in the same year one observer noted that 'on the sides of the docks are warehouses of uncommon size and strength, far surpassing in those respects the warehouses of London. To their different floors, often ten or eleven in number, goods are carried up with great facility' (Aikin 1795, 355).The great height of these warehouses, which must have made the movement of goods extremely laborious, indicates the value of this prime location, close to the early docks, and a wish to provide as much storage space as the confined site would allow. The impression made by these mammoth structures is especially understandable when a search for contemporary comparisons is made: London, our observer states, cannot match these buildings (although we know that nine-storey warehouses were built there in the 18th century), and it is quite possible that, apart from churches, the Liverpool warehouses were, when built, the tallest structures in the country.

The 19th-century warehouse
The great period of warehouse construction was the 19th century, when the success of the port depended on storage facilities keeping pace with the phenomenal growth of the city's trade and with the changing needs of its merchants, shippers and brokers. Different types of warehouse and new structural forms developed in this period, but there was also a strong element of continuity, for still at the end of the century warehouses were being built that were recognisable as the descendants of their 18th-century predecessors.
Many of the multi-storeyed warehouses of the 19th century had the same small footprint as their earlier counterparts, and like them rose tall - often to six or eight storeys - to provide a reasonable amount of storage space. The grouping of warehouse units within a single large building, as at the post-fire Goree Warehouses (Fig 24), became more common: streets became canyons, their sides punctuated with a regular rhythm of loading door and window openings (Fig 25). The provision of multiple units suggests that warehouse ownership was now seen very firmly as a profitable business: the owner might not be directly involved in trade, but could draw rents from the businesses that occupied his building.

One common characteristic of the 18th-century warehouse - its proximity to the merchant's house - was slowly eroded in the 19th century. Social and cultural reasons led the merchant to separate his home from work and to move his place of residence away from the Old Dock area, where commerce and industry now provided the dominant tone. Further from the heart of the town, behind the growing dock estate, the many new warehouses looked not to the merchant's house but to his office in the centre of the city, where all the business was transacted. The warehouse areas thus became places exclusively where goods were stored: deals were done elsewhere.
The overall form of the multi-storeyed warehouses may have altered little over the course of the 19th century, but there were, nonetheless, considerable changes in construction. The most significant impetus behind these changes concerned the fear of fire (Fig 26). The century was ushered in with the great conflagration of 1802, which consumed the massive Goree Warehouses, destroying the buildings and their a contents, threatening neighbouring buildings and shipping in the adjacent dock, and causing losses valued at more than £300,000, a vast sum at the time. In a single year, 1842, there were 140 warehouse fires: one, the Formby Street fire, destroyed nine warehouses and property to the value of over £500,000. The risk of fire stemmed principally from the use of naked flames for lighting: a lamp, once inadvertently toppled, could quickly set alight dry stored goods, and the blaze could then spread rapidly throughout the building. In the days of rudimentary fire fighting, the job was to confine the fire to a single warehouse.
The prevention and containment of fire, therefore, were of vital interest to all parties - the Corporation, warehouse, shipping and property owners, and insurance companies. As a result, a number of local Building Acts (1825, 1835, 1842 and 1843) were passed to regulate the design of warehouses and the subject of better warehouse building was discussed in the literature of the time. No attempt was made to enforce the use of fireproof construction such as had been developed for textile mills in the late 18th century and become commonplace by the mid-19th century, for it was accepted that the economics of warehousing made this inappropriate in most cases. Instead, the Acts stipulated the use of simple, sensible structural features to make warehouses less prone to failure and to limit the consequences of collapse. External and internal walls and floor and roof timbers were to be of a certain thickness, and internal dividing walls were to have metal doors in an attempt to confine fire to a single compartment. The provision of a fireproof stair bay, again with metal doors, inhibited the spread of fire from floor to floor, as well, of course, as providing a safe means of exit for warehouse workers. Cast-iron columns were stipulated for use on the ground floor, and overall height restrictions, varying according to the width of the street, were introduced. The spread of flames from building to building was to be inhibited by the use of parapet and party walls rising above the roof line, and external features - gutters, hoist beams, lean-to structures, doors and windows - were to be of non-combustible materials. From 1843, warehouses were registered and graded according to their degree of conformity to the Building Acts; the safest, enjoying lower insurance premiums, were the fully fireproof warehouses, but there were four other grades, acknowledging that non-fireproof buildings would continue to be constructed.
Together the Building Acts and the requirements of bonded storage changed the construction of warehouses. One building may be taken to illustrate the differences between the mid-19th-century warehouse and its 18th-ccntury predecessor. The warehouse at 15 Duke Street was built in 1864, and, while not entirely typical of its period, it shows many of the improvements of the age. It is of four storeys above a basement, but looks taller because the roof rises at the front to provide a 'jigger loft' containing the hoists (Fig 27a-d). It has the conventional narrow frontage to the street, but within this elevation it provides two tiers of loading doors. As in earlier warehouses, the ground floor is raised above street level to facilitate the movement of goods from carts: virtually all private warehouses depended solely on road transport.

Fire containment and security are evident in a number of external and internal features. Iron was used in place of timber in and around the openings on the street elevation - the doors and floor ends in the loading bays, the narrow pedestrian door set in a cast-iron frame, the hoist beams, with the date 1864, and the shutters to the narrow barred windows. Internally, safe exit from the building was assisted by the use of a cast-iron spiral stair within a brick stair compartment. Too confined to permit the movement of goods, the stair communicated with each floor and even the 'jigger loft' - after all, the hoist man had the furthest to go to get out of a blazing warehouse - through doorways with cast-iron frames and sheet-iron doors.
Despite all these improvements, the building is otherwise structurally similar to earlier warehouses: it uses heavy softwood timbers in its roof trusses and floors (the latter propped by cast-iron columns as stipulated by the Building Acts). An internal timber structure was the norm in multi-storeyed warehouses throughout the 19th century, and clearly it was regarded that this, rather than an over-specified fireproof structure, was what the economics of the business could sustain.
We know little about the conditions of work and of the workforce in the typical private warehouse. Warehouse work was a male occupation, but not necessarily very steady in its nature, for casual, day labour may have been used to take on men only when needed. It is likely that small numbers were employed, for although packages could be heavy, only one could be on the move at any one time in a warehouse with a single tier of loading doors. Early photographs reveal that there were periods of intense activity, as shipments arrived or left the warehouse. Some men were required to handle goods on a cart outside; others transferred goods into or out of one of the floors of the building; and one or more men operated the manually powered hoist in the hoist loft. The work of the warehouse was probably supervised by a foreman, but the buildings show no evidence for the provision of offices for paperwork. Also absent is any sanitation, which suggests that the workforce may not have been permanently based at the warehouse, but instead moved around between the dock, the town-centre offices and the warehouse, spending time at the last only when there were goods to move.

The operation of manual hoists was regarded as something of a problem. It was observed in 1869 (Boult 1869, 86-7) that

in lofty warehouses, it is sometimes necessary to have relays of men, and then six or eight men may he found on a hot summer's day, sweltering in the jigger loft close to the hot slates, and without any appreciable ventilation. Now, of course, when men of the class usually employed are so far removed from observation; there is great probability, not to say certainty, that one or more will smoke or drink; as smoking and drinking are gregarious habits, it is very likely that all, or almost all, will offend in this way, any prohibition in the Act of Parliament to the contrary notwithstanding.
The consequent risk of fire and injury was taken seriously, and alternatives to the manual hoist were sought. There was some use of steam and gas engines and of hoists worked by compressed air, but hydraulic power, widely used in the dock estate, appears only rarely to have assisted work in the smaller warehouses, because in the middle decades of the century the supply of power proved unreliable. Only late in the 19th century did an extensive network providing a reliable supply develop across the city.

Fireproof, low-rise and combined-use warehouses
Although most 19th-century warehouses were multi-storeyed and of conventional construction, a substantial number adopted different designs. Some of these were built to be fireproof; others displayed a different overall form; and still others combined warehousing with other types of accommodation - shops and offices - to create a new mixed-use building type.
The best-known fireproof warehouses are those built by Jesse Hartley on the Dock Estate. The warehouses around Albert Dock, Stanley Dock and Wapping Dock were executed on a Herculean scale for bonded storage, at last providing the port of Liverpool with facilities to match those of the London docks. The internal structure of these warehouses has a massive solidity: graceful brick vaults spring from substantial cast-iron beams, supported at intervals by iron columns (Fig 28). The heaviness of this structure contrasts, in the Albert Dock warehouses, with that of the roof, which has light, almost bow-profile wrought-iron trusses supporting a roof covering of iron sheets, the last galvanised to protect against corrosion.
The construction of Hartley's great dock warehouses was determined by unique criteria. The requirement was for secure bonded storage on a scale that dwarfed all private warehousing, and the finance was provided by the Corporation and Dock Trustees. The projects were not, therefore, governed solely by commercial considerations. These conditions did not apply outside the Dock Estate, but nevertheless for some warehouse builders fireproof construction, albeit on a more modest scale, was the preferred option. The Formby Street fire of 1842 provided a lesson: just one warehouse, significantly of fireproof construction, withstood the conflagration. Probably shortly thereafter, a fireproof warehouse was built on Waterloo Road (Fig 29), and this was quickly followed by the construction of PW Brancker's enormous Clarence Warehouses on Great Howard Street (Fig 30a-h). In the course of construction in 1844 (and therefore almost exactly contemporary with the Albert Dock warehouses), this block was of conventional plan and form but entirely fireproof in construction, with brick-arched floors and a roof of cast and wrought iron. It appears to have been built in phases and was probably designed to provide multiple units that might be let separately. Its earliest recorded use is indicated by the Ordnance Survey map of 1848, which shows it as a corn store. Although valuable and combustible, corn did not rival some other goods in either risk or value, but Brancker was clearly concerned to provide the safest environment that contemporary technology could devise. The scale and construction of the building together set it apart from all other surviving private warehouses of the period.

Very much at the same time as Brancker was building Clarence Warehouses, a markedly different form of warehouse was appearing in the areas behind the new docks to north and south of the city centre. This was the 'low-rise' warehouse, sometimes with one, sometimes with two floors over a basement (Fig 31).
It is likely that land in these outlying commercial districts was cheaper than in the city centre, and that open ground could be developed by dividing it up into generous plots unconstrained by existing buildings and complex ownership patterns. Larger plots, therefore, could be afforded, and, although the option was not universally adopted, many warehouse developers chose to build broad and low rather than tall and narrow, probably for the advantages in goods handling that the low-rise warehouse offered.
Many of these warehouses were of fireproof construction. Some, at least, had a further distinguishing feature, that is, the provision of much greater ceiling heights in one or more of their floors than is found in multi-storeyed warehouses. A single-storey warehouse of 1845 in Sefton Street had headroom rising to 28 feet (8.5 metres); at Glegg Street a surviving two-storeyed warehouse has a ground floor rising to over 6 metres (Fig 32a-b); and fireproof warehouses in Birchall Street have a ground-floor height of 4.5 metres (Fig 33a-d). These buildings could, therefore, store goods in much loftier stacks, and in the Birchall Street warehouses cast-iron hooks let into the brick vaults were probably used for lifting gear to raise loads above normal unassisted storage heights.
It is probable that the low-rise warehouse proved suited to particular trades: it might, for example, have been relatively easy to stack cotton bales to greater heights than could be managed with some other commodities. Both single-storeyed and two-storeyed versions of the low-rise warehouse were built before 1850, and continued to be built into the early 20th century, when the use of light angle-iron roof trusses permitted wide unobstructed storage areas on the upper floor (Fig 34).

A new type of mixed-use building was developed in the early and mid-19th century. The centre of the city retains a number of stylish warehouses of this period, showing that the narrow streets here must have been cluttered with goods moving to and from the docks at this time (Fig 35a-b). In the course of the century, however, the historic-centre was largely rebuilt: existing streets were widened and new streets were laid out, lined with large, impressive commercial buildings - offices, hotels, banks and so on. But warehousing remained important even in the heart of the Victorian commercial district, for in the streets and lanes leading off the principal routes - Dale Street and Victoria Street - are to be found the familiar features of warehouse architecture.
These features are found both in largely conventional warehouses, such as are found in Cheapside (Fig 36), and, more significantly, in buildings in which warehousing was just one component. An early example is found in Sweeting Street: here, Barned's Buildings, of the 1830s, provides a dignified classical range of offices set above a warehouse basement (Fig 37). A later and grander example of the same mixed use is The Albany, Old Hall Street, designed by J K Colling and built in 1856. Anything less like a Liverpool warehouse is difficult to imagine, for it is an ornate Renaissance palace, the style providing a link between the city's business community and the merchant princes of Venice and Lombardy (Fig 38a-c). Above street level, the building provided suites of offices, once populated by an army of clerks in dozens of different firms. But the basement provides storage space, and teagles (cast-iron cranes) on the long side walls enabled goods to be moved from the street to the lower level. The amount of storage space is much smaller than the amount of office space, and it is likely that the basement either held samples, perhaps of cotton, or operated entirely independently of the businesses on the upper floors. If the latter, the provision of warehousing in the basement offered the speculator the prospect of additional income for parts of the building that could not provide good office space. Subterranean Liverpool was a warren of storage vaults.

In many other mixed-use buildings, the functional distinction is not between upper and lower levels but between front and rear: instead of being hidden below street level, warehousing was located behind the less conspicuous elevations of buildings. A good example is Westminster Chambers, built in 1879-80. The facades to Dale Street and Crosshall Street are of sandstone and are dressed up in an ornate Gothic style: the windows in the elevations light two principal floors of offices above a row of shops. But, turning the corner into Preston Street, a minor backstreet, stone gives way to pale brick and functionalism replaces ornament, for on this front the building provided warehouses, with four tiers of loading doors (Fig 39a-b). The same is encountered in Victoria Street, where a long line of office buildings - Crown Buildings, Jerome Buildings, Carlisle Buildings and Abbey Buildings, all of the mid-1880s and all with stylish street frontages - betray their dual function in their rear elevation, where, towering over a narrow street, is a sheer wall punctured by tiers of loading doors (Fig 40a-b). Many of these city-centre warehouses have much better lighting than their more remote cousins, with much larger windows.
These buildings, and many others like them, were probably designed to be used flexibly. They could be rented in their entirety by a large company, or occupied by a number of companies renting out accommodation - perhaps a whole floor or part of a floor - to suit their needs. Some companies might require offices and a warehouse, some one and some the other. Shared staircases give access to the office areas on each floor (Fig 41) and, in some buildings at least, the warehouse parts could function entirely separately. The accommodation would be ideal for trades such as that of a cotton broker, wishing to conduct a business from prestigious offices but to have on hand, in an adjoining warehouse, a good range of samples.
An illustration of how such structures were used is provided by the row on Victoria Street: in 1888 Crown Buildings housed a provision merchant, two clock manufacturers, a corn and flour dealer, a hardware merchant, an engineer and a 'horse nail' company, and Abbey Buildings contained a leather factor, a boot manufacturer, and a glass, lead, oil and colour merchant. It is quite clear that even in the late 19th century, property developers were keenly aware that the commercial life of the city centre depended on proximity between business accommodation and warehousing.

Figure 20   The loading bay on the fourth floor of 46 Henry Street: the view shows the timber floor and timber prop. The rope harnesses hanging from the beam secured the warehousemen as they pulled goods into the building. [AA045279]

Figure 21   The timber stair at 46 Henry Street. [AA045276]

Figure 22   The gloomy interior of 46 Henry Street: natural light would be supplemented by the light of oil lamps. [AA045280]

Figure 23   A large window blocked to provide a small shuttered opening in the warehouse at 38 Henry Street: this may have resulted from the need to conform to the requirements for bonded storage. [AA045291]

Figure 24   The Goree Warehouses as rebuilt after the fire of 1802: in the background can be seen a much taller warehouse of eleven storeys. (From T Troughton, The History of Liverpool (1810), Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]

Figure 25   A multiple-unit warehouse on Parliament Street, built in the late 19th century, probably by the Liverpool Warehouse Construction Company Ltd. [AA045293]

Figure 26   One of many destructive warehouse fires: New Quay burns down in 1833. [Local Illustrations Collection 82, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]

Figure 27   15 Duke Street, built in 1864:
(a) The elevation shows the effect of the Building Acts in encouraging the use of fireproof features in the openings. [AA045294]
(b) The floors of this warehouse are of timber construction. [AA98I02366]
(c) The stair is of cast iron and is contained within a brick stair compartment entered through a sheet-iron door. [AA98I02367]
(d) The warehouse hoist survives in the 'jigger loft'. (AA98/02368]

Figure 28   The Albert Dock warehouses have brick-vaulted ceilings, visible here in the quayside arcade. [AA030736]

Figure 29   This warehouse at 68 Waterloo Road, at the junction with Vulcan Street, was probably built in the mid-1840s as a fireproof building. [AA045126]

Figure 30a   Clarence Warehouses, 177 Great Howard Street. This very large multiple-unit warehouse was built in fireproof form in the mid- 1840s, probably by the building firm A H Holme.
(a) The elevation to Dickson Street has ten loading bays. [AA045316]
(b) The warehouse's features include sheet-iron doors and window shutters and cast-iron window sills and lintels. [AA045317]
(c) The ceilings have brick vaults and tile floors. [AA045324]
(d) The staircases are fully fireproof. [AA045327]
(e) Openings in party walls have double-leaf sheet-iron doors. [AA045323]

Figure 30b   Clarence Warehouses, 177 Great Howard Street. This very large multiple-unit warehouse was built in fireproof form in the mid- 1840s, probably by the building firm A H Holme.
(f) The roof structure uses triangulated trusses of cast and wrought iron. [AA045326]
(g) Parapet walls rise above the roof to prevent the spread of fire from unit to unit. [AA045322]
(h) The section shows the fireproof construction.

Figure 31   A low-rise warehouse at 8 Grundy Street: note how the loading bays have doors only on the raised ground floor. [AA045299]

Figure 32a   Elevation and sections of a warehouse on Sefton Street, designed by William Cuts haw, 1845: the sections show clear floor heights of 21 feet and 28 feet (6.4 and 8.5 metres). [Sections reproduced with the consent of Edmund Kirby & Sons from the Culshaw Collection, Lancashire Record Office (DDX 162)]

Figure 32b   Very lofty storage areas were provided at the low-rise warehouse at 8-10 Glegg Street. [AA045286]

Figure 33    Warehouses at 2—4 Birchall Street:
(a) These late 19th-century warehouses are of low-rise form, with two storeys over a basement. [AA045295]
(b) Fireproof construction is used internally over the lofty ground floor. [AA045296]
(c) Hooks in the ground-floor ceiling vaults were probably used to assist lifting heavy loads. [AA045297]
(d) The section shows the height of the ground floor.

Figure 34   62-4 Kitchen Street, built in the early 20th century, has a wide span permitted by the use of light angle-iron roof trusses. [AA045301]

Figure 35    Rigby 's Buildings, Dale Street:
(a) The Victorian facade hides a small courtyard behind. [AA029162]
(b) An earlier warehouse - now converted into flats - is found along one side. [AA045302]

Figure 36   27 Cheapside: note the use of fireproof doors, large windows with cast-iron sills and lintels, and decorative polychrome brickwork. [AA045303]

Figure 37   Barned's Buildings, Sweeting Street. The handsome Classical office building has a storage basement, served by the cast-iron cranes attached to the wall. External access to the basement has now been blocked. [AA045305]

Figure 38    The Albany, Old Hall Street, built in 1856:
(a) The fine office facade, illustrated in a contemporary watercolour, disguises the storage use of the basement. [Herdman Collection Index 496, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries]
(b) The side elevation has cranes that were used to move goods to and from the basement. [AA041224]
(c) The reconstruction drawing shows how the warehousing was segregated from the office accommodation on the upper floors.

Figure 39a   Westminster Chambers, Dale Street, 1879-80, designed by Robert Owens for David Roberts. The Gothic style of the office elevation contrasts with the plain warehouse elevation on Preston Street. [AA045306]

Figure 39b   Westminster Chambers, Dale Street. The plan shows that there was no doorway connection between the two parts of the building.

Figure 40a   The Crown, Jerome, Carlisle and Abbey Buildings on Victoria Street all date from the mid-1880s. [AA040555]

Figure 40b   Crown, Jerome, Carlisle and Abbey Buildings, Victoria Street. At the rear, the range provides warehouses. [AA045309]

Figure 41   Shared stairways, with pale blue brickwork and iron balusters, give access to the offices in Jerome Buildings, Victoria Street. [AA045308]

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