Why go
Pier Head, Castle Street and the dock warehouses put the city’s imperial-era ambition into stone, brick and iron. Looking beyond the impressive facades reveals the systems of shipping and finance behind them, and the people whose forced labour and displacement were part of those systems.
The full story
During the nineteenth century Liverpool became one of Britain’s most important ports, connected to Atlantic and imperial trading routes. Merchants, shipping companies and insurers accumulated wealth that helped produce the grand scale of the waterfront and commercial quarter. Foreign consuls worked in the city; James Maury became the first United States consul in Liverpool in 1790. The architecture was intended to project confidence, but its meaning cannot be separated from the trade in enslaved Africans and from colonial extraction. Liverpool’s port also made it strategically important in wartime: during the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic was directed from the city, and Merseyside endured intense bombing. These histories do not collapse into one tidy narrative. The useful approach on a visit is to read a building such as the Cunard or Port of Liverpool Building as both a work of design and a sign of the networks that financed and used it.