Pier Head

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pier Head stands at the edge of Liverpool, England, where the River Mersey meets the city centre, and for generations it was where the world arrived. Ships bound for America, for the Isle of Man, for the communities of Birkenhead and Wallasey across the water all passed through this single riverside point. The ground beneath those ferry terminals and grand stone facades was not always so purposeful. In the 1890s, it was occupied by George's Dock, a body of water already past its useful life, too small and too shallow for the cargo ships of a booming industrial age. What replaced it became one of the most photographed waterfronts in England. How did a defunct dock give rise to a trio of buildings so celebrated they were named the Three Graces? Who fought over the land, who lost money on it, and who ultimately shaped it into the place it became?

• 2. A Dock Runs Out of Time

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  George's Dock was built in 1771, making it the third dock constructed in Liverpool. By the 1890s it could no longer accommodate the scale of commercial shipping that the city depended on. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, established by Parliament in 1857, owned most of the site. A smaller portion remained in the hands of the Corporation of the City of Liverpool, and the two bodies did not share the same ambitions for the land.

  In January 1896, negotiations opened formally. The corporation sent Frederick, Lord Derby, who held the office of Lord Mayor, to lead its team. The Board's side was led by Robert Gladstone, a member of the Liverpool family whose most famous son was the former prime minister W.E. Gladstone. Two years of talks concluded with the corporation buying the site. The price was £277,399, and out of that deal the Board reserved roughly 13,500 square yards on which to build its own new headquarters.

  The Board moved quickly on its building. It announced a competition limited to local architects, with Alfred Waterhouse appointed to adjudicate the entries. Complaints appeared in national architectural journals over the exclusion of architects from outside Liverpool, but the local firm of Briggs, Wolstenholme, Hobbs and Thornley won the commission regardless. A neo-baroque design was chosen, and a central dome was added at the last minute before the final plans were adopted for the start of building work in March 1903. The finished Port of Liverpool Building opened in the summer of 1907.

• 3. The Three Graces Take Shape

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  With the corporation holding the two remaining plots, the expectation had been that tenants for large-scale buildings would emerge naturally. None did. An auction held in 1905 drew no bidders at all. The following year, the Royal Liver Friendly Society approached the corporation through Walter Aubrey Thomas, a local architect. The society paid £70,000 for its site, considerably less than the £95,000 the corporation had hoped to receive.

  The scale of what the society intended to build alarmed Robert Gladstone and the Docks and Harbour Board. The proposed new headquarters was sometimes described as England's first skyscraper. After considerable debate the corporation approved the plans. The Royal Liver Building was constructed between 1908 and 1911, rising to two clock towers each crowned by a mythical Liver Bird. It became the headquarters of the Royal Liver Friendly Society and is now a grade I listed building.

  The third and final plot took longest to settle. Plans for a combined public baths and tram network offices fell through. A combined public baths and customs house was proposed and also came to nothing. In 1913 the Cunard shipping line announced it would build a new headquarters on the site. The Cunard Building, constructed between 1914 and 1916, was built of reinforced concrete clad in Portland Stone. Its design recalled grand Italian palaces. The architectural historian Peter De Figueiredo described it as a match for its more ostentatious neighbours in expressive power but greatly superior in refinement of detail and proportion. Cunard's building holds a grade II* listing today.

• 4. Arrivals and Departures

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  Prince's Landing Stage sat at the Pier Head to serve the trans-Atlantic liner trade. Several versions of this structure were built over the years; the most recent opened in the 1890s and was joined to the neighbouring George's Landing Stage to its south. After further lengthening in the early twentieth century, the combined structure measured 2,478 feet, making it almost half a mile long. Both stages were scrapped in 1973 when trans-Atlantic passenger services from Liverpool ended.

  The Mersey Ferries continued operating from George's Landing Stage, carrying passengers to Woodside in Birkenhead and to Seacombe in Wallasey. A new stage opened on the 13th of July 1975 to replace the combined structure, but only months later it had to be refloated after sinking in freak weather. On the 2nd of March 2006, extremely low tide and similar conditions caused it to sink again. One of its girder's air pockets appears to have ruptured, and it could not be refloated. A temporary stage served until early 2010, when work began on a permanent replacement.

  A brand new dedicated ferry landing stage was towed into position in November 2011. The linkspan bridge was craned into place shortly after. The new stage opened officially in January 2012, with services resuming on the 9th of January. During the years of disruption, ferry services to Liverpool had to be suspended on fourteen occasions when large cruise ships were visiting the terminal.

• 5. Open Space and Memory

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  Canada Boulevard runs the length of the Pier Head plaza. It is a walkway lined with memorial plaques honoring Canadians who died in the Battle of the Atlantic. At the centre of the open space stands an equestrian statue of Edward VII, dating from 1921.

  The Titanic Memorial commemorates the engineers who stayed at their posts as the RMS Titanic sank. Near it stand the Cunard War Memorial, the memorial to Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, and the Merchant Navy war memorial. In 2013, memorials were unveiled to the Second World War convoy escort group commander Captain Johnnie Walker and to the RMS Lancastria. The Chinese Merchant Seamen's Memorial, which remembers Chinese merchant seamen who served and died for Britain in both World Wars, was unveiled on the 23rd of January 2006.

  The open space itself has been reconfigured more than once. In the 1960s the area served as a bus terminal. In 1963 the Mersey Ferry terminal building was refurbished to include an adjoining restaurant, and in 1991 the terminal was reconfigured into its present form. When the £22 million Liverpool Canal Link opened on the 25th of March 2009, water from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal passed through the Pier Head itself, extending the canal's existing 127 miles into the city's South Docks via a 1.6-mile extension.

• 6. Heritage Status and the Fourth Grace

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  In 2004, the Pier Head was inscribed as part of the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City UNESCO World Heritage Site. That same year, a very different kind of story was concluding nearby. In 2002, the Pier Head and the adjacent Mann Island had been brought into an ambitious development scheme known as the Fourth Grace project. The winning design was submitted by Will Alsop and had been nicknamed "the Cloud." Fundamental changes to the original waterfront plan left the project unworkable, and it was abandoned in 2004, the same year the UNESCO inscription arrived.

  Work began in 2007 on a new scheme to re-house the Museum of Liverpool Life in a purpose-built building. That building opened in 2011 as the Museum of Liverpool. The George's Dock Building, a grade II listed structure east of the Port of Liverpool Building, was constructed in the 1930s to house offices and ventilator equipment for the Queensway Tunnel, a reminder that the engineering buried under the riverbed is as much a part of this place as the facades rising above it.

  The UNESCO World Heritage inscription that had recognised the Pier Head in 2004 was revoked in 2021, a decision that placed the site among a small number of locations worldwide to lose that designation. The Three Graces and their surrounding memorials remain, carrying the record of a city that built its identity along this stretch of the Mersey.