WALKING ON WATER STREET, Part 11 Prison Weint began its life as a protective VANISHED STREETS: FROM PRISON WEINT TO SEA BROW wall for the Tower and as a route to the 2 Graham Jones Chapel of St Nicholas (fig 3), and was first named as Church Alley on Lang’s plan of The town used to suffer in the early days from the caprices of the tide during bad 1750 and as the Antient Way to the Church weather, and various traditional stories are still current of the accidents which on Eyes’ plan of 1753.3 were frequent during the angry elements in the harbour, whereby the Stanley Tower and St Nicholas Church were sure to have suffered. The strand of this In 1828 Charles Okill produced a plan portion of the river was anciently called ‘Townside’, being frequented as the for the Corporation to indicate the Fig 2. Detail from a 1650 plan (oriented to common, and used as the property of the people. Then it grew as a watchword land ‘disposed of under Leases from the the east), from The Stranger in Liverpool, and gathering cry, and ‘Townside forever!’ served as a tocsin to rouse many a Corporation between the years 1672 and 1829. The Tower of Liverpool was replaced in the mid 19th century by Tower Buildings bold and fiery spirit in the purlieus of Water Street. 1730’ (the plots being numbered) and (shown between Prison Weint and Tower 4 Northern Daily Times, 5th June 1855 showing it as the Road to the Chapel (fig 4). Garden in fig 1). Image courtesy of the Athenaeum. Before the townsfolk began to build into the Mersey many centuries ago, the shore followed roughly a line from the western edge of the churchyard of St Nicholas to Sea Brow and beyond (figs 1 and 2).1 Fig 3. A view of the Mersey shore at a time comparable to the fig 2 plan. On the left is the Tower of Liverpool with the route to the Chapel. In the centre is the Custom House at the foot of Water Street which was vulnerable to high tides. Image courtesy of the Liverpool Record Office (LRO). Fig 4. Detail from Okill’s 1730 plan showing the Road to the Chapel and Sea Brow, prior to reclamation of the land between Fig 1. From the 1890 O.S. section the two (and upon which the Goree, Back of the Castle Street ward. Goree and the Piazzas would later be built). Image courtesy of Liverpool Image courtesy of the Historic Society of Central Library. Lancashire & Cheshire (HSLC). 24 25 Fig 6. A detail from Perry’s map of 1769 (oriented to the east). Fig 7. ‘The destruction of the Goree Warehouses by Fire, on the Night of 15th September 1802, from a painting in the possession of Mr Thomas Binns’. Image courtesy of the LRO, ref. Brierley Collection A62. Fig 5. Church Alley / Stringer’s Alley by W G Herdman (Pictorial Relics of Ancient Liverpool, 1878, vol 1, plate 4). This is a composite picture since it shows the new lantern spire of Although Sea Brow had already been given that name on Chadwick’s map of 1725, it St Nicholas (completed in 1815) and the Tower of Liverpool with a prisoner’s begging is Sea Bank or Brow on John Eyes’ 1765 map, Sea Bank or Sea Brow on George Perry’s bag hanging from a window (despite being said by Herdman to have been vacated as 1769 map (fig. 6),11 and Sea Bank in the initial 1766-69 editions of Gore’s Directory. a prison in 1810). Image courtesy of the LRO. However, presumably because of a continuing confusion with another Sea Bank (an early name for New Quay), it appears to have become content to settle down as Sea This Road to the Chapel, with its protective wall said to have been built in 1572,5 Brow from 1772 onwards. is first recorded in Gore’s Directory for 1767 as Church Alley with the premises for Perrin & Co.’s Warrington glass warehouse and the coal dealers Rippon & Berry.6 Perry’s map also shows New intended Warehouses between the Goree Strand (Goree Who else might have occupied the Alley is unknown because the early directories Cawsey on Eyes’ map) and George’s Dock (then under construction and opened in listed only ‘merchants, tradesmen and principal inhabitants’. However, the 1790 1771), and James Picton confirms that - directory contains a list of the ‘Names of the Streets, Lanes, &c. within the Liberties of Liverpool, with the numbers of persons in each. Taken by M Simmons, from October a noble range of warehouses, with arcades underneath, formed part of the 13th, 1789, to January 13th, 1790’, and the Alley is shown as having 11 properties original design, but they remained for many years in abeyance, and were not together with one cellar and housing a total of 81 people.7 erected until 1793, when, in commemoration of the African trade, then so prosperous in Liverpool, they took the name of the “Goree” warehouses...12 Church Alley became Stringer’s Alley on several maps from 1785,8 but retained its The original erections had a very short-lived history. On September 15, 1802, a earlier name in the directories until 1821, coincidentally when the last remnants of fire broke out in the warehouse of Mr. T. France, which soon spread through the the Tower of Liverpool were finally demolished.9,10 In 1848 it was renamed again – whole range, and a conflagration ensued, the like of which has never been seen in rather honest memory of its former life – as Prison Weint, of which more later. in the town.13 26 27 By 1848 the site of the Tower of Liverpool A decade later, with the arrival of and the buildings between it and St Nicholas the Overhead Railway, Pier Head Churchyard were in the process of being Station transformed the view at the redeveloped as Tower Buildings, a set of foot of Water St (fig 11). Then, in offices designed by James Picton, begun 1906, a City Engineers Department at the northern end in 1847 (fig 8)14 and photographer captured a final view with the Water St frontage completed of Prison Weint (fig 12) prior to in 1856. Prison Weint thus became the its abolition and the demolition Fig 11. From the Illustrated London News, alleyway for the entrances to those Tower of Tower Buildings to make way 11th February 1893, with its account of the Buildings offices which faced west and the for construction of the 1908 Tower opening of the Overhead Railway. rear entrances to the warehouses which Building which exists today.17 Image courtesy of the LRO. Fig 8. The bottom right hand corner of faced George’s Dock Gates (fig 9).15 Tower sheet 23 of the 1848 O.S. (Weint here is spelled Wient). Buildings was sufficiently grand to justify a The construction of the second Goree warehouses Image courtesy of the Athenaeum. directory listing of its own under ‘T’ rather gave rise to Goree Piazzas as the name for the than as a building in the Water St numerical. premises which faced George’s Dock, with Goree as the thoroughfare between the rear of those The Liverpool Arms (see fig 8) and the warehouse to its west at the junction of Water warehouses and the ones facing them to the St and George’s Dock Gates were taken down in the 1860s,16 and a detail from a east.18 In the early 1860s, the Goree was renamed painting by Herdman (fig 10) shows what was left, viewed from the Water Street Back Goree (the east side of which is on the left corner of the Goree Piazzas which had replaced the ones which had been consumed in fig 13), the name it retained until 1925 when it by the 1802 fire. The remaining Dock Gates warehouses were demolished in the early became The Strand. 1880s, giving Tower Buildings a better Fig 10. A detail from an 1867 view. In view of the docks (see fig 1). the background is Tower Buildings and in front of it, in a dilapidated condition, Fig 9. An 1865 view of George’s Dock Gates looking is the Tower Spirit Vaults (see fig 8). Fig 13. A view of Back Goree, looking south south from the Merchants’ Coffee House (‘Spirit In 1877 an artist used a window in the from a warehouse between Prison Weint and Vaults’ in fig 8) to the junction with Water St, with warehouse next door to the Vaults to George’s Dock Gates. the Goree Warehouses beyond, stretching in two record a view of the Back Goree (fig 13). Image from The Graphic, 5th May 1877, sections from Water St to Brunswick St and (behind Image courtesy of the LRO, ref. p 420. Author’s collection. the three figures) from Brunswick St to Moor St. Herdman Coll. 341. Image courtesy of the LRO, ref. Herdman Coll. 55. Fig 12. A view in 1906 of the west face of Tower Buildings and along Prison Weint. A group of young men wait at the Water Street tram stop and, behind them, bow-girder bridges of the Overhead Railway can be seen. Image courtesy of the LRO, Photographs & Small Prints, Streets & Districts, Water Street. 28 29 Fig 14. Examples of the occupants of Goree Piazzas in Gore’s Directory for 1884. Fig 16. Looking north along Goree towards Brunswick Image courtesy of the Athenaeum. St, with Pier Head station in the distance.