Recently I was fortunate to be able to reserve a place on a guided visit to Liverpool’s Old Dock of 1715. This had been excavated under the direction of Mr Jamie Quatermaine of Oxford Archaeology North.
Meeting at the Maritime Museum, a ten minute walk took the group to Liverpool one, where a modern entrance, stairway and stairlift leads to the viewing gallery, here two well-trained guides gave the background to its construction and it’s raison d’etre ie to enable vessels to unload and load at any stage of the tide very quickly instead of the two weeks often required whilst beached at the muddy inlet ‘The Pool’. A further advantage was that a dock would afford shelter from the Mersey’s strong tides and frequent North Westerly winds.
From the gallery we looked down to the Dock’s sandstone bed ( the same rock that underlies Liverpool), and the twenty foot wall of locally produced bricks rising up from it. Nearby are the large coping stones that gave a solid edge to the Quayside. For these times it was a remarkable feat of civil engineering.
It was quite exciting to see these features which had not been seen since 1811 when the Dock was filled in, no longer able to cope with the increasing size of ships and the volume of trade that the newer docks, built on land reclaimed from the river, were fostering.
In 1826 the site was used for the magnificent domed customs house, cotroversionally demolished in 1947 after suffering some war damage.
The Old Dock, a tidal dock, was the first of it’s type in the country and can be said to be a great tribute to the entreprenurial merchants who conceived and financed it. The masonry that we saw could rightly be called the foundation stones of the port, which grew rapidly,to become one of the most famous ports in the world
Stewart Black October 2011.
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