In 1793, in response to a demand for extra storage space to house the vast quantities of colonial goods that flowed in and out of the port, successful merchants built on the Strand the Goree Warehouses, with arcades underneath part of the original design. They were named after Senegal's Goree Islands off the coast of Africa. When fire destroyed the buildings in 1802, merchants rebuilt the warehouses in 1811 as trade with Africa continued after Parliament brought an end to the British slave trade.
Their name had originated over three decades earlier as they were built on land named the Goree Causeway, named after the trading post of Gorée, Senegal that the British had captured from the French in 1758; it would be returned to them in 1763. This was likely to have been part of the first stage of the process of enclosing the land in front to make George's Dock and they were the first multi-storeyed warehouses to be built in Liverpool. Their erection was proposed when the George's Dock was constructed in 1768, but actual building did not begin until 1793. Built beside George's Dock by the Corporation, but used by merchants as private warehouses, they were said to have been in part thirteen storeys high. 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'. 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, as the observer states, could not 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. They were severely damaged when, on the 15th of September 1802, a fire broke out in the warehouse of Mr. T. France, which soon spread through the whole range, and a conflagration ensued, the like of which had never been seen in the town. Destroying the buildings and their contents, threatening neighbouring buildings and shipping in the adjacent dock, it caused losses valued at more than £300,000, a vast sum at the time, and caused over £320,000 of damage.
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| Goree Piazzas in 1832 |
The construction of the second Goree warehouses gave rise to Goree Piazzas as the name for the new premises which faced George's Dock, with Goree as the thoroughfare between the rear of those warehouses and the ones facing them to the east. In the early 1860s, the Goree was renamed Back Goree, the name it retained until 1925 when it became The Strand. The name Goree is remembered to this day on the side of the George's Dock Building (Queensway Tunnel ventilation tower), whilst the Goree Warehouses which were destroyed in WWII had, until 2017, been remembered with a (suitably damaged) plaque on The Strand until the remainder was finally hacked off and stolen. Beetham Plaza now stands on the site of the former Goree Piazza warehouses.
For more info take a look at the excellent blog site here - https://bygoneliverpool.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/goree-liverpool-part-one/
see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/10/remembering-liverpool-structures.html
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