Guide
The Lost Liverpool Map: A Photo Essay on the City's Demolished Landmarks
Archive images of Liverpool's Custom House, Sailors' Home, Overhead Railway and Childwall Hall. A visual record of where these lost landmarks once stood.
Liverpool has lost hundreds of buildings, streets and entire neighbourhoods to war, redevelopment and changing times. This photo essay uses verified archival images to show what stood where the city now stands.
Almost every image below is in the public domain, with one modern photograph used under a Creative Commons licence. All are credited in full beneath the image and again at the end. Together they accompany the L1Local Lost Liverpool Map, a growing reference for what existed before the clearances, the bombs and the bulldozers.
The Custom House: lost in the Blitz
The Old Custom House on Canning Place was one of Liverpool's most prominent civic buildings. It stood on the site of Liverpool's oldest dock and served as the administrative centre for the city's maritime trade.
The building was badly damaged during the Liverpool Blitz in May 1941 and was demolished shortly after the Second World War. The site is now occupied by the Liverpool One shopping development.
A photograph held by the Historic England Archive (reference OP09390) shows the west portico on the north side of Canning Place with the roof completely gone after the May 1941 bombing. The archive holds the image under its own licence terms, which require checking before reuse.
The Liverpool Sailors' Home: demolished for redevelopment
The Liverpool Sailors' Home on Canning Place provided accommodation for merchant seamen. It opened in 1850 and was designed by Liverpool architect John Cunningham. The building's ornate facade, with its carved and gilded entrance gates, was one of the most distinctive in the city.
The building did not have an easy start. An Illustrated London News engraving records its destruction by fire on 12 May 1860, ten years after it opened. It was rebuilt and stayed in use for more than a century afterwards.
The home closed in 1969. It was demolished in 1974. The site remained largely unused for over 30 years until the construction of Liverpool One. The original entrance gates were restored in the Midlands and returned to the city.
The gates are the one substantial piece of the building still standing in Liverpool. They are the closest thing the site has to a marker.
The Liverpool Overhead Railway: the Dockers' Umbrella
The Liverpool Overhead Railway ran along the docks from Seaforth in the north to Herculaneum Dock in the south. It opened on 6 March 1893 and was described by National Museums Liverpool as the world's first electric elevated railway.
Dock workers called the structure the Dockers' Umbrella because its viaduct ran above part of their route to work. At its busiest, the railway carried around 20 million passengers a year. The last trains ran on 30 December 1956 and demolition was largely complete by late 1958.
George's Dock itself was filled in between 1897 and 1899, creating the land on which the Three Graces were later built. The photograph below was taken as the dock was being cleared, with the newly constructed railway running above the remaining water.
More on the railway's full history, its stations and what survives today is in the L1Local guide to the Liverpool Overhead Railway.
Childwall Hall: a lost country house
Childwall Hall was a country house in the Childwall area of Liverpool. Its origins date from the 17th century. The building that survived into the 20th century was largely a 19th-century reconstruction.
The hall was demolished in 1949. The grounds became part of Childwall Woods and Fields, which remains open to the public. Few photographs of the building survive, so the clearest views we have are printed ones made long before it came down.
What the images show and what is missing
Archival coverage of Liverpool's lost buildings is uneven. Well-documented landmarks such as the Custom House and the Overhead Railway appear in multiple archives. Buildings outside the commercial and civic core, including most of the terraced housing cleared in the post-war decades, rarely appear at all.
The images above cover the city centre and the waterfront. The larger story of what Liverpool looked like before the clearances of the 1960s and 1970s is much harder to illustrate from public domain photographs.
For a wider record of the city's history across all periods, see the L1Local history of Liverpool guide.
Useful links and sources
- Custom House c.1892 photograph and 1854 Bradshaw engraving: public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
- Sailors' Home c.1860 photograph and the Illustrated London News engraving of the 12 May 1860 fire: public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
- Sailors' Home gates (2017): photo by Rossographer, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
- Liverpool Overhead Railway 1897 plate and George's Dock 1897 photograph: public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
- Childwall Hall: 1832 engraving by Thomas Allen, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
- Custom House photograph (Historic England Archive, OP09390): archive licence applies. Check Historic England Archive for specific reuse terms before publication.
- Liverpool Overhead Railway, Princes Dock (Liverpool Museums, SB/1613-282): museum licence applies. Check National Museums Liverpool for specific reuse terms.