Then he built another and another. He was testing something that would change the face of Liverpool's waterfront forever: a way to store cargo that would not go up in smoke.
Image: Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Jesse Hartley, Surveyor to the Liverpool Dock Trustees.
Hartley became Surveyor to the Liverpool Dock Trustees in 1824. His background was in bridge and canal engineering rather than marine docks. During his 36-year tenure, the dock space in Liverpool expanded from 46 to 212 acres, creating a large concentration of Grade I listed buildings.
Image: Wikimedia Commons. The Royal Albert Dock, completed in 1846.
The Albert Dock opened in July 1846. The warehouse walls were built of brick, granite, and sandstone, with cast-iron support columns. The construction of the five-story warehouses required 23 million bricks and 47,000 tonnes of mortar. Due to shortages in local stone quarries, granite was imported from Scotland. The cast-iron columns, measuring four feet in diameter and 25 feet in height, were used as a lower-cost alternative to granite pillars.
The warehouses featured a functional design based on Tuscan columns and round arches. Hartley adapted the layout from St Katharine Docks in London, incorporating taller entrance arches to allow passage for mobile cranes. The dock used lock gates to maintain a consistent water level, permitting loading and unloading independent of the tides.
Photo: Unsplash / Neil Cooper. Cast-iron columns of the Albert Dock warehouses.
In 1848, the dock Trustees installed hydraulic cranes, hoists, and lifts powered by a central steam pumping station. This machinery reduced the time required to unload cargo from vessels. The enclosed layout allowed merchants to store goods securely and delay import duty payments until the cargo was sold.
The warehouses stored high-value commodities. The upper floors had a capacity of 234,950 bales of cotton. Other stored goods included hogsheads of tobacco, chests of tea, bales of silk, and casks of brandy. The facility was designed to handle imports from South America, India, and China, generating capital that funded municipal building projects in the city centre.
Before the opening of the Albert Dock, Liverpool was a major slave trading port in Great Britain. Between 1700 and 1807, ships departing from Liverpool carried an estimated 1.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Image: Wikimedia Commons. The 1789 diagram of the slave ship Brookes, demonstrating the stowage of enslaved people.
The commodities stored in Hartley's warehouses, including sugar, cotton, and tobacco, were produced using enslaved labor. The capital generated by this trade funded the construction of civic structures such as St George's Hall.
Image: Wikimedia Commons. Map showing the expansion of the Liverpool dock system.
By the late 19th century, steamships had grown too large to enter the Albert Dock basin. Cargo operations shifted north to the deep-water docks at Seaforth. During the Second World War, the dock served as a base for the British Atlantic Fleet. German air raids during the 1941 Blitz caused structural damage to several warehouses.
Commercial shipping at the Albert Dock ceased in 1972. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board proposed demolition in 1960 and 1966, but the plans were rejected. The buildings remained vacant and accumulated silt for approximately nine years.
In 1981, the Merseyside Development Corporation initiated regeneration projects in partnership with the Arrowcroft Group. The dock basin was refilled in 1984, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum opened in 1986. Tate Liverpool opened in 1988, and the television station Granada began broadcasting daytime programming from the dock in the same year.
The site received a royal charter in 2018 and is now known as the Royal Albert Dock. The warehouses contain retail shops, restaurants, and apartments.
Photo: Unsplash / Neil Cooper. The Royal Albert Dock today.
Hartley built for two hundred years. It is worth asking which building going up in Liverpool today is designed to last beyond the next planning cycle.
