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Report - - Canada Dock (Liverpool, Nov, 2018) | Industrial Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Canada Dock (Liverpool, Nov, 2018)

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urbanchemist

28DL Regular User
Regular User
Canada Dock opened in 1859, the last and biggest dock designed by Jesse Hartley (a famous Liverpool dock engineer), connecting to the Langdon and Brocklebank Docks to the north and Huskisson Dock to the south.

It was originally used for importing timber from Canada, hence the name, but has been extensively modified since.

It now consists of three branch docks and a graving dock and is mostly used for scrap metal sorting and storage (S. Norton & Co), with an animal feed place (Volac) at the south end.

I’ve driven past here many times, wondering if there was anything worth seeing apart from huge piles of scrap metal - which I kind of fancied wandering round anyway.

The main target was one the few remaining pump houses in the Liverpool dock system, D on the satellite view below.

I also had a look in a little building A, a big transit shed B, and another little building beyond it C.

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Starting with a view of A and the shed B from up in a warehouse on the opposite side of the dock road.

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Building A is shown as a custom’s office on old OS maps, built sometime between 1927 and 1964. Just an empty, grimy little place.

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Shed B is in three sections and seems to be seldom used, although some lights were on in the middle part. Nothing in here except hordes of pigeons and some small rooms and signs.

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Heading over to building C past a small Matterhorn of scrap..

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..its a little office of some sort, built in the mid 60’s according to OS maps. Nothing inside, but a good place to watch boats go past.

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The view north - the Langdon pump house is hidden behind the incoming Seatruck ferry, with the large silos of the Gladstone dock in the background.

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Heading round to the graving dock a view inland to the nearby derelict warehouses (left to right, Merseyside Food Supplies, a former engineering works and United Mersey Supplies).

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Approaching the pump house.

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urbanchemist

28DL Regular User
Regular User
Continued.

The pump house is shown on a 1906 OS map and used to have a boiler house with chimney attached, demolished in the mid 1980’s. The complete building can be seen in early aerial photos.

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A 1920 photo is included below since it shows Hartley’s Canada Dock hydraulic accumulator tower on the outer dock wall, long demolished.

Hartley was apparently a fairly austere character, but seemed to let his hair down sometimes, as with this faux-medieval creation - some of his whimsy is also evident in the little huts visible at the ends of walls in the dock road.

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But we digress, the pump house is an interesting looking building, but there’s nothing inside except the Mersey and a recent-looking control panel for electrical pumps.

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From the other end..

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I put the tarpaulin back again of course.

What used to be in here probably looked something like the photo below of the pumps in the Huskisson Dock Impounding Station on the seawall a bit further south (impounding stations pumped water out of the Mersey into the docks).

Note the similarity of the architecture.

This building was demolished sometime in the 1990’s but one of the pumps was preserved, and currently sits, fenced off from the general public for some reason, on one of the Canning graving docks outside the Mersey Maritime Museum.

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We finish with a couple of pictures of boats. The first one is moored opposite the pump house and until recently was derelict (see https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/habicht-ii-canada-dock-liverpool-august-2011.64046/).

Now its been renamed the Endeavour and is being renovated for cruises between Liverpool and North Wales. The second is a bulk carrier with scrap metal bound for Alexandria, picture taken early one morning on the other side of the graving dock.

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The Kwan

28DL Regular User
Regular User
Great report mate, Jesse Hartley based a lot of his buildings on Italian designs and probably will never happen again in this day and age but how cool are they. enjoyed seeing your report :thumb
 

urbanchemist

28DL Regular User
Regular User
....

What happened to the medieval-esque tower???

Don't know exactly - the outline is shown in a 1958 OS map, but gone by 1968 when the Canada Dock basin entrance was removed (it had apparently always had problems with silting).
 

Cortinalights

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
Yeah excellent photos, all that old industrial stuff is so interesting, looks like you got in all the buildings and stuff, hasn't this whole area of Liverpoo got so much stuff, I mean I passed so many derelict pubs around here
 

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