A place in history.
A future worth caring for.

The ground on which City Quay stands has been continuously in use for more than three centuries. It has been a deer park, a foreshore of salmon fisheries and watermills, a copper smelting works, one of the most significant pottery manufactories in England, a planned Victorian deep water dock, the closing stage of the American Civil War, a world first in elevated electric railways, a wartime convoy terminus, a postwar ruin, a garden festival site, and finally, since 2004, a residential estate of 413 apartments.

What follows is a chronological account, drawn from parliamentary records, museum archives, contemporary newspaper reports and academic sources. It is offered to members and residents as a record of the site on which our estate is built, and as context for the Board's responsibility to maintain it.

Herculaneum Dock, artist's impression by Tony Myers. The site as it appeared during its Victorian industrial prime.

1600s to 1760s The deer park and the foreshore

The land now occupied by City Quay formed part of Toxteth Park, an ancient royal hunting preserve held by the Crown and later the Earls of Derby. The park had been enclosed in the thirteenth century for the keeping of deer. In the early seventeenth century it was disparked, the deer were removed, and the land was released for settlement and cultivation.

The first substantial community to take up residence in Toxteth Park were Puritan families, many of them dissenters seeking freedom to worship outside the Anglican establishment. They established farms on the higher ground and worked the foreshore below. By the early eighteenth century the shoreline supported a salmon fishery, inshore trades, and a small number of watermills. Jackson's Dam and the mills at Otterspool, a short distance upriver, served the local community.

The Mersey foreshore at this point was a natural sandstone cliff dropping to the river, with shingle and clay beaches at its foot. The land above was given over to fields and small holdings, as shown on the first reliable maps of the Liverpool environs.

Toxteth and the Liverpool environs, 1768. The future dock site lies along the Mersey shore to the south of the town. The area is predominantly rural with lanes, estates, and small farms.

The Mersey shoreline at Otterspool, a short distance upriver from the future dock site. The foreshore retained this rural character until the late eighteenth century.

The south shore of the Mersey, 1797, showing the foreshore before heavy industrialisation.

1760s to 1790s The Cast Iron Shore

The first industrial use of the site came in the 1760s when Charles Roe and Company, a Macclesfield based enterprise, established a copper smelting works on the Toxteth foreshore. Roe had pioneered copper refining in Cheshire and needed a coastal site with deep water access for the import of ore and the export of refined copper. The Toxteth shore, with its sandstone cliff and tidal access, was ideal.

The smelting works operated for around thirty years. Its waste product, a glassy iron rich slag, was tipped onto the foreshore in large quantities. Over time the slag stained the beach and the rocks below, giving the shoreline its distinctive rusty, dark brown appearance. Local people came to call it the Cast Iron Shore, or simply the Cazzy, a name that survived long after the works had gone.

"I told you about the walrus and me, man. You know that we're as close as can be, man. Well here's another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul. Standing on the Cast Iron Shore, yeah. Lady Madonna, trying to make ends meet, yeah."

The Cast Iron Shore passed into Liverpool folk memory and, eventually, into popular music. In 1968 John Lennon, who had grown up in Liverpool and knew the Cazzy from boyhood, referenced it in "Glass Onion", a track on the Beatles' White Album. The line "standing on the Cast Iron Shore" is a direct reference to the foreshore at the future Herculaneum site, by then long disused but still visible to Liverpudlians as a childhood landmark.

The copper works closed in the early 1790s. The site lay briefly idle before being taken up for a very different industrial purpose.

1793 to 1841 The Herculaneum Pottery

In 1793 or 1794, Richard Abbey, a Liverpool engraver, and John Graham, a Scottish potter, established a new pottery works on the site of the former copper smelting operation. They named it the Herculaneum Pottery, after the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum near Naples, then being excavated to great public fascination. The name was a statement of classical ambition, signalling that the works intended to produce ceramics of the finest quality.

In 1796 the works were acquired by a consortium of Liverpool merchants, Samuel Worthington, Michael Humble and Thomas Holland, who invested substantial capital in expansion. They recruited skilled potters and modellers from Staffordshire, the heart of the English ceramic industry, bringing with them the techniques of the great Staffordshire houses. At its height the Herculaneum Pottery employed several hundred people and produced creamware, pearlware, transfer printed earthenware, black basalt, jasperware and bone china.

Herculaneum Pottery stoneware coffee pot, late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Herculaneum Pottery carafe, circa 1800 to 1805, decorated with a sailing ship. An example of maritime themed export ware.

A significant proportion of the works' output was directed to the American market. Pieces bearing portraits of George Washington, American naval heroes, and patriotic motifs were produced specifically for export to the United States, where Liverpool ware was fashionable and affordable. The pottery also produced commemorative pieces for British markets, domestic tableware, and ornamental items.

Example of Herculaneum Pottery, showing the refined quality of the manufactory's output.

The Herculaneum Pottery area, showing the scale and layout of the industrial site.

The works declined in the 1830s. Competition from the larger Staffordshire potteries, changing fashions, and the decline of the Liverpool ceramic trade combined to undermine profitability. In 1841 the Herculaneum Pottery closed. The buildings were cleared and the site returned to a derelict state, but the name Herculaneum remained attached to the location. When the next industrial use was planned for the site, a decade and a half later, the Herculaneum name was retained.

1846 to 1865 The Act of Parliament and the dock plan

In the 1840s Liverpool was expanding at a phenomenal rate. The cotton trade, the transatlantic passenger trade, and the growth of manufacturing in Lancashire combined to make the port one of the busiest in the world. The existing docks were insufficient, and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, together with private promoters, looked to the south shore for new deep water facilities.

On 28 August 1846, the Herculaneum Dock Company was incorporated by Act of Parliament, 9 and 10 Victoria, chapter 146, titled An Act for constructing Docks, Walls, Warehouses, and other Works at Toxteth Park in the County of Lancaster, to be called The Herculaneum Docks. The Act authorised a capital of six hundred thousand pounds, divided into six thousand shares of one hundred pounds each. A further Act, 11 and 12 Victoria, chapter 42, was passed on 30 June 1848, enabling the Company to sell or lease lands at Toxteth Park that were surplus to its requirements.

An Act to enable the Herculaneum Dock Company to sell or lease Lands at Toxteth Park in the County of Lancaster. Victoria Regina, Cap. xlii, 30 June 1848.

The practical construction of the dock, however, did not commence for another two decades. The Herculaneum Dock Company was absorbed into the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and the dock was eventually built under the direction of George Fosbery Lyster, the Board's Engineer in Chief. Lyster was responsible for many of Liverpool's most important Victorian dock works. The Herculaneum Dock was excavated out of the sandstone cliff and opened in 1866.

Before its opening, however, the site would play host to one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the nineteenth century.

1861 to 1865 Liverpool and the American Civil War

Liverpool's connection to the American Civil War is profound, marking both the opening shot and the final act of the conflict.

The First Shot: Fort Sumter, 12 April 1861

At 4.30 a.m. on 12 April 1861, Confederate forces began the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The first symbolic shot is credited to Edmund Ruffin, a 67-year-old Virginia secessionist and vocal proponent of secession.

The weapon that fired this historic first round was a 10-inch mortar manufactured by Fawcett, Preston & Co. of Liverpool. This Liverpool-made gun opened the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Despite official British neutrality, Liverpool maintained strong commercial and sympathetic links to the Confederacy throughout the war. The city's shipyards built vessels for the Confederate Navy, most famously the CSS Alabama, and Liverpool merchants provided substantial financial support to the Southern cause.

The Last Act: 6 November 1865

The American Civil War had formally ended with the surrender of General Robert E Lee at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Within weeks the Confederate government collapsed. Most Confederate forces had surrendered by the end of May. But one Confederate vessel remained at sea, and the war at sea continued for a further six months.

The CSS Shenandoah was a Confederate commerce raider, originally built as the Sea King, a British merchant vessel. Purchased secretly by Confederate agents and fitted out with guns at Madeira in October 1864, she was commissioned into the Confederate States Navy and took up a long distance cruise against Union shipping. Under Captain James Iredell Waddell, the Shenandoah sailed across the Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, operated in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and entered the Bering Sea in the summer of 1865, where she devastated the Union whaling fleet.

Herculaneum Dock, contemporary view of the waterfront setting in which the Shenandoah surrendered.

News travelled slowly. Waddell did not learn of the Confederate collapse until August 1865, when a British ship encountered in the Pacific informed him that the war had ended four months earlier. By then he had captured, burned or bonded thirty eight Union vessels, most of them whalers. Waddell faced a difficult decision. He could not surrender in the United States, where he and his crew faced trial and possible execution for piracy, the Union government having declared Confederate commerce raiders to be pirates following the collapse of the Confederacy.

Waddell chose instead to sail to Liverpool, a neutral British port where Confederate sympathies ran strong, where many of the Shenandoah's crew had been recruited, and where the vessel had originally been purchased. The Shenandoah made a nine thousand mile unbroken voyage, round Cape Horn, across the South Atlantic and the equator, and into the Mersey. She arrived at the mouth of the river on 5 November 1865.

The Confederate flag was lowered for the last time at Herculaneum Dock, Liverpool, on 6 November 1865. It was the final formal surrender of the American Civil War.

On 6 November 1865 the Shenandoah entered the Mersey. Waddell despatched a letter of surrender to the British authorities, addressed to Her Majesty's Government. The Royal Navy guardship at Birkenhead, HMS Donegal, a 101 gun second rate, was dispatched under Captain James Paynter. The formal surrender took place at Herculaneum Dock. Waddell presented his letter and his sword to Paynter. The Confederate ensign was lowered. The Shenandoah and her crew passed into British custody.

The event has since been recognised by historians, by the United States National Park Service, and by the Liverpool and national museums, as the last formal surrender of the American Civil War. The site of that surrender, at Herculaneum Dock, is the ground on which City Quay now stands.

Liverpool's connection with America was already profound. The city hosted one of the earliest American Consulates in Britain. The American Eagle emblem still mounted on the former consulate building in Paradise Street, now part of Liverpool One, is a reminder of that relationship. Liverpool had been divided in its sympathies during the war. Some of its merchants built and armed Confederate vessels, including the Shenandoah itself, while others organised and funded relief for the Union cause. The surrender at Herculaneum Dock brought that complex relationship to its close.

1866 to 1900 The dock opens and grows

Herculaneum Dock was formally opened in 1866, the year after the Shenandoah surrender. It had been excavated from the sandstone cliff over a period of approximately six years under the direction of George Fosbery Lyster. The dock was equipped with hydraulic cranes, railway sidings, warehouses and the infrastructure necessary for the handling of bulk cargoes.

Herculaneum Dock in operation, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The scale of the Victorian dock works is clearly visible.

In 1873 the dock began to handle petroleum and other volatile cargoes. The Mersey ports had become a major entry point for American petroleum products, and Herculaneum, with its deep water and remote location at the southern end of the dock estate, was selected as the principal site for this hazardous trade. A graving dock, a stone built dry dock for ship repairs, was added in 1876, and a second, larger graving dock followed in 1902.

The Liverpool waterfront in the Herculaneum area during the late Victorian and Edwardian period of maximum industrial activity.

Between 1881 and 1882, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board constructed a remarkable series of storage facilities on the site. Sixty barrel vaulted chambers, the casemates, were cut directly into the sandstone cliff behind the dock. They were designed for the safe storage of petroleum, naphtha and other flammable goods which could not be stored in conventional warehouses. The casemates were among the earliest purpose built petroleum storage facilities in the world. They survive today, Grade II listed, as a reminder of the dock's nineteenth century industrial role.

The casemates at Herculaneum Dock, barrel vaulted chambers cut into the sandstone cliff for the storage of petroleum and naphtha. Grade II listed.

Adjacent to the casemates were the Herculaneum Dockers' Steps, a long flight of stone steps connecting the dock level with the Toxteth neighbourhood above. The steps allowed dockers and workers to descend from their terraced homes in Dingle and Toxteth directly to the dock gates each morning. They remain a symbolic link between the dock and the residential community above.

1830 to 1896 World firsts in railways

Herculaneum Dock sat at the southern end of a dock estate that was, by the 1890s, the most intensively railway served in the world. The site has a direct connection to two world firsts in railway history.

The Wapping Tunnel, opened in 1830 as part of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, ran from Edge Hill in the east of Liverpool to Park Lane Goods Station near the dockside. It was the first transport tunnel driven under a city anywhere in the world. Though Wapping Tunnel is a mile or so north of Herculaneum, its construction established the principle of dockside rail connection that would later reach the Herculaneum site.

In 1893 the Liverpool Overhead Railway opened. It was the world's first electric elevated railway, running the length of the Liverpool dock system from Seaforth in the north to Herculaneum Dock in the south, six and a half miles of track carried on an iron viaduct above the dock road. The line operated its own power station and served stations at every major dock. The southernmost terminus was originally at Herculaneum Dock itself. The station, perched on the cliff above the dock, was one of the busiest on the line.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway and the Mersey dock estate during the height of its operation. Herculaneum Dock lies at the southern terminus of the line.

In 1896 the Overhead Railway was extended south from Herculaneum, with a half mile tunnel bored through the sandstone cliff to a new terminus at Dingle. The Dingle Tunnel and its underground station were the only underground sections of the Liverpool Overhead. The resulting arrangement, the world's first electric elevated railway connecting to its own sole underground terminus through a tunnel cut into the cliff behind a working dock, was unique in international railway history.

Herculaneum Dock was the interface between the world's first electric elevated city railway and its sole underground terminus, through a half mile tunnel cut into the sandstone cliff. This arrangement was unique in world railway history.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway closed in 1956, after the viaduct was found to be corroded beyond economic repair. The Dingle Tunnel remains, disused, behind the cliff. Its northern portal, once the entrance to the Overhead's southern line, is still visible from the cliff above the former dock.

1900 to 1939 Industrial prime

For the first four decades of the twentieth century, Herculaneum Dock operated at full capacity. Coal from South Wales and Lancashire was unloaded here by overhead gantry cranes and coal hoists, sometimes tipped directly into the holds of waiting steamers. The two graving docks handled repairs for ships from across the Liverpool fleet. Petroleum, stored in the casemates, was pumped into coastal tankers for onward distribution.

Coal being unloaded from a steamer at Herculaneum Dock, early twentieth century. The massive gantry crane dominated the quayside.

Shipbuilding and repair yards in the Herculaneum area, showing the dense industrial activity of the period.

The dock also supported a substantial workforce. The Dockers' Steps above the casemates were worn smooth by generations of workers. Children growing up in Dingle and Toxteth in the 1920s and 1930s knew the dock gates, the gantry cranes, and the distinctive profile of the Overhead Railway station as fixed features of their neighbourhood. The foreshore below the dock, though no longer accessible to the public, remained known as the Cast Iron Shore.

1939 to 1972 The Second World War and postwar decline

During the Second World War, Liverpool was the eastern terminus of the Atlantic convoy system. Herculaneum Dock was part of that operation. Merchant vessels bringing food, fuel and munitions from North America were received, unloaded and turned around at the Liverpool docks. Herculaneum, with its petroleum facilities and graving docks, handled fuel cargoes and ship repairs.

The dock sustained bomb damage during the Liverpool Blitz of 1940 and 1941, though less severely than the central docks. The Overhead Railway station at Herculaneum was damaged but continued to operate for much of the war.

In the postwar period the dock declined. The shift to containerisation from the 1960s onwards rendered the traditional break bulk docks obsolete. Larger vessels could not enter the narrow river dock system. Coal traffic collapsed with the closure of British power stations and the rise of oil and gas. Petroleum imports shifted to new oil terminals on the estuary. By the late 1960s Herculaneum Dock handled only residual traffic.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway closed in 1956. The casemates fell into disuse. The gantry cranes were scrapped. The graving docks handled only occasional repair work. In 1972 the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company formally closed Herculaneum Dock, along with several other southern docks, as part of the rationalisation of the Liverpool dock estate following the opening of the new Seaforth container terminal to the north.

The dock was drained, partially infilled, and abandoned. For the next twelve years the site lay derelict, a landscape of cracked concrete, weed grown masonry and the rusting remains of Victorian engineering.

1984 to 1998 International Garden Festival and the first redevelopment

In the early 1980s, following the Toxteth riots of 1981 and widespread concern about the condition of Liverpool's south docks, central government and Liverpool City Council initiated a programme of regeneration. The former Herculaneum Dock and its immediate surroundings were selected as the site for the International Garden Festival, an event intended to mark the rehabilitation of derelict industrial land and to attract visitors back to the city.

The International Garden Festival opened on 2 May 1984 and ran for five months. It occupied a 125 acre site that included the former Herculaneum Dock. The site was extensively landscaped. Gardens, pavilions, sculpture walks and themed areas representing different national traditions were installed. More than three million people visited the festival during its operating season. It was one of the most successful urban regeneration events of its decade.

The festival closed on 14 October 1984. Much of the site then fell into a second period of decline, though the cleared and landscaped ground was of a higher quality than the derelict industrial wasteland it had replaced. For the next decade, various proposals for the redevelopment of the former dock site were discussed.

1998 to 2004 The creation of City Quay

In the late 1990s, following the successful regeneration of other parts of the Liverpool waterfront, a consortium comprising Urban Splash, Countryside Properties and other partners acquired the former Herculaneum Dock site for residential redevelopment. The scheme, designed to integrate new build apartments with the retained historic fabric of the Victorian dock, was submitted for planning consent in 1999 and approved in 2000.

The Herculaneum Dock site during redevelopment, showing the transformation from industrial ground to residential community.

Construction took place in phases between 2001 and 2004. The development retained and converted some of the original dock walls, sandstone cliff face and historic structures. The original dock basin was partially retained and landscaped as an ornamental lake. New apartment buildings, designed to respect the industrial character of the site, were constructed around the basin. One of the two graving docks was retained as a water feature. The casemates in the sandstone cliff behind the site were not incorporated into the development but remain accessible through separate heritage arrangements.

The estate was named City Quay. It comprises 413 apartments across 13 buildings. City Quay (2001) Management Company Limited was incorporated on 30 July 2001 to manage the estate on behalf of its leaseholders.

City Quay today. The apartments are arranged around the retained dock basin, now landscaped as an ornamental lake.

The site today

City Quay is a residential estate of 413 apartments across 13 buildings. It is managed by City Quay (2001) Management Company Limited, a company limited by guarantee whose members are the leaseholders of the apartments. The Company is responsible for the maintenance, insurance and operation of the common parts, plant and infrastructure of the estate.

The site retains, in its fabric, traces of every stage of its long industrial history. The curved dock basin survives as the estate's central lake. The sandstone cliff behind the buildings is the same cliff into which the casemates were cut in 1881 and 1882. The Dockers' Steps remain. The outline of the original dock is still visible in aerial photographs.

From a place of deer, to a Puritan foreshore, to a copper works, to a pottery, to a Victorian dock, to the setting of the last surrender of the American Civil War, to the southern terminus of the world's first electric elevated railway, to an Atlantic convoy terminus, to a derelict ruin, to a Garden Festival, to a residential community of several hundred households, the land has been continuously adapted across more than three hundred and fifty years of recorded use. This Company, the holder of that site on behalf of its current residents, is the latest custodian in a long sequence.

The estate now known as City Quay stands on ground that has been continuously used, shaped and reshaped for more than three hundred and fifty years. This Company is the current custodian of that site.

Sources and further reading

The following sources were consulted in the preparation of this history:

• An Act for constructing Docks, Walls, Warehouses, and other Works at Toxteth Park in the County of Lancaster, to be called The Herculaneum Docks, 9 and 10 Victoria, chapter 146, 28 August 1846.

• An Act to enable the Herculaneum Dock Company to sell or lease Lands at Toxteth Park in the County of Lancaster, 11 and 12 Victoria, chapter 42, 30 June 1848.

• Liverpool Mercury, 7 November 1865, coverage of the surrender of CSS Shenandoah at Herculaneum Dock.

• The Times (London), November 1865, coverage of the Shenandoah surrender.

• National Museums Liverpool, The Last Confederate Surrender in Liverpool, online feature on CSS Shenandoah.

• Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray, The Around the World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah, 2006.

• Charles H. Ledyard Norton, The Cruise of the Shenandoah, 1867.

• Historic England listing, the casemates at Herculaneum Dock, Grade II, list entry 1343620.

• Liverpool Record Office, Mersey Docks and Harbour Board archives.

• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Herculaneum Pottery collection.

• John Belchem and others, Liverpool 800, Culture, Character and History, 2006.

• Adrian Jarvis, Liverpool Central Docks 1799 to 1905, An Illustrated History, 1991.

• Paul Bolger, The Docker's Umbrella, A History of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, 1992.

• The Beatles, Glass Onion, The Beatles (White Album), Apple Records, 1968.