12, Hanover Street, Liverpool, by Edmund Kirby (1838-1920). Grade II listed, this "splendid curved block" (Pollard et al. 324) was built in 1889-90, originally as offices and warehousing for the big ship-owning merchants, Ellis & Co. A massive structure of 40,000 square feet (see Whelan), it is of red brick with a slate roof, and has several of Kirby's hallmark features, such as "tripartite windows with colonnettes," a "two-storey canted oriel" over the entrance, and a "top Lombard frieze and balustrading between tall chimneys" (all in the listing text). As in other descriptions of buildings by Kirby, like that of Barclays Bank in York, its details are defined in the Buildings of England series as "somewhere between Gothic and early Renaissance" (Pollard et al. 325). It is a well-known landmark and there are plans now to turn it into a city-centre five-star hotel.
Photograph by Stephen Richards, originally posted here on the Geograph website, and kindly made available on the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) licence. It has been very slightly modified for perspective here. Text by Jacqueline Banerjee.
Bibliography
12, Hanover Street." Historic England. Web. 8 March 2020.
Pollard, Richard, and Nikolaus Pevsner, with contributions from Joseph Pollard. Lancashire: Liverpool and the South-West. Buildings of England series. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.
Whelan, Dan. "Living Brick Plots Five-Star Liverpool Hotel." We. 8 March 2020.
Created 8 March 2020