Exchange Buildings

Exchange Buildings, Liverpool

A complex office building housing a World War II military command bunker, now a museum, with an important World War I war memorial. The building incorporates two named houses: Walker House on the west side and Horton House on the east side. The bunker was constructed between 1939 and 1941, with the main upstanding building designed by Gunton and Gunton. Construction was interrupted by World War II, and Horton House was not completed until 1955. The building has undergone late 20th-century and early 21st-century alterations.

The upstanding building is stripped classical in style, comprising a central range running east-west with two wings extending southwards, forming three sides of Exchange Flags, the open square to the rear of the Town Hall. The complex has eleven storeys in the central range with an eleven-bay frontage, and the advanced wings reduce to four storeys in height across their three southernmost bays. The building features a combination of stepped flat roofs and mansard roofs. The exterior is steel-frame and concrete construction with artificial stone cladding.

The main architectural features include original doorways in the fifth bays of the advanced wings, with sculptural bas-reliefs above by Edmund C Thompson and George Capstick. These have been supplemented by recent larger doorways in the second and third bays of both wings, featuring projecting porticos with pairs of fluted columns with Corinthian capitals and entablatures inscribed with house names on their friezes. Walker House retains metal window frames (which at the time of inspection were scheduled for replacement with uPVC), while Horton House has modern uPVC window frames throughout.

At the centre of the main south elevation is a semi-circular niche containing the World War I war memorial, designed by Joseph Phillips in 1916 and cast in bronze. The memorial features a pyramidal composition with Britannia at its apex, wearing a breastplate, antique Greek helmet, and cloak, holding a trident. Beneath her cloak she shelters a small girl. Below are depicted three soldiers, a sailor, and a nurse tending to a wounded soldier, positioned around a field gun. The niche has a mosaic-covered coved ceiling and is flanked by two engaged columns surmounted by figures representing the Family, carved in Portland stone by Siegfried Charoux in the early 1950s. Stone inscriptions were added by George Herbert Tyson Smith.

The bunker occupies the basement of Walker House on two levels, containing over 100 rooms across almost 50,000 square feet of space. Known as Western Approaches Command Headquarters, it was designed around a full-height central operations room with surrounding storeyed sections providing facilities for both Royal Navy and Royal Air Force staff. These included teleprinter rooms for both services, a telephone exchange, coding and decoding rooms, a radio room, and security facilities. An emergency generator room was powered by a diesel engine salvaged from a German World War I submarine. From this facility, under the command of Admiral Sir Max Horton, the campaign against the German submarine fleet in the Atlantic during World War II was planned and directed. The main office floors and receptions in both Walker House and Horton House were remodelled and refurbished in the late 20th century and in 2007 and are not regarded as of special interest.

The war memorial was funded by subscriptions raised among members of the Liverpool Royal Exchange Company and was initially dedicated in 1916 to those members and their sons who had enlisted. By its final unveiling in 1924, it had also become a memorial to the war dead of the Liverpool Exchange Newsroom and their sons. The memorial was relocated to its present position in 1953 from the old Exchange News Room.

The site previously held two earlier Exchanges: the first built in 1803 to 1808 by John Foster Senior, possibly with James Wyatt, in the Neoclassical style, and a second built in 1864 to 1867 by T H Wyatt in French Renaissance style. The present building, begun by Gunton and Gunton, was adapted during construction to incorporate the bomb-proof bunker in Walker House basement, which became essential to the British war effort in the Atlantic.