No. 57, PARR STREET

Warehouse, built around 1799 for Thomas Parr, a wealthy Liverpool merchant and banker. The building was internally remodelled in the late 19th or early 20th century, and converted to flats in the second half of the 1990s. It is currently used for student accommodation.

EXTERIOR

The building is constructed of brick with ashlar dressings and a roof of Welsh slate. It rises five storeys over a high basement, now blocked due to a rise in street levels. The south elevation has seven bays, while the west and east elevations each have three bays; the north elevation is largely obscured by later adjoining buildings.

A stone eaves cornice runs along the building. Windows throughout have ashlar wedge-shaped lintels and stone sills. The south elevation features a pediment (now rendered) over the central three bays. The central bay originally contained taking-in doors with an arched opening at the top; these had been blocked by 1995 but were unblocked during the 1990s conversion and filled with metal-framed windows stretching the full height of each storey. The westernmost bay of windows remains blocked, with circular ventilation holes, and at ground-floor level in this bay is the present entrance, fitted with an arched stone lintel. In 1995, a series of lintels marking blocked basement windows were visible in the other bays; these have since been removed and filled with brick.

On the west elevation, the windows of the southern bay have been replaced by smaller early 20th-century openings that provide light to an inserted stairwell. The arched central bay, which in 1995 still contained taking-in doors, was treated similarly to the south elevation in the latter part of the 1990s. The eastern elevation faces a small walled yard and features a lunette in its pediment, which was open in 1995 but is now blocked. Windows in the southern bay, previously replaced by door openings serving a fire escape, were reinstated in the 1990s and the fire escape removed.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES

The warehouse stands behind a large house at 26 Colquitt Street (also listed), built around the same time for Parr. The southern wing of the house was originally used as a counting house; an arched passage from the lower basement floor of the counting house to the warehouse basement is now blocked at the warehouse end. The house served as the Liverpool Royal Institution from 1817 to 1948. A 19th-century range of lecture halls stands to the north of the warehouse and west of the house. A late 19th-century, three-storey extension fills what was formerly a courtyard between the warehouse and the lecture halls.

HISTORY

Thomas Parr (1769–1847) leased the land in Colquitt Street in 1797 and built both his house and this warehouse. The house was flanked by pavilions, the northern one built as a coach house and the southern as a counting house. A railed garden and pleasure grounds with a large pond lay on the east side of Colquitt Street. The complex was described by J. A. Picton in his late 19th-century work Memorials of Liverpool as "one of the best extant examples of the establishment of a first-class Liverpool merchant of the period".

Parr owned the massive ship Parr, equipped to carry seven hundred slaves, which sailed for the Niger Delta in 1798. The vessel is reported to have exploded off the west coast of Africa that same year, suggesting it may have been carrying gunpowder to exchange for enslaved Africans. Evidence relating to Parr's business interests indicates that the warehouse may have been used to store iron. Iron goods were taken to Africa to purchase slaves, and iron fittings such as shackles used on slave ships were also necessary to the slave trade.

By 1805 Parr had retired to Lythwood Hall in Shropshire, where he lived as a country gentleman and formed a notable collection of coins. Charles Darwin, who encountered him in 1840, described him as "an old miserly squire".

In 1817 the Colquitt Street house became home to the Liverpool Royal Institution, established in 1814 by Liverpool merchants, many linked with slavery. The driving force behind its formation was William Roscoe, a passionate abolitionist. Roscoe's collection of Florentine paintings, once housed in Colquitt Street, are now in the Walker Art Gallery. From 1817 onwards, the warehouse was let separately.