Granite House, Liverpool
When the Victorians built the Granite Buildings, as offices and warehouses for the fruit trading merchants, they did it heroically, they did it monumentally, they gave it a solid granite facade. Some of the pieces of stone weight more than 800kg. The construction of the original building is nothing short of a feat of engineering, the expense in today’s money required to build such a monster facade would be staggering.
Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner once described it as: “a very remarkable building, severe and original. It has large tripartite windows with pink granite columns and three low-pitched gables with stepped tripartite windows. One may even be reminded a little of Lethaby. The date is supposed to be 1888.”
When a fire ripped through the building in 1947 and caused major damage at No.8 and No.10 Stanley Street, including the loss of the roof and central granite gable, the street lost a key feature and the symmetry on which the visual repetition of the three identical gables was hinged took a knock, leaving the roofscape animating Stanley Street with something resembling a broken tooth.