While concrete is a superb material for creating large scale, impressive structures, brick buildings can be just as monumental.
The Stanley dock tobacco warehouse is the world’s largest brick warehouse with a ground size of 21,583 square metres; at the time of it’s construction, in 1901, it was claimed to have the largest area of any building in the world. The 14 storey building stands 125 feet tall and spans across 36 acres in Liverpool, England. 27 million bricks were used in the warehouse’s construction and it only took a single year to complete, a tremendous achievement at the time, with little modern equipment, and certainly no
dry silo mortar.
Welsh Engineer Anthony Lister was responsible for the warehouse’s design and construction. The Warehouse was actually a late addition to the dock complex, but soon began to thrive storing huge quantities of exotically imported rum and tobacco. The warehouse was able to accommodate 70,000 hogsheads of tobacco, weighing 1,000 pounds each, that’s a total 7 million pounds of tobacco! Some of the warehouses stock, was stores for as long as 15 years, before cigarette manufacturers collected or bought the tobacco.
In the 1980s the warehouse was affected by the decline of Liverpool trade, and eventually was no longer used. The building was derelict for many years, and eventually became part of the Liverpool Echo newspaper’s, successful and ongoing ‘stop the rot’ campaign, aiming to rescue and preserve Liverpool’s architectural heritage. Now the warehouse is home to luxurious apartments, restaurants and entertainment and leisure facilities, each designed in keeping with the building’s historic beauty.
