Exchange Works- The Apartments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The new part of the factory had a basement for car parking plus 5 floors but developers found it had enough strength to add a 6th floor giving them a set of two-floor apartments at the top of the building.

The slightly odd shape of the buildings floorplan resulted from the ancient street layout.

The published map opposite is wrong. The rear of the building is on Cunliffe Street abutting Hockenhall Alley leading onto Dale Street, not Vernon Street. Vernon Street is below the lower two red dots.

I note the old margarine factory at the northern end of the factory (not shown left on the plan here) has also been redeveloped and looks amazingly different. Below..Hockenhall Alley waiting for developers or a tree surgeon?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Before leaving this page here's something really weird.Many years after I'd left Liverpool I discovered that from 1874 until about 1885 my great grandfather, his wife and six children had lived in Cheapside in the tiny 3-floor house at Number 33 just a couple of doors down from the Plessey factory in Cheapside. The house is the one below with the end of the factory building just visible. In the rear view from Hockenhall Alley (right) you can see its original form.
 

 

 

 

   Behind his house for more than 100 years stood a candle factory now demolished for a scruffy car park. The side facing Hockenhall Alley was open so the workers didn't suffocate and you could watch the candles being made certainly as late as 1985. It was to the left of the Bridewell Vaults shown below in a view of Hockenhall Alley before 1850. The wall, of the now overgrown building, on the right of this picture has escaped demolition and can still be seen below.

That pub now fronts onto Cheapside as a derelict building and is a few doors up from The Rose & Crown, the haunt of coppers when the Main Bridewell (1864-1999) was open for business.

 

 

 

 

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