Visit 1: August 2007
I wasn't entirely sure where this place was. I knew it was at Huskisson Dock in Liverpool, and I knew how to get from the train station to some docks. With only that knowledge my brother and I caught the train to Lime Street station, and then began walking toward the docks. It's quite a long walk, and I was close to giving up when we spotted the brick built tobaco warehouse and the curving edges of the concrete sugar silo beyond it.
Once we got in, we just headed straight for the main door. There was smashed glass, and debris all over the place. The front door to the tower was nowhere to be seen. We strolled up to reception, and could see straight out the back of the building. A quick look around the lower floor, bits of cable hanging down, smashed glass, paint splashed on the walls and a bike in one of the rooms.
There was a small room full of fuses, and wiring. All the ceramic fuse holders sadly smashed to pieces.
Heading up stairs, the environent changes. It no longer feels like a trashed office block and much more like a decayed industrial tower. Vast conveyors and hoppers, open-tread metal stairs, glass bricks letting a small amount of light through. The floor was sludgy and sticky, with a smell of sugar in the air it was fair to assume the sludgy sticky mess covering the floors was sugar too.
Lying on the floor is the insides of a huge motor, looking up there is a gap in the metal stairs where it has smashed its why down from one of the upper floors. Quite why someone decieded it needed removing and dropping a few floors I don't know. On the walls, hand painted signs pertaining to the amount of load the floor could take safely and a couple of signs about 'hooters' which did make me giggle a bit.
As we climbed the tower, we could see out through some of the walls where the conveyors had been ripped out - not chav damage, simply damage caused when the building was decomissioned I guess. Nearing the top, there was a control room. It had a couple of weighing machines in it, all fully mechanical and full of oil. Paperwork was strewn across the floors, details of shipments. Up another level into another control room. A large monitoring panel covered one wall, it had a diagram showing the layout of how the whole thing would've worked. It looked like something out of Thunderbirds. Stood in the middle of the room was an old phone exhange, I'd never seen anything like it. Looking out of the glassless windows we could see the silo behind the tower.
Up another level, we were now at the top of the tower where the main conveyor from the dock enters the tower. Much more machinary up here, climbing up onto the gantrys and into the machinary gave us an idea of how noisy and dangerous it must've been working in the tower. There were warning signs, lights and cut off buttons dotted about all over. From the gantrys I could see down the conveyor, and across the road, down to the docks. The roof of the building was concrete, and where water had leaked through it had formed stalagtites. That was quite bizzare to look at, the building is decaying but there is new bits naturally forming.